Welcome to my Linux site, the Linux Bloke.

Donations are requested to help Andrii Nikitin, a MySQL support engineer in Ukraine, provide for his son Ivan who requires a bone marrow transplant operation. The cost of this operation is expected to be between €150,000 - €250,000 ($235,000 - $400,000). Please help us provide Ivan a chance to live.

phpguru.org is now aggregated (?) by PlanetMySQL. MySQL users may want to have a look at: MySQL TableEditor, PHP Datagrid for MySQL and a (much) quicker drop in PEAR::DB replacement. Or you may not - your choice.

Issue Five of MySQL Magazine just came out and it included the results from its Annual MySQL Usage Survey. Among a bunch of other cool information, it asked the question: “What is your favorite blog?” (Q26). The results were as follows:

The first interesting thing that I noticed was that the #1 [...]

phpguru.org is now aggregated (?) by PlanetMySQL. MySQL users may want to have a look at: MySQL TableEditor, PHP Datagrid for MySQL and a (much) quicker drop in PEAR::DB replacement. Or you may not - your choice.

I hear now about a new competition for the MySQL® Users. The ‘MySQL® 5.1 Use Case Competition’ has been just launched by the Community Team @ SUN|MySQL.

If you submit a MySQL® 5.1 Use Case Report to the Community Team by 31 August 2008 you will have a chance of winning:

• 1st-3rd prize: A MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius
• 4th-10th prize: MySQL® Community Contributor T-shirts
• 11th-20th prize: A Sakila mascot (MySQL®’s pet dolphin)

More information at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_5_1_Use_Case_Competition.

[Reminder for the Community Team: the page …

I’m back at my favorite spot at the Orlando airport:

This week has gone bye so fast it’s kinda scary.  I got dragged into one meeting after another design session after another knowledge transfer opportunity for 5 days in a row.  After our long working days, the discussions and talks just continued over dinner and beers.

It was great to meet everyone and as always we had a good time around the office and at the Ale House.  I even managed to stay sober this time around.  Well at least most of the time.

As always, the thing that struck me the most was how fast Pentaho changes.  It’s almost like visiting a different company every time I drop in.  Since I don’t see the day-to-day changes around the office, the difference between the first time I visited (15 people) and now (70+) is striking.  The office space occupied more than doubled for example.

Well, let me tell you, …

Revision: 8 - Last Update: September 03 2008

This is the first part of a series of short articles with a how-to approach about MySQL® Performance Monitoring, Tuning & Auditing. We will see the question from a GUI prospective. In particular we will describe which monitoring-oriented features HoneyMonitor, a GUI for MySQL® currently in alpha development, implements.

I will explain how HoneyMonitor let you

1. install an audit database on your server, without the need of using 3th Party Agents nor using remote repository databases
2. enable the auditing and start monitoring your server
3. tuning your server changing a few suggested list of variables to get better performance.

We will use only the 5.1.x series of the Server as we use some Scheduled Events and the Event Scheduler has been added only in the 5.1 branch. In particular we will use MySQL® 5.1.24-rc. We will also do some tests …

I have seen on many engagements the column data type is defined as INT(1).

People have the misconception that this numeric integer data type is of the length of one digit, or one byte. (One digit is 0-9 an one byte is 0-255)

This is incorrect.

Integer

For integer numeric data types in MySQL, that is TINYINT, SMALLINT, MEDIUMINT, INT, BIGINT the (n) has no bearing on the size of data stored within the specific data type. The (n) is simply for display formatting.

In the MySQL Manual 10.2. Numeric Types you read This optional display width is used to display integer values having a width less than the width specified for the column by left-padding them with spaces. The display width does not constrain the range of values that can be stored in the column, nor the number of digits that are displayed for values …

As of late yesterday, I once again look like the photo on the Open Sources blog masthead. (That's me on the right hand side with the glasses.) For those who may not have noticed, I was growing my hair for the past two years. As I explained to my boss Marten Mickos (and to the MySQL board), late last year, it wasn't a mid-life crisis. Rather, I was growing my hair to donate it to Locks of Love, a public non-profit organization that provides hairpieces to children in the US and Canada suffering from long term medical hair loss, often... READ MORE