Quick tip - suppose you need the result set of a MySQL stored procedure in your Pentaho Data Integration (a.k.a. Kettle) Transformation, what do you do?

A Call DB Procedure sounds promising, but as it turns out, you can't use it to retrieve any result sets. Rather, this type of step is meant have an input stream from another source:

• 
  
• drive stored procedure execution presumably for some useful side-effect
  
• invoke a database stored function and obtain the scalar result
  

So, what can we do? The answer is simpler than might be expected.

Just use an ordinary …

This is a quick post to show how one can issue commands to telnet session from a shell script or command line with out going into interactive mode. I use this to get stats from our memcache servers or issue a flush_all via telnet from a script/cron.

So without further delay, following command will telnet to local memcached server on port 11211 and issue one of the memcached commands, stats

(sleep .5;echo stats) | telnet localhost 11211
You may have to play with the sleep timer to get it to work for your environment but in our .5 was the sweet spot. Good luck and let me know if you have another shell command. Obviously we can do this from perl, php, python, etc but the beauty of this is that you do not need any other dependencies plus its a very short command. …

In a nutshell: What’s New in MySQL 5.1.

Release notes: Changes in release 5.1.x (Production).

And yes, very early on (at about two minutes in), I talk about my take on Monty’s controversial post at Oops, we did it again.

To play the video directly, go to http://technocation.org/node/663/play. To download the 146 Mb video to your computer for offline playback, go to http://technocation.org/node/663/download. The slides …

Welcome, readers, to the 129th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome also to 2009, so fresh it still has that wonderful new year smell. Let’s take ‘er out on the road and see what she can do.

Starting with Oracle (and reaching back here a little into the holidays), Doug Burns had performance on his mind—to be precise, his own at UKOUG; and some performance-related blogs he’s found worthwhile. Doug’s recommendations themselves always perform well.

Tanel Poder was on the same road. In his item, …

I'm busy working on my book, "Developing Web Applications with Apache, MySQL, Memcached, and Perl", writing about how Libmemcached (particularly the perl interface to libmemcached, Cache::Memcached::libmemcached/Memcached::libmemcached) is faster. And it is, except when I was writing a test script to compare, I first used Daisuke Maki's script that comes with Cache::Memcached::libmemcached, tools/benchmark.pl (which I modified to only compare Cache::Memcached to Cache::Memcached::libmemcached)

==== Benchmark "Simple get() (scalar)" ====
Rate perl_memcached libmemcached
perl_memcached 6784/s -- -78%
libmemcached 30488/s 349% --
==== Benchmark "Simple get_multi() (scalar)" ====
Rate perl_memcached libmemcached
perl_memcached 1806/s -- -84%
libmemcached 11494/s 537% --
==== Benchmark "Serialization with get()" ====
Rate perl_memcached libmemcached
perl_memcached 6402/s -- …

Ok - this has been stewing for some time now, and I think now is the right time to announce that I am working together with Jos van Dongen from Tholis Consulting to create a book for Wiley with the tentative title "Building Pentaho Solutions".

My personal aim is to make this book the primary point of reference for DBAs and Application Developers that are familiar with Open Source products like MySQL and PostgreSQL but have no prior BI skills, as well as BI professionals that are familiar with closed source BI products like Microsoft BI and Business Objects that want to learn how to get things done with Pentaho.

The book will cover all distinct components and sub-products that make up the …

A while back I announced on the PDO mailinglist that I would review the tests the mysqlnd team wrote. These tests are currently MySQL specific and I was hoping that we could adopt them for the other drivers. I spend less time than I originally envisioned on the review, mostly because the last 2 months were a bit more exhausting at work than I had anticipated. So I ended up sleeping more and working less. Anyways, at this point it seems to me like the tests themselves are too MySQL specific to be easily portable to other RDBMS and that the time is therefore better spend simply writing new tests and using the mysqlnd tests as inspiration. However, I feel like the current structure of the test suite is not optimal yet, though I might not fully grasp the current approach.

So I think the next …

A bumper CAOS Links rounding up the news and views from the festive period, including: Red Hat revenue up 22% in 3Q. Alan Cox departs for Intel. Evolving open source business strategies. The commercialization opportunity around OpenOffice.org. And more.

Official announcements
Red Hat Reports Third Quarter Results Red Hat

OpenLogic Survey Highlights Enterprise Perspectives on Open Source Application Servers OpenLogic

Asianux Concludes Triumphant Year, Welcomes Fifth Member Asianux

News articles
The future of open source …

Background Knowledge

With the use of Samba we are able to share files through a local network and make it appear as if the files are on the Mac OS X locally. The instructions below will step you through step by step on how to access files from the Mac OS X to a Windows XP/Vista™ system through the network.

NOTE: Instructions to unblock network traffic through a software/hardware firewall are not provided. Refer to your software/network manual or support web site for details.

NOTE: These instructions will not allow for sharing via the Internet.

Solution

Setting up a file share in Windows XP

1. Open Windows Explorer/My Computer (press Windows Key+E) or go to the Windows Start Menu -> Programs -> Accessories -> Windows Explorer.
2. Browse to a folder you wish to share and right mouse click on it and left mouse click on “Properties”. …

This post is for people who are trying to roll back unwanted modifications to their MySQL database.

You cannot use the binary logs to undo unwanted changes to your data. The binary logs are for redoing statements, not undoing them. If you have a backup, you may be able to restore the backup and [...]