Sometimes, the small things make all the difference. Last month, a friend of mine that works at Intel asked me how to do something seeming easy – concatenate the rows eliminated during a GROUP BY and present them in a column of their own. This is actually something typical when trying to do all sorts of reports, and just makes thing easier for everyone.
The answer? GROUP_CONCAT of course. This could have been easy. Alas, they were working with SQL Server 2005, which does not have such a function.
Now, all of the above isn’t exactly news – there are tons of articles and blog posts about it on the web. Some give you the code for special UDFs and some give you solutions that use cursors. A 3 year old post by Xaprb suggests using local variables.
I suggest a different approach based on a “hack” which utilizes the new …

Creating MySQL Backups With AutoMySQLBackup

AutoMySQLBackup is a shell script that lets you take daily, weekly and monthly backups of your MySQL databases using mysqldump. It can back up multiple databases, compress the backups, back up remote databases, and email the logs.

My prayers have been answered.

We have found a worthy replacement for Jay Pipes: Dups.

• Dups joined MySQL in July 2007.
• Dups until recently was in the MySQL Web Team, and has joined us now.
• Dups comes from Canada (Newfoundland).
• Dups even lives in Canada (Montreal).
• Dups will roam the North American continent to serve the MySQL community, to learn from it, to explain Sun to the community, and to explain the community to Sun.
• Dups is sometimes mistaken for Colin Charles, because of similarities in physical appearance.
• Dups has a somewhat challenging name, Duleepa Wijayawardhana.

I’m very happy we got Dups as our Jay clone, because

• Dups is a MySQL user since last century.
• Dups knows MySQL very well.
• Dups is an excellent communicator: he structures his thoughts clearly and writes an enjoyable …

Exit Jay, whom we will miss dearly. He was the first person that I met in the MySQL community who went to work for the company. That's when I started thinking that maybe I could become an employee as well. …

Busy next few days: Sun Systems Tour in Jakarta, Indonesia on November 5, then MyGOSSCON 2008 on November 6.

For the Sun event, there’s a corporate slide deck - MySQL from Sun: The Platform for the Web Economy. For the MyGOSSCON event I’ll be speaking about MySQL Best Practices.

If you’re in Jakarta and free on November 5, don’t hesitate to say hi. Similar invite for MyGOSSCON, though I don’t actually know if its open to all.

In the great words of Douglas Adams and in response to Jay's "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish", the world does not quite end as Jay removes his Community Manager hat and puts on those coveralls to work on pouring code out of Drizzle. Sadly for you all, Giuseppe and Kaj in a fit of nothing short of madness chose yours truly to take over from Jay -- I was thinking that perhaps Kaj might have been suffering from some altitude sickness when the emails reached him.

Stepping into Jay's position is nothing short of climbing the beanstalk and discovering that …

Last week I attended the International PHP Conference 2008 in Mainz in Germany. The conference was well prepared and I would like to say thanks to organizers. There was just one thing, which could be better. It was raining for all my stay, but this nobody can influence:).

As I expected, almost nobody from the attendees knew the PHP support in NetBeans or NetBeans itself. PHP support in NetBeans is still new and the first version of the PHP support will be released with NetBeans 6.5, probably next week. Because our tool is still new for PHP developer, no surprise for me. I met probably less people than I have fingers, who knew NetBeans. Sun was one of the Gold sponsors and during opening ceremony the audience was asked whether there is someone who knows the PHP support in NetBeans. I think that there was  6 people who put up hand.

On Wednesday I had one session, where I did demonstration of features that are available in …

Update: Sun has expanded its Cloud Computing portfolio with the recent acquisition of Qlayer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds.  The Q-layer organization, based in Belgium, is now part of Sun's Cloud Computing business unit which develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

Cloud computing is about managing petascale data. Sun's server and storage systems can radically improve the data-intensive computing emerging in the cloud. Some clouds are closed platforms that lock you in. Sun's open source philosophy and Java principles form the core of a strategy that provides interoperability for large-scale computing resources. Sun's virtualization solutions for advanced …

Update: Sun has expanded its Cloud Computing portfolio with the recent acquisition of Qlayer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds.  The Q-layer organization, based in Belgium, is now part of Sun's Cloud Computing business unit which develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

Cloud computing is about managing petascale data. Sun's server and storage systems can radically improve the data-intensive computing emerging in the cloud. Some clouds are closed platforms that lock you in. Sun's open source philosophy and Java principles form the core of a strategy that provides interoperability for large-scale computing resources. Sun's virtualization solutions for advanced …

Thanks to everybody who responded to microslow patch - backwards compatibility. After some more poking around in the code, I've managed to resolve the issue and it now both eats and displays fractional seconds. That means that on input it's now backwards compatible with a stock MySQL build. And it can now also accept say 0.05 (for 50 milliseconds, if I have my zeros right ;-)

You can find the branch containing the new patch here.

The full updated functionality is documented at http://ourdelta.org/docs/microslow and will be included in the next upcoming OurDelta build (d7), so that we may forget …