Yesterday I found out that the MySQL books sold at Foyles in London, England, were not in the ‘Database’ section. Instead they could be found just under and next the Apache and PHP books. I was rather disappointed. You see a whole rack of Oracle, PostgreSQL, Firebird, DB2, .. but no MySQL where (I guess) most people would first look. The two guys from Foyles told me that this was already like that before they got there.

Hear! Hear! Pearl Jam in Belgium! And it was about time! IMHO, we need a new national holiday for this! They knew they left us in the cold after canceling a few times, but they warmed us up again after the great show. The 90s might be gone, and we are all like 10 or more years old after Ten and Vs., but it felt great.. Opening with there most smashing hits and having a go on us with their new singles, they got me rocking.

Yesterday (29th of August) we had our first Belgian MySQL UserGroup (still need a catchy name!) meeting. I think it went great as we had quite a bunch, 14, attending. The meeting room was arranged by X-Tend (www.x-tend.be) in their offices in Kontich (that’s between Mechelen and Antwerpen). We had a late start because some folks were eating at the Quick, some where still enjoying the X-Tend provided sandwiches and Kris had a late fight with MySQL Cluster.

Last evening I went to a Colony OS BBQ 2006. It was a social event for people active in the open source scene in Belgium. I didn’t recognize faces and I felt a bit outsider, but I guess that’s normal not being really active until recently. Never the less, I had some talk with good folks there and I’m glad I went. Tille and the others helping her out did a great job.

I spend some time on this last night to figure it out with MySQL Cluster NDB API.. Actually, I had to ask my dear colleagues for help. Pekka gave a tip, I added some weird logic: bingo! Actually, nothing special, but here is the silly code inserting a record into a table with a BLOB field. The oper->equal("id",4) line and the order of things are important. Note: it is missing lots of stuff, like checking for errors!