Malaysian Airlines has impressed me, yet again. Last week, in The Star, they reported that Sharul Isahak, a MAS employee, has helped save the airlines close to RM70 million (about USD$21 million), thanks to his use of open source software.

The software is meant to help airline maintenance, i.e. to keep track of parts and records of maintenance works. The web-based solution, is E-Promis (read the blog entry, its pretty interesting, as he takes you through the planning stages - it also seems like he’s still the only developer).

?This meant looking at open-source solutions. Instead of platforms such as Microsoft or Sun, we chose LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)?

I couldn’t help but grin …

A concise compilation of today's news of interest to TheAquarium readers:

Maatkit version 2152 is ready for download. This release is also known as the “is this project really alive?” release. We thought we should delay until MySQL released a new Community Server version. Just kidding – it has nothing to do with that.

At OSCON, Sun had a huge booth. I mentioned that before, and I was part of the show. During booth opening hours, members of all Sun communities (Open Solaris, Glassfish, OpenJDK, MySQL) addressed the audience with technical presentations.

I was very impressed by these two booklets that were given away to whomever wanted them. They are short, well written, with the sort of practical information that a beginner wants to find immediately.

It's nice to hold them, but books are heavy, especially if you are traveling 6,000 miles with hand luggage only. So it's very nice to find them in the OpenSolaris site.

• Getting started with OpenSolaris 2008.05
• …

Why do we continue to lust after Apple products when Apple treats us like two-year olds? READ MORE

Anybody out there know more that one language?

We’ve got gettext going in the drizzle source now, and although we don’t have all the strings marked yet, we do have a start, and it’s time to get going on translating!

If you’d like to help out, just head over to launchpad, pick a language and get going! You may want to go to your launchpad settings and pick your preferred languages first, though, else the list of offered languages might be a little odd.

I’m guessing the easiest ones will be “English (Australia), English (Canada) and English (United Kingdom)” … but I could be wrong…

…

I should be faster with publishing slides but things are how they are. The slides from my OSCON2008 talk are now published at Percona Presentation Pages.
Enjoy

Entry posted by peter | 4 comments

Add to: | …

In an effort to speed up my database updates, I've been looking for ways to batch some of my updates. CASE seems like the way to go:

mysql> create table bar(a tinyint, b tinyint);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)

mysql> insert into bar(a) values(1), (2), (3), (4), (5);
Query OK, 5 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 5  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql> select * from bar;
+------+------+
| a    | b    |
+------+------+
|    1 | NULL | 
|    2 | NULL | 
|    3 | NULL | 
|    4 | NULL | 
|    5 | NULL | 
+------+------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> update bar set b = case a
    ->   when 1 then 42
    ->   when 2 then 43
    ->   when 3 then 44
    ->   else 45
    ->   end;
Query OK, 5 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 5  Changed: 5  Warnings: 0

mysql> select * from bar;
+------+------+
| a    | b    |
+------+------+
|    1 |   42 | 
|    2 |   43 | 
|    3 |   44 | 
|    4 |   45 | 
|    5 | …

GlassFish and MySQL bundle was released a while ago and I finally got a chance to try it out. Here are simple instructions to get you started:

1. Download GlassFish and MySQL co-bundle zip from here.
2. Install the bundle (detailed docs)
   1. Create a temp directory and unzip the contents of bundle there. The contents are:
      
      

      -rw-r--r--   1 arungupta  arungupta   239703 Mar 19 02:57 3RD-PARTY-LICENSE.txt …