April 20, 2009 was one hell of a day. In the morning, Sun announced the Oracle acquisition. In the afternoon, my mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. She died three months later.

Within hours, three foundational aspects of my life were rocked to the core: The project I worked on, the company I worked for, and one of the two people directly responsible for my very existence (however, I did receive a decent tax refund, so the news that week wasn't all bad.)

Now that I'm solidly on the other side of an extraordinarily disruptive year, I can afford to reflect and offer some perspective.

The burning question is, of course, What became of Falcon? The short answer is that the project was shelved and the team disbanded. But let me offer a somewhat more considered answer to that question.

Falcon's very existence was predicated upon the fact that MySQL needed a transactional storage …

At Fosdem 2010, already two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Geert van der Kelen explain the work he has been doing on connecting MySQL and Python. I don't know anything about Python, but anybody that has the courage, perseverance and coding skills to create an implementation of the the MySQL wire protocol from scratch is a class-A programmer in my book. So, I encourage everyone that needs MySQL connectivity for Python programs to check out Geert's brainchild, MySQL Connector/Python.

In relation to MySQL Connector/Python, I just read a post from Geert …

I'm pleased to announce the release of Vertical Partitioning storage engine version 0.8(alpha).
Vertical Partitioning is a Storage Engine for vertical partitioning for a table.
http://launchpad.net/vpformysql

The main changes in this version are following.
This release is bug fix release.

Please see "99_change_logs.txt" in the download documents for more detail.

Enjoy!

As usual, Michael Skok of North Bridge ventures will be presenting the results of the annual Future of Open Source survey at this year's OSBC conference, March 17-18 in San Francisco.  This is a great opportunity to weigh in and provide your perspective on some important business questions. Here are the 2009 Results as reported by Ostatic.

• Survey: …

We have published a new beta release of Version 5.2.16 Workbench Beta 6 build includes fixes for 67 bugs.

In Beta 6 we’ve also responded to great community ideas and feedback with various new convenience and security features:

1. Saving your profile/connection passwords in OSX keychain, gnome-keyring or – for windows – in a encrypted password-vault-file.
2. New rapid development features for generating complete SQL Select/DML statements or names for selected objects in Query Editor to either the query area or clipboard.
3. New in the Windows version (coming to Mac and Linux soon) the ability to set a preference for the placement of the sidebar in the Query Editor (left or right side.)
4. And last but not least, we put a good bit of focus on optimizing and stabilizing the administrator components.

We want to thank all the people who have been testing MySQL Workbench 5.2 alphas …

It’s Ash Wednesday today (Feb 17th 2010) !! I learnt that Ash Wednesday derives its name from the practice of placing ashes as a Sign of the Cross on the…

The post Ash Wednesday:Repent, and believe the Gospel and MySQL first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.

I'll approach this topic from another direction.
I had to perform a task which required moving tables between schemas on the same MySQL server. One way of doing this would be:

1. Dumping the original table to disk.
2. Creating new empty table on the target schema.
3. Importing table from disk into the target schema.

But, a simpler way exists! The manual entry for RENAME TABLE casually describes this feature: As long as two databases are on the same file system, you can use RENAME TABLE to move a table from one database to another:

RENAME TABLE current_db.tbl_name TO other_db.tbl_name;

Which works almost instantaneously and does what it is supposed …

To far fetched (pun inteded), some might think.. Below you'll find a procedure to get a list of MySQL supported character sets and their collations. The output is Python and can be used to build a (big) tuple.

The problem is that character set IDs in MySQL have 'gaps'. For example hebrew has ID 16, and the next character set in the COLLATIONS-table, tis620, has ID 18. Not a big problem, just a bit annoying. This list is hardcoded in MySQL Connector/Python and I needed something to easily maintain it.

Solutions were using text editing skills, parsing it in Python to produce a list, etc.. But why not a …

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

Review ACTION points from previous meeting (jib)

• ACTION: ttx to announce papercuts nominations
  • ttx: done
• ACTION: zul to do another call to action for the apport hooks involvement
  • zul: will do today
• ACTION: zul to raise php5.3 update on -server and -devel mailinglist, outline which apps are currently not working with 5.3
  • zul: done

Alpha3 progress review (ttx)

• Make sure status is updated on each of your blueprint whiteboards EOD on Tuesdays !

• Prio 1 specs < 70% completed: …

I track security updates for the following vendors: Apple, Cisco, FreeBSD, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. I chose these vendors based on my own needs for the networks and systems I manage. I've also found that updates from these vendors tend to catch the major updates necessary for common software applications. If you have other vendors you would like me to provide updates for, send me a message.

If you have an interest in information security from both a technical and managerial level, check out Principles of Information Security. It does an excellent job of presenting material for both audiences.

Red Hat, Inc.

• RHSA-2010:0108 Moderate: NetworkManager security update
• …