MySQL Workbench has a beta out! No idea why its version 5.0.9, but its highly exciting. This software existed before, but this is quite unlike its predecessor. One snag for me is that it is Windows-only at the moment, with Linux and OS X versions to follow suit.

However, due to excitement, I decided to try running it on Linux, anyway.

Seeing that it is a .NET application, I thought I’d pass it through MoMA (the migration analyser). Everything passed, so I got excited. Running mono MySQLWorkbench.exe however, led me to a failure:
** ERROR **: Method ‘<Module>:<CrtImplementationDetails>.DoDllLanguageSupportValidation ()’ in assembly ‘/home/byte/Downloads/MySQL Workbench 5.0.9 OSS …

Just came off today's MySQL University session about How to Build MySQL on Windows - Reggie did a great job on explaining how to build the MySQL Server from Source on Windows using the Microsoft development toolchain and some additional required tools. I am glad to hear that we're making progress on making it easier for Windows developers to work with the source code and Reggie and the other members of our Windows Task Force (what a nice acronym this one makes!) have plenty of other ideas for improving that experience.

If you missed his session, the audio file and IRC log will be published from the MySQL University pages shortly.

And in case you haven't heard about MySQL University before, check out the pages on the …

Just stumbled over this article, which might come in handy for our Microsoft Office users out there: "Using Excel to analyze MySQL data" by Jason Gilmore explains how to set up the MySQL Connector/ODBC and connecting to a MySQL database using Microsoft Excel.

If you're a Linux user, this article on NewsForge covers a similar topic, using OpenOffice.org

to connect to a MySQL Server.

Update: Thanks to Guillermo Roditi for pointing out that both links pointed to the same article - now fixed. Sorry about that.

Last week I was notified that my article about how to install and configure MySQL and the MySQL Connector/J was published in the Java Starter Magazine, a special edition of the german Java Magazin. It covers the basic installation of MySQL and Connector/J on Windows and Linux and how to write a small example program to connect to to MySQL with Java using the Eclipse framework. They were kind enough to send me a number of copies that I plan to give away at tonight's Hamburg MySQL User Group Meeting.

MySQL 5.1 is moving to a new system for building the source code on Windows, based on CMake (more on this another time).

While finishing up the last bits of this, I ran into a very annoying limitation in Visual Studio (version 7.1 I think). The library include path in Visual Studio project files (.vcproj) has a very tight limit on the maximum length, around 2000 characters it seems. Put a path longer than that in the AdditionalLibraryDirectories section, and you will not get an error but the build will fail to find required libraries. This problem is made more serious by the fact that CMake tends to use absolute paths, leading to longer paths in the project files.

Googling a bit for this problem turned up nothing, so in the end I had to resort to some extremely ugly Perl one-liner build cleanup:

perl -i.bak -pe "s/[a-z]:[^,; …

Some of you may remember a GUI tool named MySQLFront written by Ansgar Becker, a shareware tool for Windows to administrate a MySQL server. The development stopped with version 2.5 in September 2002, because Ansgar no longer had the time to further drive the development. About a year later, the name (not the code) was taken over by Nils Hoyer, who started to develop and sell a product similar in functionality under that name. See this page (in german) for a more detailed history.

Back then, many people had asked Ansgar to turn his work into an Open Source project, which he declined to do (as it would probably have required even more time to maintain properly than just doing the development all by himself).
…

MySQL 5.0.19 was announced on March 10th and the developers have been very busy with resolving many of the bugs that were reported. Something that did not really get much attention because of all these changes was the fact that we now provide binaries for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 (AMD64/Intel EM64T) as well!
If you run the 64bit version of this OS, give these binaries a try and let us know how they fared for you! Kudos to the build team for making these happen.

VMWare recently released a freeware called VMWare Player that can play a pre-built virtual machine file. A virtual machine is an OS bundled with whatever the virtual machine creator put there. This is perfect for people to test-drive various operating systems and software, without going through the hassle of installing themselves. VMWare currently provides virtual machines preloaded with RedHat, Novell Suse, ubuntu, Oracle, MySql, and Bea, among others.

Memory used to be a bottleneck for virtualization software to take off. However, on the hardware side of things, both Intel and AMD are pushing 64-bit processors pretty aggressively now. With 64-bit architecture, the memory space the operating system can access increases exponentially (from 2^32 to 2^64). With the push towards 64-bit and the emergence of virtualization technology, I wonder what kind of impact this will have …

It is still in Alpha, but you can now download Connector/ODBC version 5 from dev.mysql.com!

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/5.0.html

This is a pretty serious rewrite of the old Connector/ODBC, so please take some time to test and report bugs at bugs.mysql.com.

While working on a new feature for my time tracker, I needed to be able to determine how long a user had been idle using VB.NET (so that if I walked away without punching out, the tool could prompt me and punch me out retroactively upon my return). There are a lot of convoluted ways to do this involving a lot of hooks, but there is a nice LASTINPUTINFO call in User32.dll that can be used to accomplish the task with a minimum of coding.

The only limitation is that the call is only available as of Windows 2000, but that is not a concern for me, and I can just disable the functionality for users of earlier versions of Windows.

I have posted a class I found that takes advantage of LASTINPUTINFO for VB.NET at http://www.vbmysql.com/samplecode/idle-time.html.