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 …

Constraints are simultaneously one of my most favorite and least favorite Oracle Database features. They're great for keeping bad data out of the database. They're a terrible imposition on object-oriented, agile, or <insert your favorite buzzword here> coding style. They save a ton of repetitive coding, writing the same logic in different languages. Hey, we already wrote all that redundant code

I have been doing some studying on the internet in my free time (not that I have too much of that nowadays) and I stumbled upon the Unix Philosophy. This is a philosophy, not method, for building programs and systems.
As I went through the rules, I found something interesting. I'll paste it here:
Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data, so program logic can be stupid and robust.

Even the simplest procedural logic is hard for humans to verify, but quite complex data structures are fairly easy to model and reason about. To see this, compare the expressiveness and explanatory power of a diagram of (say) a fifty-node pointer tree with a flowchart of a fifty-line program. Or, compare an array initializer expressing a conversion table with an equivalent switch statement. The difference in transparency and clarity is dramatic. See Rob …

Years ago Percona created the microslow patch, allowing greater granularity as well as additional detail to be captured in the slow query log. Brilliantly useful!

Just one problem, and for OurDelta we've been pondering how it can best be resolved: the original patch changes long_query_time to mean microseconds (millionths of a second) rather than seconds, so an existing config file would have to be modified.

One possible solution, which is currently in a branch preparing for the next OurDelta (d7) build, checks the input value and if it's <600 it presumes seconds were specified and multiplies accordingly. This works both from cmdline/my.cnf as well as when using SET. …

OpenSQLCamp is coming close and it is your last change to register.

I'm very excited about this event as it looks to be marketing free community gathering, having much fewer attendees but many of them are well known MySQL Professionals. Besides hopefully in depth sessions this promises a lot of good informal chats.

Also as this event is free for attendees consider chipping in by Sponsoring some of event expenses.

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I've blogged before about the new SQL synthax which is becoming available in databases and how it helps solving questions which are increasingly common.Now it's time for another example, something which doesn't come up often in a reporting environment as most tools have this feature, but can be a problem if you're building your output with a scipting language.Adding a "Total" row at the end of

Very very interesting, if this article indeed a true account of what happened and the new situation. Quote:The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) in Washington DC has decided that in the future, instead of automatically granting a patent for a business practice, there will be a specific testing procedure to determine how patentable is that process.

The decision is a nearly complete reversal of the court's controversial State Street Bank judgement of 1998, which started the stampede for patenting business practices.Perhaps in that brave new world, startup-wannabees will focus on actually getting something to market? That'd be great!

Update: Australian-based Brendan Scott of Open Source Law has written about this also: …

When I was in Japan I sat down and spoke with ~40 folks from the Japanese community on Drizzle. Japan easily has more hackers who go into the MySQL code base then any other single country (I am talking about people who hack storage engines/optimizers/etc). There is a lot of good stuff in Japan that just never makes it out of country (I'll blog about two storage engines who came out of Japan in a later blog entry). We have had number of patches that have come from folks in Japan, and I am hoping to see that grow!

Here is a couple of blog entries from folks who went to the meeting :

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Kiske/20081031/1225465597

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Voluntas/20081101/1225518072

EnterpriseDB CTO Bob Zurek was kind enough to have me on the his Database Radio program, with the audio feed here and the transcript here (PDF), which proved to be fun to record and hopefully an enlightening listen.

Bob asked me to name the top trends in open source. Here'...

We are almost there. Four days more, and then it's over. The CfP for the MySQL Users Conference 2009 ends on November 5th, 2008.

We have already received more proposals than we got last year, and (yes!) many of them are innovative.

Thanks to all the submitters.

I have still a few wishes, though.

There are still no proposals or very little on

• The event scheduler
• OpenOffice integration
• Java
• The plugin architecture
• MySQL Proxy

If you have a technical story to tell about one of the subjects above, don't be shy, and come forward!

And of course, if you have some innovative ideas on any topic related to MySQL, feel free to submit a proposal.