A user recently asked: What kind of approaches and techniques can you employ to become familiar with an existing database if you are tasked with supporting and/or modifying it? How can you easily and effectively ramp up your knowledge of a database you have never seen before?Here was my reply:The first thing I do is create an Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD). Sometimes you can

If you are trying to transfer your connection details for Query browser or Administrator from one computer to another then follow the instructions described in this tutorial.

You may need to know about your kernel version number to install some software on your machine. You can use the instructions described in this tutorial to find the kernel version number.

PHP provides several functions that depend upon the version number of PHP you are running. In situations, where you want to find the version number of PHP installed, you can use the following techniques.

Symfony is one of the best rapid application development frameworks available for PHP. In this tutorial I am going to discuss the installation steps for Symfony.

As a long time DBA and Database Architect this idea is repugnant – make a database 100% de-normalized; one table and except for the one query, retrieval by primary key, nothing else works.  And yet we have had great success using this kind of database.

This does not replace the original normalized database, rather it is more like a permeant cache fed from the main database.  It is a MySQL database which has certain advantages over Memcached or other true caches such as it is permanent until our processes replace it.

Consider what it might take to build a simple web page: get a request, process it which might take many queries and some significant processing then send back your html.

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Many, if not all, corporations control and monitor employees web surfing and email activities. Sometimes a company may choose to use automatic configuration script to enable employees’ web connection. This can be verified by:

• Internet Explorer: Tools -> Internet Options-> LAN Settings -> “Use automatic configuration script”;
• Firefox 3: Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings… -> Automatic proxy configuration URL:

Sometimes you need to know a proxy server name or IP address. For instance, if you use Perl and would like to do an automatic binary install of a module, then you will need to define a proxy for cpan to use. This is the command to do that:

set HTTP_proxy=http://my.proxy.server:8000/

So obviously you need to know a proxy server name or IP address. To find that out, you need to copy the location where the automatic configuration script is …

Gerv, Frank, Mark and I have been discussing ideas around how people can turn open source experience into an asset for their resume. We’ve got some of our own ideas, but we want yours as well. Please blog, comment, email or ‘dent any one of us, or catch up with Gerv and Mark at FOSDEM.

My top three tips for making the best of your open source participation are:

1. Free your work and free yourself. Turn software into a platform for your career by contributing to free and open projects and by releasing your own work under free software and open source licenses. In addition to the well-understood collaborative benefits, you get to keep using …

A year ago this past week (on January 16, 2008), Sun Microsystems announced a historic deal to acquire MySQL AB for a billion dollars. Since then, MySQL-ers (aka Sun Dolphins) have settled in with Sun folks. While Sun has had an influence on MySQL, MySQL has also had an influence on several projects within "Sun Classic". Over this week, we hope to explore some of the projects around Sun which use MySQL and how the acquisition has helped bring us all closer together.

Today we talk to Neelakanth Nadgir in the Sun/MySQL Performance Team about MySQL and ZFS, the revolutionary file system included with Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems from Sun.

I was just talking to someone who backs up their MySQL servers once a day with mysqldump, and I said in a catastrophe, you’re going to have to reload from a backup; that’s some amount of downtime, plus up to a day of lost data.

And they said “We can just promote a slave, we’ve done [...]