I was listening today to the OurSQL Episode 36: It's Not Our (De)fault! Part 1. As usual, Sheeri and Sarah are very informational and entertaining while explaining the innards of MySQL and their best practices.
Being a DBA oriented show, there was an omission in this podcast. There was no mention of custom groups that you can have for your my.cnf. This is mostly useful for developers. If your application requires some specific settings, instead of using a separated configuration file, you can use a different group, and then instruct your client applications to use that group.
By default, all client applications read the "[client]" group.
But you can tell your client to read a group that you can call whatever you like.
For example, with this configuration file,

[client] …

An example of a basic ODBC (MSSQL Server/DSN-Less) query using PHP.

Example of Result Set Returning One Row

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      $szDBConn="DRIVER={SQL Server};SERVER=SQLServerNameHere;DATABASE=DatabaseNameHere";
$szDBUsername="UsernameHere";
$szDBPswd="PasswordHere";
$szDBQuery="SELECT FooBar, Foo_Bar, Foo_ID FROM FoobarSubscribers WHERE FooID=777";
$rDBConnect = odbc_connect($szDBConn, $szDBUsername, $szDBPswd);  
$rDBRes = odbc_exec($rDBConnect, $szDBQuery);
$szLastCheck = odbc_result($rDBRes, "LastCheck");
odbc_free_result($rDBRes);
odbc_close($rDBConnect);

Example of Result Set Returning Multiple Rows in an Object

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      $szDBConn="DRIVER={SQL Server};SERVER=SQLServerNameHere;DATABASE=DatabaseNameHere";
$szDBUsername="UsernameHere"; …

For a few years, I've tried to recap here some events I've found notable over the past year and offering some guesses on what might be ahead of us. I'm somewhat late on these things this year, due to being busy with other stuff, but I didn't want to break the tradition, no matter how silly my wrong guesses might seem later. And again, others have covered generals, so I'll try to focus on specifics, in particular as they relate to what I do. For a look at what we achieved for Habbo, see my recap post on the Sulake blog.

This time last year Oracle still had not successfully completed the Sun acquisition due to some EC silliness, but that finally happened over the 2010. It seems to be playing about how I expected it to - …

It's that time of the year again — the nice folks at FOSDEM have granted us a developer room at their upcoming conference (February 5+6 2011 in Brussels, Belgium)!

As usual there were more applications than they were able to accommodate, so we are very grateful for this opportunity for collaboration. Titled "MySQL and Friends", our room next year will be H.2213 with a capacity of 100 seats. It will be at our disposal on Saturday 5th, from 13:00 till 19:00. Like last year, we would like to set up a schedule of talks related to the MySQL server and the various projects that surround it. Each talk will last 20 minutes, plus 5 minutes of Q&A and a 5 minute break for switching speakers, giving us 12 slots in total to fill with …

Scribd is a top 100 site on the web and one of the largest sites built using Ruby on Rails. As one of the first rails sites to reach scale, we’ve built a lot of infrastructure and solved a lot of challenges to get Scribd to where it is today. We actively try to push the envelope and have contributed substantial work back to the open source community.

Scribd has an agile, startup culture and an unusually close working relationship between engineering and ops. You’ll regularly find cross-over work at Scribd, with ops people writing application-layer code and engineers figuring out operations-level problems. We think we’re able to make that work because of the uniquely talented people we have on the team.

To allow us to keep scaling, we’re now looking to add a strong, experienced operations guru to the …

There are many questions that arise out of Oracle’s copyright and patent infringement complaint against Google regarding its use of Java in Android. There are several things that make the suit significant to the entire industry: it centers not just on software copyright, but also software patents (an increasingly and hotly debated issue), the quickly-expanding smartphone market and open source software. The first question is: what is Oracle doing?

Many are speculating that this is simply an effort to further and more effectively monetize Java, a storied program language that has move more toward openness and survived several supposed death sentences as newer languages arrived. Still, with all of the open source parts — GlassFish application server, MySQL database, OpenOffice.org suite — is Java the most significant to Oracle? It may be, but regardless of what Oracle is doing, its legal moves here may certainly have an impact on the …

We use nginx and its features a lot in Scribd. Many times in the last year we needed some pretty interesting, but not supported feature – we wanted nginx X-Accel-Redirect functionality to work with remote URLs. Out of the box nginx supports this functionality for local URIs only. In this short post I want to explain how did we make nginx serve remote content via X-Accel-Redirect.

First of all, here is why you may need this feature. Let’s imagine you have a file storage on Amazon S3 where you store tons of content. And you have an application where you have some content downloading functionality that you want to be available for logged-in/paying/premium users and/or you want to keep track of downloads your users perform …

There are signals of continued problems and dysfunction — namely lack of support, organization and communication — in the OpenSolaris community. This follows on a deterioration of the OS leadership and support since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, including the elimination of OpenSolaris CDs, one of the things that made the open source version of Solaris more like Linux.

We had speculated on the fate of Sun open source software under Oracle and while we acknowledged Oracle’s participation in, contribution and commitment to and opportunity from open source software, we …

My closing presentation at the dedicated MySQL track at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 discussed various techniques and best practices for improving the ROI of developer resources using MySQL. Included in the sections on Design, Security, Development, Testing, Implementation, Instrumentation and Support were also a number of horror stories of not what to do, combined with practical examples of improving productivity.

Increasing MySQL Productivity View more presentations from Ronald Bradford.