I find it amazing that the U.S. Department of Justice can continue to cover its eyes and ears while Microsoft is allowed to exert its monopolistic power over all hardware manufacturers.

About 20 months ago, I was able to purchase a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 from the lenovo.com website without an operating system installed. Today, I went to purchase a new Lenovo Thinkpad laptop, again without having to pay the Windows Tax. Turns out Lenovo has stopped offering this option. What a complete PILE OF SHIT. Somebody in Microsoft’s “Business Development” or “Partners” team must have told Lenovo to stop offering its customers a simple choice of not having to pay the OEM license fees for Windows. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Microsoft is just too big and too pervasive for anybody to have a damn effect on them.

Frankly, it’s anti-choice, anti-competition, …

Fig. 1 MySQL per-row replication filtering

A MySQL Software preview is available which allows you to write Lua scripts to control replication on a statement-by-statement basis. Note that this is prototype functionality and is not supported but feedback on its usefulness would be gratefully received.The final version would allow much greater functionality but this preview allows you to implement filters on either the master or slave to examine the statements being replicated and decide whether to continue processing each one or not.

After reading this article, you may be interested in trying this out for yourself and want to create your own script(s). You can get more information on the functionality and download the special version of MySQL from …

We'll soon have our last MySQL University session for this year, followed by a winter break until the end of January 2010. So far there's only one session scheduled next year, but we'd like to have one session per week, so we need lots more speakers!

Anyone who has something technical to say about MySQL qualifies as a speaker. MySQL University sessions take place on Thursday afternoons European time, and normally have between 20 and 30 attendees, but quite a lot of people listen to the recordings when the live session time isn't convenient for them. We're using Dimdim as our conferencing system, so the setup for speakers is very simple: Just grab a headset, start a Flash-enabled browser on either Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris, perform a 10-minute test with the MySQL University host, and …

We recently added support for Windows 7 to both Zmanda Cloud Backup and Amanda Enterprise. Zmanda Cloud Backup stores its backup archives on the Amazon S3 Storage Cloud. Amanda Enterprise has the option to do so. Users can backup both the Windows file systems and system state, as well as various Microsoft applications, Oracle and MySQL databases. Now we support all Windows versions supported by Microsoft, including Windows 7.

To upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, Microsoft recommends users to backup their Windows XP to external hard disk and then install Windows 7. Backup to (and Restore from) …

It's been some time already since I informed you about server: database: UNSTABLE repository in openSUSE Build Service. Today I want to mention what is going on there. As the name of the repository suggests, it's probably not the best idea to use anything from here on your production servers

MySQL 5.4

I'm keeping there MySQL 5.4. Currently in version 5.4.3 beta. 5.4 branch of MySQL contains some patches to improve performance. That is the reason why it might be interesting. Downside is that it isn't released as often as 5.1 and it is not considered production ready. I already wrote something about …

It’s been some time already since I informed you about server: database: UNSTABLE repository in openSUSE Build Service. Today I want to mention what is going on there. As the name of the repository suggests, it’s probably not the best idea to use anything from here on your production servers

MySQL 5.4

I’m keeping there MySQL 5.4. Currently in version 5.4.3 beta. 5.4 branch of MySQL contains some patches to improve performance. That is the reason why it might be interesting. Downside is that it isn’t released as often as 5.1 and it is not considered production ready. I already wrote …

We'll soon have our last MySQL University session for this year, followed by a winter break until the end of January 2010. So far there's only one session scheduled next year, but we'd like to have one session per week, so we need lots more speakers!

Anyone who has something technical to say about MySQL qualifies as a speaker. MySQL University sessions take place on Thursday afternoons European time, and normally have between 20 and 30 attendees, but quite a lot of people listen to the recordings when the live session time isn't convenient for them. We're using Dimdim as our conferencing system, so the setup for speakers is very simple: Just grab a headset, start a Flash-enabled browser on either Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris, perform a 10-minute test with the MySQL University host, and …

We'll soon have our last MySQL University session for this year, followed by a winter break until the end of January 2010. So far there's only one session scheduled next year, but we'd like to have one session per week, so we need lots more speakers!

Anyone who has something technical to say about MySQL qualifies as a speaker. MySQL University sessions take place on Thursday afternoons European time, and normally have between 20 and 30 attendees, but quite a lot of people listen to the recordings when the live session time isn't convenient for them. We're using Dimdim as our conferencing system, so the setup for speakers is very simple: Just grab a headset, start a Flash-enabled browser on either Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris, perform a 10-minute test with the MySQL University host, and …

A lot of the time I have found that the only available backup taken from mysqldump contains all databases. This is ok but can be a head ache if you only need to restore one or some of the tables in one database. Below is a good way to restore only that which needs to be restored. I have created three tables in the test database, truncated the third table and now need to restore just that table.

-- Example:

mysql> select database();
+------------+
| database() |
+------------+
| test |
+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> show tables;
+----------------+
| Tables_in_test |
+----------------+
| tbl1 |
| tbl2 |
| tbl3 |
+----------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select min(anum), max(anum) from test.tbl1;
…

A few weeks ago I wrote about a student group who will be working with the Drizzle community to build a new database client tool. While the tool will be the primary replacement for the Drizzle client tool, we hope it will be generic (using the Python DB API) so it will work with others like MySQL and PostgreSQL. We’ve had a number of great discussions, including a session at OpenSQL camp last weekend. I wanted to toss out a few ideas of how such a tool could be structured to allow for maximum extensibility.

One possibility is to borrow from typical Unix shells and DSP processing systems where you have a number of modules with I/O interfaces and data exchange formats between each module. Each module provides a specific signature so you know what other modules it can plug into. Here is a simple example: