Here’s an interesting bit of news from the blurred line between open and closed source software. Ubuntu sponsor Canonical has announced that it is reselling IBM’s DB2 Express-C database as both a standalone software package and as a software appliance with VMware. While Express-C is free as in beer, it is not free as in speech. Of course, if you want support it is not free at all.

DB2 Express-C is available as a free download from th Ubuntu repositories for Ubuntu 7.10 or later, while users have to register to be sent download instructions for the DB2 Express-C vitual appliance, which requires VMWare Server, VMWare Player 2.0, VMWare Workstation 5.5 or VMWare ESX …

The following statement is completely valid and does what you expect:

SELECT DATE(creation_time) AS date,
       COUNT(*) AS num_signups
FROM signups
GROUP BY date
ORDER BY date;

In MySQL, you could leave out one clause of the above SELECT statement, yet still end up with the exact same result. Which clause is that?

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Mark writes:

At the 2007 conference, they had certification tutorials for CMDBA I and II, along with MySQL Cluster . I attended the CMDBA tutorials, both tracks and it was excellent. It was also packed with attendees, and I can say what I learned there helped me greatly in passing both exams. You should know, only about a third of the attendees taking the CMDBA I exam, and about half taking the CMDBA II exam passed last year. The last years final numbers can be found …

It's the premier time to get your MySQL certification! As of today, you have 55 days to get ready before the first testing session on April 15th. Since I'm not in a position to attend the conference this year, I'm passing along all my tips that I learned from the 2007 conference. I'm hoping I can attend, but right now, it's not looking promising.

Why Take Your Exams at the Conference? Simple. . .

1. Soon after the 2007 conference had ended, I wrote up my techniques to study and prepare for the CMDBA exams. This approach saved me a ton of time, and can be applied to the CMDEV and CMCDBA certifications as well.

2. It's the lowest cost you'll have to pay for taking the exams. It's best to prepay for your exams …

Have you run into the 'default fault'?

mysql> create table foo (t1 int not null, note char(10) default 'none');

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)


mysql> insert into foo values (1,'some');

Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)


mysql> insert into foo values (2);

ERROR 1136 (21S01): Column count doesn't match value count at row 1

mysql>

So why isn't the default value of 'none' automatically entered into the table? If you are an old hand at MySQL, you probably are smiling right now and remembering the first time you whacked you metaphorical toe on this situation. There is a question similar to this in the MySQL exam bank that separates the experienced pros from the newbies.

Okay, so how do you get the default value into the note field?

Hint:

mysql> …

On IRC, I told Pia, that I enjoyed the Beijing SFD tremendously, and they should definitely win for 2007. I did make a note that if it was required, I would blog about it… She mentioned that it probably wouldn’t matter, because they were a contender already. Nonetheless, I figured that eventually I’d blog about it - turns out its come many months later, generally inspired by Peter Junge’s blog post. Lucky for me, all this isn’t just coming off from memory, but my trip report, that was on an internal mailing list!

First up, some quick resources: the winning report, photos, including the ones from the speaker dinner, held after …

Today I sat down and started to read the post by Amanda McPherson of the Linux Foundation on the recent brouhaha around Sun's announcement about supporting Web 2.0 frameworks:
http://www.linux-foundation.org/weblogs/amanda/2008/02/17/hey-jonathan-the-l-in-lamp-is-literal/

What struck a chord with me about the "L" word is that it really is more then just Linux.

It is GNU.

Richard Stallman's constant mantra of "GNU/Linux" is very relevant.

It is the GNU part that really establishes the platform. FreeBSD gets that, and even Apple gets that.

When you buy a Sun box, and are going to run Solaris on it. What is the first thing you do?

You download all of the GNU utilities to make it useable.

This was true when I …

A

Last week, I described how to use the MySQL plug-in API to write a minimal 'Hello world!' information schema plug-in. The main purpose of that plug-in is to illustrate the bare essentials of the MySQL information schema plug-in interface.