Friday, 28/03/2008, is when the Sun-NUS Open Source Day occurs, from noon-6pm. If you’re in Singapore, I can highly recommend you attending. Pre-register now, if you’d like.

Come see me, talk about how you can contribute to MySQL. Especially in a time when students in Singapore will find it useful, to learn, seeing that the Summer of Code applications are in its last lap.

Its at the National University of Singapore. I understand that there might be a DTrace User Group meeting sometime in the evening (i.e. post-6pm). I’ll definitely be at that, or other events if necessary.

I’m reachable at +6-012-204-3201, preferring to get an SMS instead of a call (roaming costs a bit).

See you Friday afternoon!

The agenda (which I can’t seem to find easily online, is pasted here for posterity):
12:00pm …

At 8AM PST I will be doing a MySQL University session on Amazon's Web Services.

There is an IRC channel up on Freenode, #mysql-university for discussion.

Follow my Twitter stream for more details:
http://twitter.com/brianaker

Audio details will be published on IRC and here:
http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Instructions_for_Attendees

Slides are here:
http://download.tangent.org/talks/AWS.pdf

This is more of an intro talk, so don't expect too much as far as amazing reflections on it :)

Just pondering alphabet soup on the way home...

Linux -> EC2
Mysql/Memcached -> S3/SimpleDB/Queue
Apache/Asterisk -> HTTP/Mechanical Turk
PHP/Perl/Python -> REST

The shift is from a defined technology to mode of operation. I could replace operation with service, but frankly the word is overused at the moment.

The above also focuses the attention on Amazon, when really it is about meeting a need. It just so happens that Amazon at this point has the lead.

Google is skipping the service business and building applications at this point (aka value add).

Why just store data when you could instead turn it into a spreadsheet?

Google Apps is damn sexy for a company just starting out. Once they roll out their Contacts App which eats away SaleForce and then sucker punches QuickBooks they become a one stop shop.

Amazon …

The 451 Group just published a "glass half empty" assessment of the open-source database market. One big takeaway? Open-source databases are widely used, but not yet deeply used.

One of the key findings is that open source software has had a superficial impact on the enterprise database market in that ...

I’ve always been a big proponent of data modeling and using modeling tools to create physical database designs (as an aside, I’ve never been much on logical modeling), so I’m naturally happy about our upcoming MySQL Workbench tool.  During my DBA years, I basically lived in my modeling tools and used them all the time for many different purposes.  I’ve just written a new dev zone article that talks about why modeling is important for creating high-performance databases, and how you can use modeling tools for change management/control purposes and how doing this can keep you from getting burned when DB changes go bad.  Check out the article and let me know what you think.

After seeing some very good "of-the-day" series, I thought why should MySQL variables be left behind. So, my contribution in the race - "variable's day out". I won't brand it "of-the-day" series as it calls for too much of dedication and given my track record I shouldn't promise that. Henceforth, instead of calling a variable lucky enough for a day, lets call a day lucky enough for a variable. Though I will try my best to keep the lucky days rolling.

Today's variable is delay_key_write. Properties:

Since ages, I was busy with many projects including my marriage. Nice to be back on the blog with an update on MyEye - the project I announced in my very first post.

MyEye is an (or is going to be an) open source monitoring tool for MySQL installations with handy knowledge-base and advisories for MySQL DBAs.

So, I'm done with the first round of analysis and design for MyEye. As far as it is planned, it's going to be a framework that would provide interface for people to write their own monitoring rules. Meanwhile MyEye web site is also under construction and I will be publishing the documentation soon there.

Will be looking forward to your contributions for creating an open knowledge base for MyEye.

Today’s question comes courtesy of Diego Medina.

I’m still looking for new entries. I get quite a few suggestions, but not all of them make it into quiz questions. Do send in your suggestions!

When using a 1-byte character set like Latin-1, a VARCHAR(250) field requires 251 bytes of storage. A VARCHAR(260) field requires 262 bytes of storage. Why?
(more…)

If you want to filter a query for further usage, you need first to identify the query as the one to process, and then you need to isolate the elements to use for the task.

Both needs can be satisfied using the Lua string.match(string,pattern) function. Since Lua is an object orieneted language, this function can also be used as stringvar:match(pattern).

Let's see an example. We need to do something with with the UPDATE statements to the employees table.

function read_query( packet )
   if packet:byte() ~= proxy.COM_QUERY then
       return
   end
   local query = packet:sub(2)
   local cmd, table_name = query:match('^(%w+)%s+(%w+)')
   if cmd and cmd:lower() == 'update' then
       print( 'updating table ' .. table_name)
       if table_name == …