Well, once again it’s been some time since I managed to find any time to write anything for my blog. The past month certainly has been one of the most hectic I’ve had in many many years!

I’m now working for MySQL AB - as a Support Engineer for the Americas Group!

I applied a little over a month ago now, and when I found out that I got the job I had a very short space of time with my old company, Cool-Tools., to do wrap up what I was doing with the monitoring tool that I was working on, and to make sure that everybody was happy with taking over from my old position in support.

I got a weekend off.

I then started directly with MySQL the following Monday (2 weeks after discovering I had gotten the job). From then it’s been a pretty fast learning curve, working with some of the best colleagues I’ve ever had so far. The guys here at MySQL really are a fantastic bunch of people!

I notice that …

Last week I made the promise to make another round of MDB2 and MDB2_Schema releases by the end of next week. Appearently more and more projects are picking up MDB2_Schema like Jaws and Chiara_PEAR_Server. So I have a few more days to fix things up. I am a bit sick after 3 days of outdoor mixed championships. My frisbee team ended up second. We lost the finals 14:12 after leading 10:12 (game was played til 13, cap 2, with a maximum of 15). However it was still quite exciting to play at such a high competitive level for me. We have multiple teams in Berlin and so I am a member of two teams, but I have mostly played with the one that plays 2nd league level. So …

the bastedo blog

(I did matching versions [5.x] don’t know how diff versions will work)

Setting up a slave with a newer version of MySQL is quite a common setup. It has a couple of advantages:
- it lests you test a new version before deploying on the master (to test that everything goes smoothly)
- it lets you test new major versions (e.g. 5.0) before they are released GA (helps find bugs that may affect your setup).

I know at least one customer generally has a slave runnin the latest BK tree - just to be sure that nothing is going to even potentially break for them. Kudos to them :)

Having a slave that you use for backups is a great idea. No extra load on the master (i.e. you can safely stop the db on the slave and back things up quickly - without having locks held on your master!).

Also, if …

I was tinkering a bit with integrating Wordpress and Gallery2 and in the process posted some photos from a trip to Prague I took earlier this year as part of a MySQL developer conference. If all works well, you can click the image below to see them:

A while ago I implemented native prepared statements into the MDB2 mysqli driver. However I was never able to get LOB support to work in the execute method. I almost forget about this and only stumbled over this issue again while testing a new portability fetch mode that fixes the issue of sqlite returning table qualifiers in associative fetches unlike most other DBMS extensions in PHP. Maybe someone has experience here and/or is motivated to fix the problem.

FYI: I also added the ability to specify if the array keys in associative fetches should be lowercased (default) or uppercased via the "field_case" option (set it to CASE_LOWER or CASE_UPPER). Previously only lowercasing was supported. Technically I should probably even make uppercased the default, …

I have been looking a bit at c# 3.0's LINQ feature. Essentially it provides with c# with an SQL syntax to do what SQL does on DBMS, XML, Array and many other forms of data. What is interesting that the syntax also allows you to define not only what data you want but also the structure you want it in. Furthermore using reflection on the data source and generally the fact that you are no longer passing just a string to your datasource (SQL or XQuery) it is now possible to do compile time checking.

At first it seemed quite wierd to me. But I am slowly warming up to the idea. Pondering things a bit further I discovered that in many ways PHP has tried to push things into a similar direction. For example PEAR::DB's getAssoc() method (as well as equivalent methods …

I just finished an upgrade to Shaw Extreme cable internet for my home network. The service requires that you change from a Terayon modem to a Motorola SurfBoard modem, and the payment of an extra $10 a month, but from what I can tell it will be oh so worth it.

Just before switching modems I started a download of the debug version of MySQL 5.0.12 (50 megs), I got around 300-400K per second. After the upgrade I tried the same download from the same mirror and saw 800-830K per second. SO far so good.

Of course, seeing that I host some sites from home, I was more interested in the upstream. Here BroadBandReports.com helps:

Certainly a step from the claimed 1.5 up / .5 down that my old service claimed. The new speed is supposed to be 7 down 1 up, and while the download speed is not hitting the claim, the upstream is right on target (according to BroadBandReports the …

MacOS X 10.2 doesn’t have poll(2).

Why they don’t, who knows. It’s not as if it’s new or anything. At least they do in future versions. I think I recall reading somewher that the OS X 10.1 implementation was buggy, so I think they pulled it out of 10.2 - for some people….

oh fun.

Just wanted to remind people in the Berlin area that there will be a special PHP UG Berlin meeting on september 12th as part of a roadshow. We will have a bunch of guests from Zend, eZ Publish and MySQL doing some very interesting presentations:

1. eZ systems: "Enterprise PHP components by eZ systems": Die eZ publish enterprise components sind der erste Schritt zur Erstellung von komplexen Webapplikationen. Dieser Vortrag stellt die Klassen-Bibliothek vor und zeigt exemplarisch deren Verwendung.
2. MySQL: "Einführung in MySQL 5.0": In diesem Vortrag erhalten Sie einen Überblick über die neuen Funktionen von MySQL 5.0. Erfahren Sie mehr über Stored Procedures, Views, Triggers, XA, Cursors und das Information Schema.
3. Zend: "Zend und die PHP-Community in Deutschland": Offene …

When:
Tuesday September 13th 7:00pm

Where:
Miro International Pty Ltd
Level 18, 31 Queen Street
Melbourne 3000, Australia

Thanks to Miro for offering their offices for the meeting.

What’s happening?
Stewart Smith will talk about:
- What’s new in MySQL land
- Introduction to MySQL AB the company
- what it does
- what it offers
- Graphical tools for MySQL
- MySQL Administrator
- MySQL Query Browser

RSVP
Please RSVP via our meetup.com site:
http://mysql.meetup.com/93/

After
We can head to a pub or out for curry.