MySQL Conference 2009 is coming around the corner, next week, in Santa Clara.

You may want to delve into the notes, as a fast way to learn about the happenings.

If you want to become an active code contributor to MySQL, the hackfest by Mark Callaghan seems interesting, and you should probably also start here and here. 

There will also be a special BoF geared to community contributors. (I still haven't been able to find out about the exact timing of this but you should be …

MySQL Conference 2009 is coming around the corner, next week, in Santa Clara.

You may want to delve into the notes, as a fast way to learn about the happenings.

If you want to become an active code contributor to MySQL, the hackfest by Mark Callaghan seems interesting, and you should probably also start here and here. 

There will also be a special BoF geared to community contributors. (I still haven't been able to find out about the exact timing of this but you should be …

I just read about the release of Honey Monitor for MySQL. I read through the features. I looked at the screenshots. Then I read about the licensing. Then I read about the fact that it only runs on windows XP or Vista. So, my questions for the ages…

1. Why, in this age of multiple OSes battling each other for market share, would you write an application that is OS specific? Every app should run in a vendor neutral web browser unless there’s a really really good reason. Monitoring software, are you kidding? Monitoring software must be vendor neutral and web-based. I will never use anything that ties me to windows or linux or osx, it has to be cross platform. End of story.
2. Why, when MySQL is so heavily used on Linux and Solaris, would you write an application for MySQL that can only be run on Windows? Every MySQL DBA …

I just read about the release of Honey Monitor for MySQL. I read through the features. I looked at the screenshots. Then I read about the licensing. Then I read about the fact that it only runs on windows XP or Vista. So, my questions for the ages…

1. Why, in this age of multiple OSes battling each other for market share, would you write an application that is OS specific? Every app should run in a vendor neutral web browser unless there’s a really really good reason. Monitoring software, are you kidding? Monitoring software must be vendor neutral and web-based. I will never use anything that ties me to windows or linux or osx, it has to be cross platform. End of story.
2. Why, when MySQL is so heavily used on Linux and Solaris, would you write an application for MySQL that can only be run on Windows? Every MySQL DBA …

Introduction

If you, like me, are building or thinking of implementing a MySQL-powered application that has any need for prioritizing selecting certain data over other data, this article is for you.

Example

As a real world example, consider a queue-like video processing system. Your application receives new videos and processes them. The volume of incoming videos can at times be higher than the processing rate because the process is CPU bound, so occasionally a pretty long queue may form. You will try to process them as fast as you can but…

Note that I am using a queue here, so the the next item to be processed is a result of sorting by some sort of field in a ascending order, for example ORDER BY id or ORDER BY upload_date. Iâ€ll pick the id sort here.

…suddenly, you need to process a video somewhere in the middle of the queue or an important video enters and …

Since a long time people (including me) complained that storeconfigs was a real resource hog. Unfortunately for us, this option is so cool and useful.

What’s storeconfigs

Storeconfigs is a puppetmasterd option that stores the nodes actual configuration to a database. It does this by comparing the result of the last compilation against what is actually in the database, resource per resource, then parameter per parameter, and so on.

The actual implementation is based on Rails’ Active Record, which is a great way to abstract the gory details of the database, and prototype code easily …

Version 1.0.3-alpha of the MySQL Connector/C++ has just been announced by Lawrin Novitsky and is now available for download. This driver is licensed under the GPL and is a new implementation of the MySQL Client/Server protocol. Instead of wrapping the C API calls in C++ methods, the implementation mimics the JDBC API, which hopefully feels much more "native" to a seasoned C++ developer.

The driver has been ported to a wide range of platforms and is about to hit the beta test phase. So if you're writing a C++ application that needs to connect to a MySQL Server, give it a try! The developers are always looking for …

In this fourth post (parts one, two and three are found here) on the State of the Computer Book Market, we will look at programming languages and drill in a little on each language area.

Overall the market for programming languages was down 5.9% in 2008 when compared with 2007. There were 1,849,974 units sold in 2007 versus 1,740,808 units sold in 2008, which is a decrease of 109,166  units. So the unhealthy 8% loss in the Overall Computer Book Market was not completely fueled by …

Today I had to swap 2 columns in one of my MySQL tables. The task, which seems easily accomplishable by a temp variable, proved to be a bit harder to complete. But only just a bit.

Here are my findings:

1. The

   UPDATE swap_test SET x=y, y=x;

   approach doesn't work, as it'll just set both values to y.

   PostgreSQL seems to handle this query differently, as it apparently uses the old values throughout the whole query. [Reference]

2. Here's a method that uses a temporary variable. Thanks to Antony from the comments for the "IS NOT NULL" tweak. Without it, the query works unpredictably. See the table schema at the end of the post. This method doesn't swap the values if one of them is NULL. Use method #3 that doesn't have this limitation. …

Introduction

Clickjacking is a malicious technique of tricking web users into revealing confidential information or taking control of their computer while clicking on seemingly innocuous web pages. A vulnerability across a variety of browsers and platforms, a clickjacking takes the form of embedded code or script that can execute without the user's knowledge, such as clicking on a button that appears to perform another function (credit: Wikipedia).

Clickjacking is hard to combat. From a technical standpoint, the attack is executed using a combination of CSS and iFrames, which are both harmless web technologies, and relies mostly on tricking users by means of social engineering. Additionally, the only server side technique against …