Man, what did I do before strtotime().  Oh, I know, I had a 482 line function to parse date formats and return timestamps.  And I still could not do really cool stuff.  Like tonight I needed to figure out when Thanksgiving was in the US.  I knew it was the 4th Thursday in November.  So, I started with some math stuff and checking what day of the week Nov. 1 would fall on.  All that was making my head hurt.  So, I just tried this for fun.

strtotime("thursday, november ".date("Y")." + 3 weeks")

That gives me Thanksgiving.  Awesome.  It is cool for other stuff too.  At its very basic, it can take a MySQL datetime field and turn it into a timestamp.  Very handy for date calculations.  It also understands RFC 2822 and ISO 8601 date formats.  …

This is more of an "behind the scenes" update and I hope that you won't see any (negative) changes on the PlanetMySQL front page or the RSS feeds: I just finished and commited the conversion of the backend script that performs the parsing and aggregation of feeds from requiring MagpieRSS to SimplePie.

This will provide better support for a wider range of feed types and should also fix a few quirks, e.g. that some postings (for example the one from Kevin Burton) only showed up as an "A" in the Planet's RSS feed. It hopefully also fixes a weirdness with time zones that …

This is more of an "behind the scenes" update and I hope that you won't see any (negative) changes on the PlanetMySQL front page or the RSS feeds: I just finished and commited the conversion of the backend script that performs the parsing and aggregation of feeds from requiring MagpieRSS to SimplePie.

This will provide better support for a wider range of feed types and should also fix a few quirks, e.g. that some postings (for example the one from Kevin Burton) only showed up as an "A" in the Planet's RSS feed. It hopefully also fixes a weirdness with time zones that …

Tomorrow (Thursday, 11th of September) at 9:00 PST/16:00 UTC/17:00 GMT/18:00 CET, there will be an new free MySQL University Session. MySQL University started as an internal training program for MySQL engineers, to share and spread knowledge about their areas of expertise and has been available to the public for quite some time now. It covers a wide range of technical topics around the MySQL Server and usually takes place once per week.

For the first time, the presentation will not be performed by (former) MySQL employees/developers, but by two of our "Sun Classic" colleagues: Jyri Virkki (OpenSolaris Web Stack community lead) and Murthy Chintalapati (Sr Engineering Manager, Web Stack development) will talk about the …

Slave delay can be a nightmare. I battle it every day and know plenty of people who curse the serialization problem of replication. For those who are not familiar with it, replication on MySQL slaves runs commands in series – one by one, while the master may run them in parallel. This fact usually causes bottlenecks. Consider these 2 examples:

• Between 1 and 100 UPDATE queries are constantly running on the master in parallel. If the slave IO is only fast enough to handle 50 of them without lagging, as soon as 51 start running, the slaves starts to lag.
• A more common problem is when one query takes an hour to run (let's say, it's an UPDATE with a big WHERE clause that doesn't use an index). In this case, the query runs on the master for an hour, which isn't a big problem because it doesn't block other queries. However, when the query moves over to the slaves, all of them start to lag because it plugs up the single …

One of the sessions at DrupalCon I attended was Larry Garfield's talk about "Drupal Databases: The Next Generation", which gave me a good insight into the current state of the Drupal database layer and how they plan to overhaul it for Drupal 7. The key points that I took away:

• A new API based on PDO
• Object-oriented, requiring PHP5
• Support for using prepared statements
• A unified access API
• A query builder
• More support for other database systems (currently Drupal supports MySQL and PostgreSQL only). In particular, they are …

Man, this video hits too close to home. Developers all over the world are in pain, so go ahead – hug one right now! Dedicated to all developers at blinkx, MySQL, and beyond.

Newsflash: Perl 6 is not dead (in case you thought it was)!

I stumbled upon this most excellent series of posts by Moritz Lenz of perlgeek.de that describe the differences between Perl 5 and the upcoming Perl 6 (thanks to Andy Lester for the link). The posts are done in the form of tutorials, which helps comprehension. Simply awesome, Moritz.

It seems like Perl 6 is going to be a lot more object oriented, but such orientation is optional and not forced upon programmers, like in, say, Java. It warms my heart that I will be able to do this (you did see the …

Protobuf comes with a minor problem: it does not have support for handling "type tagged structures", that is, something reminiscent of objects in OOP lingo, so if one is going to have a heterogeneous sequences of messages, you have to roll it yourself. For that reason, I added a transport frame for the messages in the binary log that wraps each with some extra information. In addition to allowing the binary log to be a sequence of messages, it also adds some integrity-checking data and simplifies some administrative tasks.

The format of each message in the sequences is given in the table in the margin. where the length is a specially encoded …

Being able to use an Open Source DBMS to manage your data is nice, but what good would it be if you can't easily access it from your applications? One key factor to the popularity of MySQL is probably its wide range of available language bindings, which started with support for C, PHP and Perl from early on.

I've tried to gather a list of languages and their respective MySQL drivers/modules below. It's by no means complete or exhaustive, but I think I covered quite a lot of popular as well as exotic programming languages.

There is a number of connectors which are actually developed by the Sun Database Group (aka MySQL) itself and that are ready to use:

• Connector/ODBC - Standardized database driver Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix platforms.
• …