The slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/blueskarlsson/my-sq-lonaws101 and if you don't know it already, tomorrow friday April 26 is SkySQL Solutions Day. Registration and Beer is free! I'll be talking on MySQL on JSON but that are many other interesting talks, The venue is the same as the Percona Live conference!

/Karlsson

Below are the slides from my last talk at this Percona Live Worldwide MySQL Conference. The idea for this talk was proposed by my co-presenter Massimo Brignoli and goes back to a debate on this topic that went through the MySQL blogosphere during last Autumn - which in itself was sparked by an outstanding retrospective published about a MySQL failure at Github.

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First of all, thank you to everyone who nominated me, voted for me, and to those of you who shared kind words with me and congratulated me. It’s humbling to have been awarded one of the “MySQL Community Contributor of the Year” awards for 2013. Many people have asked or wondered without asking why I do what I do, and how I got here. Given the occasion, I thought I would share some thoughts on that.

Early days as a user in web development

I started working with MySQL (and before that, mSQL) back in 1998 while working with a web development company. MySQL worked quite well (and I pretty quickly forgot about mSQL), and I started to learn more and more about it. As many new users at the time, I hit a few bugs or quirks, and poked at the code from time to time to understand what was going on. I continued just being a user of MySQL into 1999, and started to build more and more complex applications.

A first bug …

It was a busy day at Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013. After the regular sessions, there were the traditional MySQL Community Awards, and two entities close to me were among the winners.

• My company, Continuent won the award as Corporate Contributor of the year;
• My pet project of the last 7 years, MySQL Sandbox, won the award as Application of the year 2013.

Thanks to the MySQL community for these awards. They give me (and my colleagues) a goos feeling of appreciation.

The day was even more successful for four major occurrences that contributed to my wellness:

• …

My install instructions on the web site were old, somebody wanted me to publish another set of screen capture for the MySQL 5.6 install and configuration. This is it for Windows 7 using the downloadable MSI file.

Installation Steps

The installation from MySQL’s perspective is actually the installation and configuration of MySQL. For your convenience and reference, I’ve already installed the pre-requisites for MySQL. They’re:

• Visual Studio Tools for Office 20120 Runtime
• Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile
• Microsoft Excel 2007 or greater
• Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile
• Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 32-bit runtime
• Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile

Below are the installation steps after you download the current release .msi file. …

I am not at Percona Live this week because I opted to stay home after a crazy year of travel (41 talks in 11 different countries on 3 continents in the past year). However, I realized today that Percona Live has no Code of Conduct.

I will not be attending any Percona Live events until there is an acceptable Code of Conduct. MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database; the community deserves a Code of Conduct.

ETA: I have contacted Kortney, the conference organizer for Percona Live, and asked for a Code of Conduct to be put in place ASAP.

ETA: If you want to know why this is an issue, see http://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/conference-policies/

ETA: This is my personal statement, and not a statement of what any of my Mozilla colleagues may feel. Other colleagues, including employees under me, may choose to attend or …

Yesterday we posted the photos and lyrics. Now we’ve got the YouTube video (click here)!

And for those who want some behind the scenes photos, see here and here. (courtesy of @seattlegaucho).

Slides from my Percona Live talk evaluating the new spatial features in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5 are now online. This is new material I have never presented before. It is based on work I have done in my job at Nokia HERE.com location services. So even if at this conference it draws less attention than my HA talks, it is actually what I'm most proud of to present.

TL;DR summary is that PostgreSQL has lots of features but MySQL has much better ease of use and performance. (I copy paste this standard sentence into any PostgreSQL vs MySQL evaluation I do :-) The MongoDB info is basically outdated, as the new 2.4 release introduces completely new implementation based on GeoJSON, new indexing, neither of which I tested.

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Years ago I complained bitterly about MySQL’s backwards development and release model, which made guinea pigs out of the paying customers. I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t say it’s been fixed for years. And it’s really fixed right in my opinion — much better than what I proposed.

Congratulations, and thanks, to the MySQL team for superhuman software engineering, release engineering, documentation, bug triage and analysis, and doing a million things right — in other words, making a damn good database, which is hard. You know I still have gripes occasionally, and so do most people, but in the scheme of things — wow. MySQL is awesome.

From Freenode: how do you generate a five number summary in MySQL? There is no "median" aggregate function built in. You could do some clever things involving self joins or temporary tables, or build an aggregate UDF - see the comments section in the manual for those approaches.

Here's another way using a single query. Be sure to set group_concat_max_len high enough for your data, and since it relies on string manipulation, it's probably not a good choice if your data is millions of rows.

First, a helper function to get the Nth element of a comma-delimited string, just to make the query shorter:

CREATE FUNCTION LIST_ELEM(inString …