The latest from the MySQL community

Below are the Open Office Impress and PDF versions of the slide decks I will be giving tonight. Utah PLUG readers, these are those intermediate slides that have taken so long for me to clean up!

Join-fu: The Art of SQL - Part I   Open Office Impress slides
  PDF slides

Topics include:

• Schema optimization and vertical partitioning
• SQL Coding style guidelines
• Set-wise problem solving in SQL (and why it kicks for-loop-fu's ass.)
  • Rewriting correlated subqueries into joins
  • Using derived tables or subqueries in the FROM clause
• Working with N:M or "mapping" tables
  • Dealing with OR conditions
  …

There is some very big news going around that internet thing today: MySQL has switched from Bitkeeper to Bazaar. I wrote up a quick post on the Canonical blog about the same thing, and Giussepe Maxia has a nice technical post about how to get started working with the new system.

Here’s an excerpt from a mail I just sent to an internal Canonical list:

Bazaar and Launchpad are truly tools that matter, from a historical and social perspective. MySQL and other open source software run a huge percentage of the internet, and these tools preserve and enrich the body of knowledge that is in the public commons, knowledge that will be there for our …

I previously wrote about Clipperz because I really think Marco and the team at Clipperz have a great idea. To summarize, Clipperz has technology for "zero-knowledge web applications" which they have applied to an online password manager as a proof of concept. Marco writes: "We simply meant that Clipperz knows nothing about its users and their data! ... As a consequence of the "learn nothing" mantra, every zero-knowledge application should be completely anonymous, or at least it should make it impossible to relate the real name or email of a user to his data" It seems that Richard Stallman agrees... READ MORE

SQLyog 7.0 beta 1 is about to be released very soon (we are ‘polishing’ on details at the moment). This release includes completely new code for Data Synchronization that addresses user requests we have had since Data Synchronization was first introduced with SQLyog.

Probably we did not fully understand the needs of some users before. Users have told us

* It is not always desirable or possible to run the sync directly. Audit and access policies may prevent that. A SQL sync script is required in those situations.

* Also some users have wanted a detailed log for every (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE) operation - for simple documentation or for comparing - in various ways - sync operations between different executions.

* Some users wanted sync scripts for ‘differential backup’ purposes or for auditing purposes.

* Even some users wanted not necessarily to actually perform any sync at all - they only wanted a …

Just a quick note to let folks know I'll be doing a presentation on Join-Fu: The Art of SQL, tonight in Cincinnati. Thanks to Elizabeth Naramore for inviting me down to OINK-PUG (Ohio-Indiana-Northern Kentucky PHP User Group)!

I'll be covering both Beginning Join-Fu and Intermediate Join-Fu tonight. Topics covered include:

• Schema optimization and vertical partitioning
• SQL Coding style guidelines
• Set-wise problem solving in SQL (and why it kicks for-loop-fu's ass.)
  • Rewriting correlated subqueries into joins
  • Using derived tables or subqueries in the FROM clause
  …

Now that MySQL has switched its development to Bazaar, we can play a bit with the new tools. One thing that I have tried immediately upon adoption of the new RCS is to create a test bench for multiple MySQL versions by combining Bazaar and MySQL Sandbox.

If you are into bleeding edge testing, you may like to know how to get a new MySQL server up and running in a sandbox from a source tree.
First move - make the repositoryThis is a zero time consuming move, and you will have to do this only once. But this move will save you heaps of time in future. By …

I wasn't really looking for a new job a few months ago when I received an email from Eric Scheide (see Team Bios), the CTO at craigslist. He mentioned that they were looking for someone with MySQL experience and asked if I knew anyone. This sort of thing happens all the time.

But this time it was different. Over the course of about three seconds, something clicked in my little brain and I realized that craigslist is a pretty unique combination of things: a small company with a solid financial base, a great service that I use myself, a focused groups of people who really care about doing things well, and an open-source friendly environment.

I replied that I might be interested myself and things kind of took on a …

During the last month, MySQL code has been migrated from BitKeeper to Bazaar. Bazaar is a distributed, free revision control system sponsored and supported by Canonical, the company behind the fast-growing Linux distribution Ubuntu.

We have migrated all MySQL code trees that were available in BitKeeper. This means not just current GA and development versions of MySQL Server and MySQL Cluster, but also the history all the way back to MySQL 3.23.22 released about eight years ago. And we’ve also migrated non-MySQL-server FOSS applications to Bazaar, such as MySQL Workbench (formerly not in BitKeeper but in Subversion, also known as svn) and our internal QA suites.

…

I have put up a new version of the Dimensioning Toolkit.
Now, there is a particular version for MySQL Cluster 6.2 and MySQL Cluster 6.3.

The reason for this split is that the libraries and include files are in different locations (include/ and lib/ in 6.2, but lib/mysql and include/mysql in 6.3).
I don't know why the build team changes this between versions (even builds) and so often... very annoying.

Anyways, follow the links to download:

Dimensioning Toolkit for MySQL Cluster 6.2
Dimensioning Toolkit for MySQL Cluster 6.3

This blog posting has little to do with MySQL or Sun. It’s about experiences gathered while shuttling around the world as MySQL’s Ambassador to Sun, but it’s not about databases, it’s not about operating systems, nor computer languages: it’s about human languages, and how going beyond English provides a business advantage.

Let me try to grab your attention by first sharing my perhaps somewhat controversial conclusion:

English as a language of communication is much overrated. In an international setting, English may be sufficient for conveying meaning, but it has severe deficiencies when it comes to establishing a social relationship, to showing respect, to building trust, and to having fun.

For many years, I have attempted at learning how to say “thank you” and “please don’t smoke” and “where is …