Apart from a new project manager, the Sun acquisition also gifted our beloved little project with three Sun engineers from DBTG. I will spare the reader personal chagrin and preemptively counter the reflexive incantation of Brooke's Law by stating up front that, in the case of Falcon, you would be wrong. "Mythical Man-Month" my ass, we needed the help.

Naturally, we don't want just anyone hacking Falcon (yes, we're open source, but we have to ship for heaven's sake), and so we didn't get just anyone, we got three top-notch engineers each of whom bring something to the table.

(Free idea: "Heaven's Sake", a tangy Japanese alcoholic beverage made from fermented rice, available at select wine shops near you.)

Olav Sandstaa, Senior Software Engineer

Here is Olav's official bio: "Olav has developed database systems for …

Strong start. Zero follow-up. Let's get this going again, shall we?
It's been a busy five months since the last post, so here's an overview of what we've been up to:

May: New Falcon Engineers
Synergy happens. Details in the next post.

May: Falcon Meeting in London
Big news from Jim. Training for the new folks. Details to follow.

June: Falcon 6.0.5 Alpha
Team is busy with bug fixes trying to keep the release train rolling.

July: Falcon Meeting in Boston
Got the band back together, this time on our turf.

August: Falcon 6.0.6 Alpha
Another busy month of bug fixing. Feature complete, finally. Some performance stuff, too.

September: MySQL/Sun Meeting in Riga
All-hands engineering meeting, very productive for Falcon. Details to follow.

Here's the HP Oracle Database Machine talked about in Larry's keynote. On the way out, some audience members said they were drooling over it. I don't know if that's a good idea; didn't see anything about moisture resistance in the tech specs.I noticed that the box was about the same height as Larry. In the same way we talk about pizza boxes, 5U vs. 10U servers, etc., will we one day measure the

While resorting emails, I found one from someone at Bungee Connect that I met at some conference a while ago. He asked me to take a look at something called "Bungee Connect SQL Admin"

It looks decent, but I don't know what it does that phpMyAdmin doesnt do, and I don't much care for having to trust some random other-hosted service with firewall access and passwords into my own databases.

But it is a SaaS, thus avoiding installation and upgrading costs.

Maybe it will be useful to someone.

Counting inventory should be pretty straightforward, but it doesn't have to be. In early versions of opentaps, it was handled by this block of minilang (an XML scripting language from the ofbiz framework) from the ofbiz product application:

        <set from-field="parameters.productId" field="lookupFieldMap.productId"/>


        <if-compare field-name="parameters.locationSeqId" operator="equals" value="nullField">
            <set from-field="nullField" field="lookupFieldMap.locationSeqId"/>
        </if-compare>

        <if-compare field-name="parameters.useCache" operator="equals" value="true" type="Boolean">
            <find-by-and entity-name="InventoryItem" map-name="lookupFieldMap" list-name="inventoryItems" use-iterator="true" use-cache="true"/>
            <else>
                <find-by-and entity-name="InventoryItem" …

      select
title, from_date, to_date
from titles
where emp_no in
(select emp_no
from employees
where first_name = 'Mary'
      and last_name = 'Sluis'
)

The result, in MySQL 5.1.28 is

+-------+------------+------------+
| title | from_date  | to_date    |
+-------+------------+------------+
| Staff | …

So you want to store URLs in MySQL, and the URLs have those annoying %20%27%7C%26%5E%2B%2D%25 symbols? And you want to be able to show your users some kind of human-readable information. You might want to consider using this trick. Take this list of commonly escaped characters as an example:

%20 - space
%27 - '
%7C - |
%26 - &
%5E - ^
%2B - +
%2D - -
%25 - %

So, how about we do some search’n’replace on that?

mysql> SET @url:='%20%27%7C%26%5E%2B%2D%25';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT @url as original,
    ->        REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(
    ->        REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(
    ->        @test,'%20',' '),
    ->        '%27','\''),
    ->        '%7C','|'),  -- REPLACE() is case sensitive
    ->        '%7c','|'),  -- so we have 
    ->        '%26','&'),
    ->        '%5E','^'),
    ->        '%5e','^'),  -- to …

Welcome to the 116th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

This was the week of Oracle Open World (OOW), Oracle’s gigantic annual get-together in San Francisco — always the heaviest week in Oracle blogs, so let’s start there.

For day-by-day coverage of OOW on the ground, I recommend Doug’s Oracle Blog: OOW Day 1, OOW Day 1.5, OOW Day 2, …

I gave a webinar several weeks ago about Grazr's infrastructure, lessons we learned about scaling and over-building. One thing that I noticed a lot of interest in was how we used Sphinx to not only improve our search, but releive the database of FULLTEXT indices, which were a performance issue for us.

The purpose of these posts are to give you an idea of how Sphinx works, any limitations it has, and how you can use for both search functionality, as well as freeing your database from having to use FULLTEXT. I think Sphinx is a great project, and want to share info that can help promote its use.

There is a lot of information on Sphinx to share, so I'm going to make this a multiple post, in parts. I'm already working on a book, and Sphinx information could be a small book of its own!

Grazr overview, from FULLTEXT to Sphinx

Grazr is a company who derives it's searchable content from …