One of my current MySQL Web Team projects involves the creation of a "Tag" system for the web site. The idea is quite simple, we have lots of different types of content and we want to be able to link it all together by tags. For example, a customer maybe tagged with a specific region or industry and same goes true for a white paper, case study, web page, image and so on.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to describe this tag system in more detail, but in creating some administration pages for it I had to use a bit of SQL that few people talk about. I thought, hey why not throw it out there in case someone is learning SQL and finds it useful. My standard disclaimer: There are many ways to skin a cat as they say, so this is just one take and feel free to post some suggestions. Also this example is not optimized nor performance tuned so you might want to test this carefully on a set of tables …

I just started a new blog on photography, in German. It’s based in http://blogs.arno.fi/foto/ and so far only has just four entries — one on a photo session with fashion photographer Riccardo Desiderio, one on my ensuing autumn portraits of my wife along the Isar here in Munich, one on fun underwater photography ( …

A typical scenario is when a master has a few dozen slaves, and instead of dealing with all of them directly, uses four relay slaves, each one dealing with 6 slaves.
So, where's the trick? The trouble comes if you change replication format after you start the slave.
Example. One master (M), two relay slaves (R1, R2), with four slaves each …

I was booked for keynoting the second MySQL Users Conference in Japan on 30-31 October 2008. Going to Japan is always something I’m looking forward to.

However, I won’t have that pleasure this time. I got requested to keynote a Sun partner event instead, on Tue 28.10.2008 at Kievits Kroon, just outside Pretoria in South Africa.

For Japan, I will be replaced by nobody other than David Axmark. I’m happy he gets the opportunity to do this keynote, transitioning from his current role to a consultant next month. I hope this also gives the press an opportunity to understand David’s motivations a bit better!

This blog is about OurDelta, my visit to PGDay (and resulting quest to search for a good nntp reader for OSX) and my long term search for a good set of bluetooth stereo headsets. So lets start with OurDelta. The other day Arjen pokes me about OurDelta. The idea is to offer a place for distribution of all those tasty MySQL patches that float around the web (like from Mark, the Google guys etc.), that simply do not fit in MySQL's research schedule. Obviously this is awesome. There are packages for all sorts of distros (I am sure Windows will come one of these days too), which takes away some of the scaryness for people not comfortable with building things themselves. Moreover you know that there are other people that are using the same binaries and I guess one of the key things that OurDelta could build is a better way to communicate about success and failure when using some of these patches.

…

This is a short post that might save someone some valuable time, if Google decides to rank it high enough.

I've tried to install a newer version of the MySQL Connector .NET, namely 5.2.3 instead of the old 5.1.3 I had installed.
When trying to install 5.2.3, I got this error message:


Apparently the connector does not support upgrades from 5.1.x to 5.2.x. We should just remove the old one.

Here lies the problem: when I tried removing the old 5.1.3, I got a weird error of which I took no screenshot. It consisted of a blank error message showing a computer screen with a icon of a moon on it. Something resembling a "sleep mode" icon. Huh?

…

To save Solaris from a certain death ?

Reading Planet MySQL the last couple of hours I'm trying really hard to convince myselve the Solaris offensive there is not orchestrated.. but I can't.
It might ofcourse be the fresh MySQL users that Sun brought in on their platform that started out blogging but hey .. I`m paranoia right :)

Are they really trying to get at least a fraction of the MySQL community on Solaris. Do they really think they can ? Yes they lost a zillion of Solaris customers that were running a proprietary database to MySQL on Linux users ,, but why would they want to move back to a semi proprietary setup ?

According to Linuxjournal Alan Cox seems to think that ZFS is the only thing that is keeping Solaris alive. I don't think DTrace was a bigg mass tool that would convince the crowds to suddenly move to an other operating system.

So is Sun trying to Lock In a community ? …

In MySQL, not all keywords are reserved words, and because of the way function parentheses are handled by default, function names aren't reserved words either.
Reserved words are nasty, as they can't simply be used for identifiers: database, table, and column names.
I say "can't simply" because you can of course backtick anything and use it as identifier, even stuff with spaces; but that doesn't mean you should ;-)

While working with the OurDelta (and earlier, Percona) builds, I found that the Google patch with the magic SHOW USER|CLIENT|TABLE|INDEX_STATISTICS commands actually produced all those *_STATISTICS keywords as reserved words (see this bug). It shows up easily in v2 of the patch that also makes this info available through INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables. You quickly find there that unless …

I just pushed up a new Drizzle branch at lp:~fallenpegasus/drizzle/newplugins

It contains two new plugin types, one for configuration interface, and one for query cache. Those two are not "plumbed in", and are in fact just templates, containing two dummy entry points with two dummy parameters. But they follow the evolving pattern for plugin types.

It also contains fixes and improvements for the logging and errmsg plugins. The logging engine implementation has parameters for filtering for slow queries and for "big queries", both ones that return a lot of rows, and ones that just examine a lot of rows.

It's all also been internationalized.

There is still lots of work to be done, but it's fun to get this foundation stuff going.

I just read that Toru has a branch he's been working on a query cache plugin interface as well, so we need to work together to stitch all our work …

Download Maatkit

The newest release of Maatkit contains mk-audit bug fixes, lots of new features for mk-table-checksum so you can check replication more frequently (see my earlier post about this), and more bug fixes for other tools.

Here’s the changelog:

Changelog for mk-audit:

2008-10-17: version 0.9.3

* mk-audit died if no /etc/*release file existed (issue 62). [...]