I wanted to quickly mention a couple community members who have contributed to the MySQL Forge this week, in completely different ways.

That Damn Error 2003

Long-time MySQL Forum extraordinaire, Bill Karwin, has put together a wiki page in the Forge wiki on the various causes and solutions to perhaps the most common MySQL error encountered by newbies (or even veterans who haven’t installed MySQL in a while… 🙂 ).

So, why does this page deserve mention? A few reasons. First, the wiki page highlights both Windows and *nix solutions. Too many times, users of Windows or *nix have a tendency to forget (or ignore) the fact that the other side of the equation even exists. Bill does a great job in balancing the OS worldview and providing insight on how to diagnose and fix connection issues on both major platforms. Secondly, he has written the article with lots of code examples, allowing the reader to simply copy/paste from the article the solution to their problems. Third, he provides an excellent list of other article references at the bottom of the article to dig deeper. Well done, and thanks, Bill!

T-SQL to MySQL Converter Project

Erik Wetterberg has written, and hosted on Sourceforge, a C++ project that converts T-SQL stored procedures into MySQL stored procedures. But, wait, you say! There is already a MySQL Migration Toolkit; why is this project so cool? Ah. Well, for a couple reasons. The Migration toolkit is a GUI toolkit (although I believe it may have a command-line interface inside it). tsql2mysql is a command-line tool intended for the Windows platform (although there seems to be no technical reason it could not very easily be ported to *nix). While not flashy, the project is useful for its simplicity. It can be used to script entire conversions of T-SQL stored procedure libraries. Check out the code and consider asking Erik if he would like to expand the project, or if he needs assistance with documentation, or the like. Thanks, Erik!