This is the first place I am announcing this: The Pythian Group has made me a Team Lead. I am extremely honored and somewhat humbled by this, and I am determined to do a good job. I started officially on Monday, March 3rd, and my first week went pretty well. On [...]

“If you’d like to get out of the aircraft quickly, and we’re not around to help you, grab this red handle on the door and pull it up.” Our friendly pilot just gave us his friendly security instructions at take-off from Dublin airport, on the way to Bromma in Stockholm. Dave Douglas, Julie Ross and myself are heading on the first leg of our trip to meet MySQL personnel across Europe.

I’ve been frequently teased about using “Sun’s Corporate Jet”. Flying around on that one is certainly perceived as glamorous, and perhaps not compatible with the humble roots of MySQL. Well, glamorous or not, here we are, three people, three empty seats and two pilots up in the sky. However, it’s not exactly “Sun’s” jet. It’s Netjets, more like a taxi than a company car. We’re going to have a different pilot tomorrow, and a different plane. That said, I do enjoy it and I took my favourite gadget, my 8mm fisheye lens, …

Last week at CeBit I once again had a conversation with an application developer that was not aware that it's possible to embed the MySQL Server inside an application instead of running it as a separate process. I experienced something similar at FOSDEM recently, while talking with the Amarok developers - how come that this feature is so little known? In fact, there are two possibilities for embedding MySQL (and both of them are licensed under the GPL): the first one is using the libmysqld embedded library, which is suitable if you are developing C/C++ applications:

The embedded MySQL server library makes it possible to run a full-featured MySQL server inside a client application. The main benefits are …

Farhan Mashraqi knows his job. He must be good at it, because he has on his hands a very busy and heavily loaded server. Fotolog is one of those servers that can take away all your resources very quickly if you don't pay attention. If you want to stay online, you have to make sure that the server is always healthy and efficient.
The above is theory. Farhan …

In my opinion, the last MySQL Meetup group in London was a really good event. We met Marten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL and now Senior Vice President of Sun, David Axmark, founder of MySQL and Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun.

The main questions to the guests were pretty expected: is it going to change anything in the licensing, the deployment and the platforms of MySQL? The single answer is a "No, nothing is going to change". No change in the licensing (Simon Phipps has clearly stated it), no changes in the Community and Enterprise editions (at least not in the near future) and no changes in the development for Linux, Windows, Solaris and other OSes. There will be more opportunities, instead, of spreading the database in environments that are not the common target for MySQL at the moment. We are definitely not going to inflate the server with a large set of barely …

My laptop disk died on Friday.
Although this is a sad occurrence, I was very pleased to find out that my backup was in good shape, and I was back in working conditions 30 minutes after the accident.
I don't regret buying a 2 TB firewire hard disk.

That made a huge difference. Last time that I had a breakout, restoring 50GB from a USB external disk took about 5 hours. Transferring the same amount of data through a firewire interface takes now less than 25 minutes. I love technology!

MySQL recommends using the BLACKHOLE engine as a replication filter. Well it turns out there is a flaw in the implementation that makes it very dangerous to use it for that. Normally, when an INSERT is made to a table with an AUTO_INCREMENT column, MySQL writes a INSERT_ID_EVENT packet into the binary log. This is broken for INSERT statements executed against a BLACKHOLE table.

I've opened the bug here:
http://bugs.mysql.com/35178

Let me demonstrate:

mysql> show create table n1\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
       Table: n1
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `n1` (
  `c1` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`c1`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> show create table n2\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
       Table: …

The last leg of the IRC world tour meetup was initially scheduled for last week, but it had to be changed for technical reasons. The rescheduled time was announced last week, but nobody took into account the Daylight Saving Time, which starts on March 9 in the USA, and on March 30 in Europe. Consequently, the announced Pacific time is right, but the European time is not. So, let’s remind what it is:
The IRC meeting with Bob Brewin will take place on Wednesday, March 12, at 9am PDT, 5pm CET.
For those of you who still live in a single time zone, this timetable can be helpful.

This quiz is based on an email I got from a somewhat annoyed Jesper Krogh.

btw, 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!

Given:

SELECT * FROM car_parts:
+---------+---------+-------+--------+
| part_id |  car_id | price | weight |
+---------+---------+-------+--------+
|       1 |       1 |  2.20 |   3.00 |
|       2 |       1 |  3.30 |   5.00 |
|       3 |       1 |  4.40 |   7.00 |
|       4 |       2 |  2.20 |   9.00 |
|       5 |       2 |  3.30 |  11.00 |
|       6 |       2 |  4.40 |  13.00 |
+---------+---------+-------+--------+

We want to know the least expensive part of each car, and how much that part weighs:

SELECT car_id, MIN(price), weight
FROM parts
GROUP BY car_id;
+---------+------------+--------+
|  car_id | MIN(price) | weight | …

For starters, it's the first tutorial I get to host at the Users Conference, and this is understandably satisfactory in itself.
Then, because it is going to give me the technical room that I was longing for. I have been writing and speaking about MySQL Proxy for 10 months, and on every occasion I felt that I had time or space limitations. There was not enough time to explain all that we …