I wrote a post recently that focused only on things I see as shortcomings or problems with Gentoo GNU/Linux. That was the intent of the article, to explain why I switched to Ubuntu for my personal systems. On the flip side, nothing's perfect, but nothing's perfectly flawed, either. There are still many things I like about Gentoo.

Daniel Nichter has released version 3.0 of mysqlreport, one of my favorite tools for quickly comprehending the overall state of a MySQL server. The new version prints out the most important information about InnoDB.

Here are some common SQL problems, all of which have related solutions: how do I find the most recent log entry for each program? How do I find the most popular item from each category? How do I find the top score for each player? In general, these types of "select the extreme from each group" queries can be solved with the same techniques. I'll explain how to do that in this article, including the harder problem of selecting the top N entries, not just the top 1.

I wrote before about a generic, cross-platform way to simulate the SQL ROW_NUMBER() function in any RDBMS. There is a much more efficient way to do this on MySQL with user variables.

I wrote a while ago about a program I wrote to export GnuCash data into a MySQL database, including a couple of queries against the resulting schema. I've made some improvements since then to allow a simple overlay of my wife's expense categories onto the GnuCash hierarchy. This article explains the improved schema, and includes some more useful tools and queries.

Here's a way to write join clauses so they are more compact, more readable, and less confusing.

A kind soul has contributed a Debian/Ubuntu package for the innotop MySQL and InnoDB monitor. Thanks Sebastien Estienne!

Some people who know I've used Gentoo asked me my thoughts on using it for MySQL servers. Here are my opinions and experiences using Gentoo, both for desktop systems and for servers.

I recently attended the MySQL Camp 2006 un-conference at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. This article is a high-level overview of the event. If you didn't go, you really missed something good. Go to the next one!

I recently tested installing innotop on Microsoft Windows. There was one slight glitch, but I changed a couple lines of code, and now it runs out of the box under ActivePerl. Version 0.1.156 contains those changes for Windows compatibility.