Yesterday, Carsten Pedersen and Roland Bouman of MySQL AB visited us to tell us a bit about the MySQL certification program. Although I've been using MySQL for several years they told me of some features I simply never used before. Of course I had heard of 'stored procedures' before, but I just did not use them at all. One of the reasons is that all of our products are database independent and stored procedures are not. In other words: writing a MySQL stored procedure for ATK would mean all people using ATK on an Oracle or Postgres database would suddenly get fatal errors.

In the training they explained what stored procedures and functions are and I got curious. "Okay, so I can use a programming language sort of thing in MySQL. So how powerfull is this?". Driving back I suddenly realised I would do a really stupid and most probably useless experiment: to try to build a website entirely in MySQL, leaving the PHP part out? With that in mind I couldn't really do anything else than boot my computer once I got home, and keep hacking it until my application was finished.

Afgelopen zaterdag ben ik met Ivo, Lineke en Guido naar het pfcongrez geweest. Daar aangekomen merkten we gelijk weer wat een Zend-logo op je borstzakje doet. "Hee, de mannen van Zend zijn er!". We werden vriendelijk ontvangen en streken met een kop koffie neer op het zonnige terras in Maarssen. Wat daar verder nog gebeurd is weet ik niet, want ik moest redelijk snel nog even naar Utrecht Centraal heen en weer om Lineke op te halen.