I have a lot of interaction with publishing types. I write a lot, and I edit some, and I do tech reviews and stuff for some publishers, and I co-authored a book, and I’ve worked on two magazines, and a newspaper, and I’m generally fascinated by the technical book market and stuff like that. I’m also someone who is lucky enough that his job is also his hobby. I work in technology, and am always doing something technology related at home in my spare time. Needless to say, I read tons upon tons of technical books.

I almost never post book reviews, in spite of the fact that I read all of these books. Why? Well, to be honest, I couldn’t tell you. It just hasn’t occurred to me to write a book review. Could be because I don’t really value book reviews too much myself I guess. I mean, if there’s a really obvious consensus across a huge number of reviews, I might be swayed. But in general, I find that book reviews are too often the …

After I moved back to Europe and Malta in order to set up our operations here, I was approached by a old friend of mine who wanted to know how to add a UNIQUE constraint and remove duplicates on a table, while keeping the newest records. He had been trying with ALTER TABLE but ran into problems as the older values were taken.

So, to help him out, I first solved it based on his original idea, and then figured I would post a small note about the solution here.

So, let’s say we have the following structure . . .

sql01 blogs> SHOW CREATE TABLE post1164\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
       Table: post1164
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `post1164` (
  `a` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `b` varchar(5) DEFAULT NULL,
  `c` varchar(5) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`a`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=7 …

Find out whether management at Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM think that open source is a threat or an opportunity. READ MORE

This includes the end of support for all things PHP 4 as noted by seemingly everybody on php planet. But I also wanted to reminds people that the same is more or less happening in the MySQL world too. Did you know that active support for MySQL 4.x ended along with the year 2006? Did you even know that MySQL 5.0 active support is ending this year!?! Given MySQL 5.1 no show mentality, they might have to review this. Well there is of course extended support that extends MySQL 4.0 support until this year, MySQL 4.1 until the end of next year and MySQl 5.0 until the end of 2011.

This includes the end of support for all things PHP 4 as noted by seemingly everybody on php planet. But I also wanted to reminds people that the same is more or less happening in the MySQL world too. Did you know that active support for MySQL 4.x ended along with the year 2006? Did you even know that MySQL 5.0 active support is ending this year!?! Given MySQL 5.1 no show mentality, they might have to review this. Well there is of course extended support that extends MySQL 4.0 support until this year, MySQL 4.1 until the end of next year and MySQl 5.0 until the end of 2011.

It’s time again for another edition of the weekly review of database blogs, Log Buffer. Since it was a big week for SQL Server, let’s start there, shall we?

The big news — SQL Server 2008 is released, as reported by SqlServer-qa.net, in seven different versions. Aaron Bertrand introduces a new kid on the block: SQL Server 2008 Web Edition — “. . . designed for highly available Internet …

I'm off in few hours to attend DebConf 8 in lovely Mar del Plata, Argentina.  The only bummer is that its winter down there so this seaside resort is going to be a bit chlly and as a result Im not able to pack as light as I usually do.  That being said, getting away from the string of 100 degree days that we've been having here in Austin isn't such a bad thing.

I had a great time at DebConf 7 in Edinburgh, particularly since it was a homecoming of sorts for me.  This time its exciting since I've never been to Argentina before and have heard great things. Like last year, Sun is a Silver Sponsor of the event.

On the …

This is a continuation of my articles on how to select the desired rows from ranked data. A user recently posed a question in the comments that I thought was particularly intriguing:

What is the best way to query 1) Sum of min price of all types? 2) Sum of 2nd highest price of all types?

Sounds like fun! Let me start by saying the sum is the easy part. You can always do that like so:

select sum(price) from (
   -- find desired rows here
) as x;

Finding the desired rows is the hard part. In my previous articles I focused on extrema:

• The single biggest/smallest/extremest row in each group. (Pretty easy.)
• The N most extreme rows in each group. (Doable, but harder.)

In this article, we’re going to see how to get not the most extreme row, not the N most …

Me, Larry Augustin and a penguin. Film at 11:00. READ MORE

On Wednesday, September 17 there will be a web based seminar on MySQL 5.1. 

Seminar will be in Italian and anyone who is interested is invited to join us!

You can find details here.

If you are a database administrator or a developer and you are courious about new features coming with MySQL 5.1 then this is the right webinar to attend. In the meantime, to better understand MySQL 5.1, take have a look at "Inside MySQL 5.1" white paper.

See you soon!