Before you think I’ve posted an animal story in my MySQL category please read on. For reference, The RAT and the CAT is something I wrote back in 2006, that explains the CAT part.

I was reviewing the website performance tonight of a client. I had access to an idle system so being lazy in collecting SQL after my initial audit of the system and MySQL, I turned on the General Query log and hit the home page. NOTE: Do not do this on a running production system, especially with any volume.

What I got was 77 lines of output (after I removed newlines in the queries). 74 were queries, and 72 were from the same table, via some unnecessarily complex sub-joins. I wish I could have laughed but it wasn’t really funny.

My Friday wisdom for writing SQL is this:

• Don’t write duplicate SQL statements
• Look the entire …

Hi!

Just a few hours ago, I arrived home after a very quiet and peaceful two-week holiday with my family. It was great! I didn't bring a computer on purpose. I brought a mobile phone, but didn't answer that on purpose too :) Result: absolute relaxation, with lots of time to hike, cycle, and read, and occasional visits to musea and historic sites. Bliss :)

Anyway, now that the bags are unpacked, and the kids are asleep, it's time to face the dragon better known as my inbox. What I found brought a big smile to my face:



Yes - it's true!! Copies of my and Jos' book Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL have hit the …

OK, I know that this is not really Web2.0, Business, Marketing or MySQL related, but I found a very inspiring story about an executive finding a job of his own dreaming.
I'm a lucky guy who has an interesting and fulfilling job, but paving the road for the career of your dreams is something that everyone should get used to, especially in this turbulent times.
His approach was a good one for tough times, so I wanted to pass it along to you. The part of the story that I like is the attitude of the hunter while trying to find a job:
"I visualized what I wanted this position to be like and wrote a list of bullet items about the job and my ideal company."I completely agree. Each of us, especially in this flat and continuously evolving world, can work to shape a position where he fits perfectly. If you mix your technical skills, leadership …

Our DBA team wants replication state on a MySQL slave to be more robust against machine crashes. There are some things I can do, but now is a good time to review the work in progress by the community that will eventually make replication much easier to support in production.

Replication in MySQL has many possible futures. I use MySQL out of convenience to mean official MySQL, MariaDB, Drizzle, XtraDB, the Facebook patch and the Google patch.

Drizzle has by far (leaps and bounds far) the cleanest interface for …

For the first time ever I took a two-week vacation. How can a person who has 100s of database servers, 100s of web servers, and a system that supports 100K tps across 20 TB of data is able to take a vacation? Easy, I have a great team that is very competent in managing the platform by following our cookbook routines and guidelines for new application interaction with the databases.

Where did I go? I went to NYC-stayed in Tribeca and only ate Pizza, Hotdogs, White Castle and Hala Food from vendors that are nearly on every street corner. I also lost 6 pounds! After three months of half-ass dieting to prepare for my Pizza diet, who would have known that just going for it was the key to success! How did I do it? Well, first I walked to Little Italy, bought 2-4 slices, ate them, and then walked around the city. That is it. As a Database Dude, I do not do much walking except for when I am too tired to run on the treadmill for 20 mins. I was …

I received my pre-ordered copy yesterday of Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL. A huge congratulations and thank you to Roland Bouman and Jos van Dongen, two long time Pentaho community members who wrote the book.

I can' t tell you how excited I am to see this book! For many years, developers and project managers that I've worked with have felt that a book like this one is the missing link to helping customers achieve success with their warehouse and business intelligence strategies. Most books on business intelligence are either too abstract or offer guidance only on select pillars (for example, only reporting solutions), which leave the reader with unfulfilled requirements and no direction for filling in the gaps.

With Pentaho Solutions, the reader gets a concrete explanation and best-of-breed Pentaho implementation of ETL, reporting, analysis, dashboarding and data …

Vladimir will be giving a presentation on PBXT at the FrOSCon 2009 in St. Augustin, near Bonn in Germany tomorrow:

PBXT: Technology trends that affect your Database
Room: C120/OpenSQLCamp
Time: 22 Aug 2009, 18:15 - 18:45

The talks is packed with interesting information about how the design of PBXT handles the major technological challenges of the future, including multiple cores, lots of RAM and solid state drives.

If you are in the area, check it out! :)

I just discovered today in the MySQL 5.1 Reference Manual a handy set of additional indexes in the System Navigation section.

• Index
• Standard Index
• C Function Index
• Command Index
• Function Index
• INFORMATION_SCHEMA Index
• Transaction Isolation Level Index
• JOIN Types Index
• Operator Index
• Option Index
• Privileges Index
• SQL Modes Index
• Status Variable Index
• Statement/Syntax Index
• System Variable Index

Perhaps they have been around for some time and I’ve not noticed, but there are much better then searching when you know the content type as per the index list on what you are searching for.

Looking at twitter #songsincode (just search on #songsincode tag), it appears a large chunk of geeky/nerdy world has come to a halt while spending the day expression song titles in code. So far we’ve seen most programming languages as well as CSS and SQL come by. I think it’s a nice example of how “the collective” can become very creative. My favourite SQL ones so far (by @john_chr): SELECT * FROM walk WHERE gait LIKE '%EGYPTIAN%'

Update: a good friend of mine, Steve Thorne (@Jerub), wanted to set up a site for this, so we hacked one up: SongsInCodeDB.