The two big developments in the SQL world this summer are the pending arrival of the SQL:2008 ANSI standard, and my (Peter Gulutzan’s) attendance on Sun’s behalf at an ANSI meeting. Okay, I concede that the events have unequal importance, but sometimes I slip in a bit about personal involvements.

What’s a standard?

Review: ANSI (which stands for “INCITS Technical Committee H2 on Database”), and its counterparts in many other countries, produce official standards for many things, including SQL. The international co-ordinating body is ISO (International Organization for Standards), so there’s an ANSI standard and an ISO standard, and they’re practically the same. There’s a partially-restricted site containing ISO papers here.

The current edition is ANSI/ISO SQL:2003. But SQL:2008 is only a few days or weeks away. I’m taking a risk here by …

On Thursday, July 17 there will be a web based seminar on MySQL Workbench. 

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 architect and you usually work with data models this tool is going to make your life easier and you will learn some interesting features. In the meantime, to better understand the product, take have a look at http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/, where you can download a copy of the community version, read blogs, contribute, discuss and learn.

Happy data-modeling!

On Thursday, July 17 there will be a web based seminar on MySQL Workbench. 

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 architect and you usually work with data models this tool is going to make your life easier and you will learn some interesting features. In the meantime, to better understand the product, take have a look at http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/, where you can download a copy of the community version, read blogs, contribute, discuss and learn.

Happy data-modeling!

I actually wrote about this a bit in a comment on Paul's blog, but thought it time to re-hash the issue since it came up again during a friendly discussion at work (PostgreSQL was mentioned :)

Why doesn't MySQL have an custom field types? Or perhaps I should call them complex field types, but either way, why no love for anything but primitive strings and numbers?

Take an IP address, for instance. It is an unsigned 32-bit integer. Yes, we can store it in its raw form and use the INET_NTOA() and INET_ATON() functions. The problem seems to be, however, that many people don't use those functions and opt to use a varchar() instead. Ugly, wasteful, and, in some cases, slow; but simple. The INET_* functions work well, and, while you can mask this behind VIEWs and stored procedures, it seems to make things more complex and …

It turns out that there is a bug that causes replication on a 5.1 slave to fail when reading LOAD DATA statements from a 4.1-or-earlier master.

About a month ago, I set up a data warehouse for an old 4.1.21 system that can't be upgraded. I decided to use the latest 5.1 beta to take advantage of partitioning, but within the first day replication stopped rather suddenly and with a nondescript error:

[ERROR] Error running query, slave SQL thread aborted.
Fix the problem, and restart the slave SQL thread with
"SLAVE START". We stopped at log 'xxx' position xxx

Using mysqlbinlog, I compared the relay log and the masters binary log around that position, and noticed the relay log appeared corrupt! I don't recall the exact steps I took, but I isolated the problem to a LOAD DATA INFILE statement, and filed my first issue with MySQL Enterprise support.

The great folks at MySQL Support had a …

With my continued investigation of evaluating alternative data management with cloud computing options, I’m now evaluating Amazon Simple DB. Still in restricted beta, it helps to have a friend on the inside.

Working through the Getting Started Guide (API Version 2007-11-07) was ok, annoying in parts. Here are some issues I found. I was working with Java as the programming language.

• The Docs enable you to view the language syntax in Java, C#, Perl, PHP, VB.NET, ScratchPad. You can also restrict the view to a specific language. A rather cool feature. One observation is there is no Python, which is rather ironic as my first investigation was …

I just posted slides from a talk I gave at a Facebook application developer conference in Las Vegas this weekend. The talk is titled Outrun the Lions. Our customers run several of the top 10 applications on Facebook right now (as measured by the number of active users), and I revealed the secrets to building applications that can handle the load.

The title is a pun on the story about lions and gazelles in Africa (every day, a gazelle wakes and knows it must outrun the fastest lion; every day a lion awakes and knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle). If you're a Facebook application developer, the lion is not your competition. It's your users. They will love you if you do a good job. They will love you so much that the load will destroy your application, and then they'll go away and they won't come back. (Another speaker at the …

I actually wrote about this a bit in a comment on Paul's blog, but thought it time to re-hash the issue since it came up again during a friendly discussion at work (PostgreSQL was mentioned :)

Why doesn't MySQL have an custom field types? Or perhaps I should call them complex field types, but either way, why no love for anything but primitive strings and numbers?

Take an IP address, for instance. It is an unsigned 32-bit integer. Yes, we can store it in its raw form and use the INET_NTOA() and INET_ATON() functions. The problem seems to be, however, that many people don't use those functions and opt to use a varchar() instead. Ugly, wasteful, and, in some cases, slow; but simple. The INET_* functions work well, and, while you can mask this behind VIEWs and stored procedures, it seems to make things more complex and …

I have a somewhat strange relation to parser since a while. Like everyone I started with writing little parsers by hand and bounced several times against yacc and flex failing to get around their very own syntax.

Then I discovered lemon and used it in lighttpd for the configuration and HTTP parsing, finally a parser syntax I could read. But it still was a split between lexing and parsing.

Along the the way there was ragel with its wonderful dot-output to visualize its state-engine, very neat and a mixed lexer and parser.

2-3 weeks ago I finally stumbled over LPEG and I'm happily writing parsers now. Like a simple one that can parse complex SELECT queries and …

Mit einer der nächsten Versionen von XAMPP ist eine Überarbeitung der Demo-Seiten geplant. Die sind nun auch schon 6 Jahre alt und schreien förmlich nach einer Auffrischung.

Und damit wir uns nicht nur von unseren persönlichen Vorlieben leiten lassen, suchen wir nun für eine Befragung zu deren Usability freiwillige Teilnehmer.

Vielen Dank an alle Teilnehmer und ganz besonders an Karin Kunkel, Sonja Uhl und Constanze Weiland, die diese Umfrage für uns durchführen.