By Giuseppe Maxia

The Data Charmer, a.k.a. The Wizard, is a free lance database consultant, with a long career in several IT fields. He is well known for his Perl and SQL expertise,although he is proficient in several other languages, such as C++, shell scripts, and Italian.

He has a split personality, one of which lives in virtual space and time, floating around UTC+1. The other (or the others, as there is a dispute about how many they are) is less documented and some people believe it to be fictional. He teaches Creative Biography at the University of Euphoria, CA (also known as Euphoric State).

G.M. Hello, D.C. Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. I'll start with a question that most people ask. Who are you?

D.C. This is not really a question I'm willing to answer. Besides, the answer would be misleading. In the Internet age, I can be several people at …

Adding An ODBC Driver For MySQL On Ubuntu

Sometimes you may find the need to develop cross platform applications which make use of a database. ODBC can be a solution to your portability needs, but unfortunately it is not as easy to set up an ODBC connection on Linux as it is on Windows. This tutorial attempts to shed some light on this process by guiding you towards adding an ODBC driver on Ubuntu. The process described below has been tested on Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 8.10.

Vadim wrote some time ago about how to find unused indexes with single query.

I was working on the system today and found hundreds of unused indexes on dozens of tables so just dropping indexes manually did not look fun. So I extended Vadim's query to generate ALTER TABLE statements automatically. I also made it to look only at tables which were accessed:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> SELECT concat('alter table ',d.table_schema,'.',d.table_name,' drop index ',group_concat(index_name separator ',drop index '),';') stmt FROM (SELECT DISTINCT s.TABLE_SCHEMA, s.TABLE_NAME, s.INDEX_NAME FROM information_schema.statistics s LEFT JOIN information_schema.index_statistics iz ON (s.TABLE_SCHEMA = iz.TABLE_SCHEMA AND …

Well I've been back for nearly a week already... happy New Year everybody! I am happy to note that Open Query business continued as normal while I was not around; delegation to capable co-workers is a great thing (I'll admit to checking in on things while in Europe, but that's about it - had a real holiday).

Barely back from the three weeks in Europe with my daughter (3 1/2 yrs old, she had a ball and good fun even on the very long 12+8 hrs flights), I'm packing for the annual Linux.conf.au which this year is in Hobart, Tasmania (that's still Australia).

Linux.conf.au 2009 features a two-day miniconference about open source databases, with MySQL and Drizzle abundantly represented. Monty Widenius (yes the one and only!) is coming this time, possibly thanks to me prodding his wife Anna about it many months …

Less than 48 hours after starting to scratch this itch, I have table functions working in my WL820 repository on Launchpad.It is pretty nifty:mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN Deep_Thought SONAME 'psm_example.so';Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.10 sec)mysql> CREATE FUNCTION test.FooAnswer() -> RETURNS TABLE(answer TEXT) -> NO SQL LANGUAGE Deep_Thought EXTERNAL NAME 'compute';Query OK, 0 rows affected (

At the hotel tonight playing around with adding some more stats for Waffle Grid.  I added memcached latency stats to the show innodb status:

———
MEMCACHED
———
Memcached puts    184434
Memcached hits    458
Memcached misses  183976
Memcached Get Total Latency 127 (us)
Memcached Get Recent Latency 127 (us)
Memcached Set Total Latency 6 (us)
Memcached Set Recent Latency 8 (us)

Debating whether or not I want to add disk read stats here as well ( which maybe fun ).  And since the “recent”  is really over the last 1000 calls, do I want to add the last 10 latencies?  something like :

Last 10 gets:  127,129,120,150,400,120,100,120,300,200

Last 10 sets:  9,9,12,15,20,12,10,12,7,8

It has some value in troubleshooting.  Anyone out their have an opinion?  would you …

the "f" parameter in the UNIX tail command stands for "follow". Probably you have used it for logfile monitoring, a fantastic feature!

Now you can do the same in a MySQL table, using HeidiSQL: Just click Tools > Auto-refresh > Active (or press Ctrl+F5) to start monitoring a table's data:



This feature has been implemented moments ago. Select Help > Check for updates in HeidiSQL or go here to get the latest build.

A while ago Dries wondered about Contributing back to Drupal .

Now Inuits is not a Webshop, we are an Open Source shop, so you won't see a zillion Drupal modules being contributed by us in the near future (albeit there are a couple) , we are company assisting other organisations in their adoption of Open Source, and Drupal is amongst the projects we care for. You'll notice code from us in the different other Open Source projects, including the Linux Kernel and other core infrastructure. And not all of it was code, there is a lot of published documentation, methodologies, bughunting and also spreading the words, or talking about our experiences around different topics such as MySQL Cluster and Drupal, or different alternatives to Monitor , or to Monitor MySQL etc ..

But we've been contributing in …

Wow, big wins for NetBeans (best IDE, best Java tool, best development utility (profiler), best mobility tool, best open source product) and MySQL Workbench (best database tool). This is particularly impressive for MySQL Workbench given that it's quite new. Congratulations!

http://www.developer.com/java/other/article.php/3795991

This may come as a complete shock based on the title of my website… but I have come to the conclusion that all DBA’s should be eliminated from all companies hierarchies. WHAT? Yep I do not think any company should employ a “DBA” ever again.

Before the mob comes and beats me up for heresy, Let me explain. The term and more specifically the job title “Database Administrator” is way to broad. More so then most titles in my opinion. In fact I feel it is an ancient description that does a disservice to most modern database professionals. I have seen titled DBA’s responsible for entire infrastructure stacks, and I have seen DBA’s who only know how to run SQL and perform backups. It hardly seems fair that all these folks end up lumped in together. I think we need better definitions and a somewhat common vocabulary to truly tell what sorts of tasks and responsibilities people have.