As Kaj announced a few days ago, there is a IRC session with Simon Phipps scheduled for March 6, at 14:00 UTC, 15:00 CET.
Don’t miss it. It’s a great occasion to ask questions, and to chat to a bunch of gurus in the same room, all at once in true URC tradition.
The IRC meeting with Bob Brewin has been rescheduled to Wednesday, March 12, at 17:00 UTC, 18:00 CET.

I didn’t get to attend many sessions at the Tech Days, as I was mainly meeting with people, or at the PostgreSQL on Solaris booth (figures someone from MySQL should’ve been there too). I had plenty of interesting conversations with Tom Daly; we met by chance since I had a blue MySQL shirt and he figured he’d be cheeky and offer me a PostgreSQL one.

I was going to take a photo with him today, but he called me from the airport last night to say he had to go back. Oh well.

Laurie Wong, and me

Instead, you get a photo of Laurie and me (MySQL cap, PostgreSQL on Solaris t-shirt). I’ll blog later about the sessions that I did attend - I wish I could’ve done so earlier but staying at the Sheraton in Darling Harbour, meant that there was no in-room Internet access. …

Short version (aka, Executive Summary)

If you try to run a 32bit program under 64bit Ubuntu, there is a chance you might see this misleading error message:

-bash: ./executable_filename: No such file or directory

What the shell is actually trying to say is "You can't run 32 bit applications here without installing support for 32 applications!".

Longer version

We purchased the Webyog's MONyog MySQL monitoring tool, after some trial version testing in a Windows environment. When trying to run it on one of our Ubuntu servers, I got this:

myuser@myserver:~/MONyog/bin$ ./MONyog-bin
-bash: ./MONyog-bin: No such file or directory

I checked again: the file was there, permissions were okay. Hmm. Why was bash saying the file wasn't there? Here it is! It's not like the error came from the …

Another quiz based on comments from aka fenixshadow:

Two identical tables with FOREIGN KEY constraints within the tables are created:

CREATE TABLE t (
  id INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
  type INT,
  pid INT,
  FOREIGN KEY (pid) REFERENCES t (id)
) ENGINE=INNODB;

CREATE TABLE t1 (
  id INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
  type INT,
  pid INT,
  FOREIGN KEY (pid) REFERENCES t1 (id)
) ENGINE=INNODB;

The tables are created, and then the following updates are done in table t:

INSERT INTO t VALUES (1,1, NULL);
INSERT INTO t VALUES (2,1, NULL);
UPDATE t SET pid  = 2 WHERE id = 1;

Satisfied that all the updates have completed successfully, we attempt to add the data in t to t1:

INSERT INTO t1 SELECT * from t;

But are greeted with:

ERROR 1452 : Cannot add or update a child row: a foreign key
constraint fails

Question 1: Why did …

A ''tipping point'' is a concept, product or idea that becomes a hot commodity that attracts everyone's attention, interest or inspiration. There are always specific reasons and factors that are not easily identifiable why one product becomes a tipping point and others do not. Products not considered a tipping point usually never become a tipping point and ofter never understand why they didn't

No, solidDB hasn't died. In fact, the fact that it's now free from IBM may actually turn it into an interesting open-source project.

But there are few, if any, near-term winners in the mess. Certainly not Solid's investors, who pumped nearly 100 million euros into the company only to sell it for (rumor has it) 20 million euros. Or so. In fact, the result was bad enough that one of Solid's venture investors went on the record to declare, "Sijoitus Solidiin ei vastannut sille asetettuja tavoitteita" ("The investment in Solid did not meet the objectives set for it."

...

A lot of people contact me asking if I’m looking for a job. (I have an unanswered email in my inbox right now.) People are looking desperately for qualified, knowledgeable MySQL professionals. There’s a critical shortage of people who can admin MySQL moderately well, much less at the guru level. If you are one of the many who are trying to hire a MySQL DBA, you should send your employees to the MySQL Conference and Expo.

If you are one of the few strange people who were wondering: yes, Sun made an offer to retain me as part of the MySQL team.  Yes, I accepted.

I like some things (a lot); I dislike some other things (a lot).  We’ll see how it goes.

I’m not sure how I will adapt to a large corporation, nor how a large corporation will adapt to me (not at all, I suspect).  I think I have too much entrepreneur in me to fall in love with them as an employer, but who knows.  They seem to be a generous corporation, at least compared to other large USA-based corporations, and regardless of motivation they are exploring some interesting avenues.

Change Is Stability, I’ve heard, so here’s to change.

Note: An inadvertent draft of this post went out in our RSS feed and was posted for about an hour on Tuesday. It was cloned from Q1 '07 and most of the data and information was wrong.

In this fourth post (one, two and three are found here) on the State of the Computer Book Market, we will look at programming languages and drill in a little on each language area.

Overall the 2007 market for programming languages was down (1.67%) in 2007 when compared with 2006. There were 1,809,695 units sold in 2006 versus 1,779,523 units sold in 2007 which is (30,172) …

Installing the MySQL GUI tools are pretty easy on Linux (Fedora - 2.6.18-1.2798.fc6) but there are a few prerequisites for setting them up. The following listed RPMs are required. I did a google search and then performed a quick download of them. libsigc++20-2.0.6-1.i386.rpmglibmm-2.4.7-1.rhfc3.nr.i386.rpm gtkmm24-2.8.5-1.i386.rpm Load the RPMs. MySQL Administor is loaded in /usr/bin by