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…

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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 …

I'm sitting in the back of the training room in Brisbane, following Sebastian Bergmann on the first day of his Quality Assurance in PHP Projects workshop. He is of course the right man for that job, since he wrote PHPUnit.

I have to run off after lunch to catch my flight to Adelaide (SAGE-AU 2008 Conference), where I'll be doing a tutorial on MySQL Backup and Replication strategies, and a session on managing e-mail and task overload ;-)

Here are three short routines that raise tough questions. I’ll bet that many MySQL stored-procedures experts will fail to answer all three.

Question 1. The Ambiguous Identifier

Given one table and one stored procedure:
DELIMITER //
CREATE TABLE t (x INT)//
INSERT INTO t VALUES (1)//
CREATE PROCEDURE p ()
BEGIN
DECLARE x INT DEFAULT 2;
SELECT x FROM t;
END//
CALL p()//
Notice that x is both a column and a variable.
MySQL will return
(a) ‘1′ because that’s the value of column x.
(b) ‘2′ because that’s the value of variable x.
(c) an error message because x is ambiguous.
?

Question 2. The same-level handler

Given one table and one stored procedure:
DELIMITER //
SET @@sql_mode=”//
CREATE TABLE t (x SMALLINT)//
CREATE PROCEDURE p ()
…

I was just reading Sheeri’s post Why You Want to Switch to MySQL 5.1, and my favorite 5.1 feature jumped out at me.

Online, table-based logging.

It doesn’t get a lot of press, which is sad, because it’s hella useful. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve showed up to a client’s site to help with performance tuning, started with “well, let’s look at the slow log” and (as I’m sure we all know) been foiled by the fact that they don’t have it on and can’t do a server restart. I was even at a client a couple of weeks ago where they were actually using the CSV engine support of this… although I’d never really found that all that interesting myself.

Online logging. It’ll make all the ($gender_of_sexual_preference) love you!

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