Vacation Week!

I’ve been on vacation this week and didn’t spend much time programming… well, not on anything official at least. Mostly I’ve been poking around at stuff between games of Modern Warfare 2 and my chore list from The Wife. One of the more interesting things I’ve been playing with is using MySql with MonoDevelop and Ubuntu.

Since MSSQL normally costs extra in a hosted environment I typically end up using a handful of XML files or serialization to keep track of information. But now that I’ve been using Mono I started to consider that MySQL might be an option for further projects (especially since it’s normally free in hosted environments).

I did a post recently about getting started with cross platform development where I listed some resources to get you started but I didn’t mention anything about using SQL. Below are some tools that can get you started.

MySQL (Server)
Setup for the actual SQL server instance — Standard stuff here…

MySQL GUI Tools and the MySQL Workbench
Great set of tools to work with your SQL server instance. Just look at how polished some of these tools actually are!

A couple warnings before you get too far. Linux (or at least Ubuntu) is case sensitive — this means that if you try to include the DLL files for MySQL in your Mono project the case must match! When I downloaded the files they were all in lower case but the DLLs were imported using camel case (mysql.data.dll as opposed to MySql.Data.dll)

Also, I don’t see any way to use LINQtoSQL with MySQL (and it wouldn’t make sense if it did anyways). Be prepared to start writing your own queries just in case.