I've been playing with various GUIs off and on over the last couple of months. I find that I drop to mysql.exe quite often no matter which tool I use. My favorites until recently have been the MySQL GUI Tools and NaviCat.

I was using the Lite edition of Navicat. I actually started using navicat with postgres a few years ago. I like it but the lite version is limited in some annoying ways. It's nice in that it runs (at least the mysql version) in Linux and windows. I don't use a mac so that doesn't really do anything for me.

Of course the MySQL gui tools run just about anywhere.

I just …

It might not seem like a big deal that Silicon Valley is losing its middle class - defined as those who make between $30,000 and $80,000 per year. That is, unless you want to create a company that employs normal people who make normal wages, which is just about every company on the planet.

By most accounts, Silicon Valley is doing very well, adding jobs faster than the US national average. But this lack of reasonably paid employees is worrisome:

The consequence of the shift may undercut some of the basic mechanisms of the Valley economy, according to the authors of the report, by making upward mobility more difficult. "If you lose the middle, it's harder to support the top," said Doug Henton, an economist at Collaborative Economics, a research and consulting firm in Mountain View, Calif., that helps prepare the annual report.

It's …

Yesterday I had a chance to catch up with Doug Judd, principle search architect at local search specialist Zvents, to get some insight into Hypertable, the new open source massively parallel database software project.

Hypertable is an open source (GPLv2) implementation of Google’s Bigtable, an internally-deployed database that serves the company’s web indexing, Google Earth and Google Finance services. According to Judd, the best way to think about Hypertable is as a traditional database, but one that trades advanced features like transactional capabilities for scalability: specifically thousands of commodity PCs.

While Hypertable is not designed to support transactional …

Which data type holds the greatest range of data? MEDIUMINT or INT?

Which data type may hold the largest amount of data? MEDIUMTEXT or TEXT?

(more…)

I just registered for the MySQL Conference and Expo 2008. Note that early registration closes on February 26, 2008, so if you register now, you get a really nice discount. For what its worth, speakers were given a little discount code to give away  (20% off the conference price tag), and if you’re a blog reader, and the 20% discount will help you attend the conference, by all means drop me an email (firstname at mysql dot com).

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysql conference, mysql conference & expo 2008, …

I ran into a very surprising result today in regards to using UPDATE ... SET ... that I thought interesting enough to share. For those of you who keep up with my blog (I'm not sure why, but thanks :), you know that I have been playing around with using triggers to keep various items up to date instead of relying solely on the application code itself. This far, I have been pleased. I could see situations where people might abuse the mighty power of triggers, but they seemed to really help keep things consistent on my site - even if it just for a few small things.

I had previously implemented triggers to keep track of the comment count of blog posts. Seemed to make a whole lot more sense to use a trigger for this than having to run multiple queries in the application. Less chance for error, and it is more difficult to mess up the comment counts …

KEWEGO, the European leader in Internet video distribution, has selected MySQL to power its video streaming solutions -? providing an obvious match between two key players in the growing Web 2.0 space.

I have presented this webinar in Italian on Mon 12th Feb. The main topic was the scale-out strategy with MySQL, based on Replication, MySQL Cluster, in combination with other HA solutions, such as DRBD. This picture shows an example of shard using DRBD and MySQL Replication.





The recording (in Italian) and the slides (in English) of the webinar are available here:

Here is an abstract of the Q&A session (still italian):

Q from Giovanni: Volendo implementare una soluzione Mysql in un ambiente completamente virtuale (macchine virtuali su piattaforma esx server clusterizzata) è preferibile aumentare semplicemente il numero di mysql server …

For my US trip in March, I tried flying Delta. On paper they made the best offer regarding price and flight times. I am not a frequent flyer, I do not usually fly in the US and if I should have known to avoid Delta if possible… well, I did not. Also, I have been told that all airlines suck for one reason or another so choosing Delta was not worse than choosing anybody else.

This post is not about accusing anybody, it is a simple report of my booking experience. And about what is wrong with the now popular system of customer support.

I started searching for flights using Kayak. Their website is simple, the UI is very easy to use and anticipates the user’s input with great success. It is a pleasure to …