“… when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” –Tony “Scarface” Montana

In the world of computing, first you get the users, then you get the applications, then you get the power. What do I mean by power? In a word “platform”. If the only way for users to get applications is through you, and the only way for application developers to get to users is through you, then you are a platform. If you continue to nurture and grow your platform, your company is immortal, it is a goose that will continue to lay golden eggs…as long as you continue to nurture it.

To get the users, you need to deliver immediate value. Once you achieve critical mass of users, the developers will start showing up, whether you want them or not. A good example of this was Myspace. They attracted so many users, that developers started providing extensions directly to users without Myspace’s …

Leopard 10.5.7 now comes with PHP 5.2.8, I wasn’t aware of this, and it’s caused me a great amount of agony and hair pulling over the past few days. So, for those of you running XAMPP and recently upgraded to 10.5.7 you may want to be aware of this.

When I had installed XAMPP, I had removed the php binaries in /usr/bin, and linked them to their equivalents in /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/bin/

10.5.7, removed the php symlink and replaced it with the 5.2.8 binary. This caused all sorts of problems for me, as my tasks stopped working. The fix is simple, just replace the symlink again.

Thought I’d share this with others in the same situation as me. On irc people told me to switch to MAMP, but that’s not solving the problem .

As I write this, my friend (and eLiberatica chair) Lucian is packing up to fly to Bucharest for this year’s instance of the eLiberatica Electronic Frontier/Free Software/Open Source conference. Sadly, I won’t be participating this year – a commitment to less travel and a new venture make doubly sure that I’m staying home.

Despite the downturn, it looks like this is going to be a great year for the conference: 400 people have registered and the list of speakers is formidable, including: OSI board member Danese Cooper, FSFE founder Georg Greve, MySQL founders David Axmark and Monty Widenius and Zbigniew “Gandalf” Branecki from Mozilla Europe.

If you are in or near Romania, you should try to …

[ Note: this post was updated on Dec 2, 2009 to correct dashes. In the original post, dash dash -- was showing up as a single dash. This is noted in the comments and has been corrected in the text below.]

These are very (very) basic instructions for setting up a very simple application with Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express to use the MySQL Embedded Library (libmysqld).

The MySQL Embedded Library is a full version of the server that is available as a dynamic or static library.  Developers can run the library inside their application.  It’s extremely fast, easy to distribute and it’s ideal for stand-alone applications.  More information about the library can be found at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/libmysqld.html

Having little experience using Visual C++, I’ve struggled to find instructions for setting up a project to use a dynamic library.  I finally got it to work thanks to …

Tomorrow (Wednesday, May 20, 2009), Ulf Wendel and Andrey Hristov, engineers working in the Connector team of Sun|MySQL database group, will be presenting a webinar about the new MySQL Connector/C++. This connector, which uses much the JDBC API patterns, was recently made available as a GA release during the MySQL Conference and Expo.

Register from anywhere in the world and listen to Ulf and Andrey as they talk to you about Connector/C++ from somewhere in Germany!

Addendum: At this very moment, I'm attending this free Webinar. It is truly amazing how well-coordinated this is. So, if you couldn't get to this, try to make it to some other upcoming MySQL Webinar.

There are two PRIMARY directions to sort data in SQL: Ascending (ASC) and Descending DESC.
When these two sort definitions are put together in a single statement a filesort is produced.

Why do we want to avoid filesorts?

Filesorts are bad. 1st they tickle a thread based buffer called sort_buffer_size. Additionally filesorts reads the data twice, unless max_length_for_sort_data limit is reached and as a result the Filesort runs slower to reduce disk I/O. If you want filesorts to run faster at the expense of the disk increase the default max_length_for_sort_data. You can read the filesort algorithm here.

So, here is an example

 CREATE TABLE `ABCD` (
  `A` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
  `B` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
  `C` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL …

We have released version 0.29 of libmemcached.

The highlights:
* Fixed malloc usage to calloc for spots where we need zero filled memory.
* All code warnings now treated as errors.
* Fixes for debian packaging.
* Added new pooling mechanism.
* MEMCACHED_BEHAVIOR_NO_BLOCK no longer also sets MEMCACHED_BEHAVIOR_BUFFER_REQUESTS.
* Updated generic rpm.

The new pooling mechanism is thread safe so if you have been looking for a way to limit your number of memcachd_st structures and you use threads you are now set!
This work was done to improve the connection handling in Drizzle for Memcachd (and it is going into the UDF for MySQL as well).

You can find out more information here:
http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html

Recently on a client site I had to fight the pain of having no way to confirm loss of data integrity when optimizing data types. Due to MySQL’s ability to perform silent conversion of data, when converting a number of columns we enabled sql_mode to catch any truncations as errors.

sql_mode=STRICT_ALL_TABLES

This ensured that should any data truncations occur, an error is thrown not a warning. The following shows an example case study for converting an INT to TINYINT UNSIGNED and shows that without sql_mode silent conversions occur.

mysql> drop schema if exists tmp;
Query OK, 25 rows affected (0.40 sec)

mysql> create schema tmp;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> use tmp
Database changed
mysql> create table t1(i1 INT NULL);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.15 sec)

mysql> insert into t1 values(1),(2),(3),(256),(65536),(NULL);
Query OK, 6 rows affected (0.06 sec)
Records: 6  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0 …

Tomorrow (Wednesday, May 20, 2009), Ulf Wendel and Andrey Hristov, engineers working in the Connector team of Sun|MySQL database group, will be presenting a webinar about the new MySQL Connector/C++. This connector, which uses much the JDBC API patterns, was recently made available as a GA release during the MySQL Conference and Expo.

Register from anywhere in the world and listen to Ulf and Andrey as they talk to you about Connector/C++ from somewhere in Germany!

Addendum: At this very moment, I'm attending this free Webinar. It is truly amazing how well-coordinated this is. So, if you couldn't get to this, try to make it to some other upcoming MySQL Webinar.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, May 20, 2009), Ulf Wendel and Andrey Hristov, engineers working in the Connector team of Sun|MySQL database group, will be presenting a webinar about the new MySQL Connector/C++. This connector, which uses much the JDBC API patterns, was recently made available as a GA release during the MySQL Conference and Expo.

Register from anywhere in the world and listen to Ulf and Andrey as they talk to you about Connector/C++ from somewhere in Germany!

Addendum: At this very moment, I'm attending this free Webinar. It is truly amazing how well-coordinated this is. So, if you couldn't get to this, try to make it to some other upcoming MySQL Webinar.