(A guest blog by Danny O'Brien, the EFF's cultural ambassador)

As one of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's outreach folk, I have to concede that our message is not often about cyber-unicorns and crypto-ponies. We're often warning companies and hackers about what we see as upcoming threats to their rights, and urging them to take action. To give some examples: one year, I gave a Emerging Tech talk called "The Wheel of Plaintiffs", in which we span a giant Flash wheel to see who we thought in the audience might get sued next, and by whom. Another year, I heard a hacker come out of our software patent tutorial muttering "Man, that was the most depressing talk I've ever heard". I'm sure that if there was a box in the O'Reilly audience feedback forms that said "Speaker Made Me Reconsider Landscape Gardening …

It’s not open source, but those involved with data management might be interested in my first post over at the 451’s new Too Much Information blog as it tracks the progress of H-Store, the new OLTP database project from Michael Stonebraker, who you may remember from such database projects as Ingres and PostgreSQL.

Given Jonathan Schwartz’s proclamation that Sun will make further open source acquisitions, I’ve been putting some thought into likely targets and/or new directions opened up by the MySQL acquisitions. One likely target sector is the ecosystem of vendors that surround the MySQL database - such as clustering and HA software providers - as well as complementary technologies.

With that is mind it is interesting to see that the company has hired two key Python developers, Frank Wierzbicki and Ted Leung. As the Infoworld report states, this is similar to the way Sun …

I saw a post by Baron mentioning that his tool maatkit is best for handling situations where a master-master replication setup has got out of sync.

If you think Baron was blowing his own trumpet he has good reason to. I have used his mk-archiver tool as part of the Maatkit to make the problem of archiving and purging data much easier. This was much easier than rolling my own solution.

Anyhow. I

This is absolutely the most awesome release of memcached ever, and it has absolutely nothing to do with me being a patchmonkey for it.

Trees are stabilizing and people are getting to work. Fun and exciting things to come :)

Kudos to MySQL and Sun (like krow) for jumping in on the fun.

Next up: 1.3.0-rc. Time to start hammering down the binary protocol before it wanders off even more.

I'm up way too late :) Praise insomnia!

This is absolutely the most awesome release of memcached ever, and it has absolutely nothing to do with me being a patchmonkey for it.

Trees are stabilizing and people are getting to work. Fun and exciting things to come :)

Kudos to MySQL and Sun (like krow) for jumping in on the fun.

Next up: 1.3.0-rc. Time to start hammering down the binary protocol before it wanders off even more.

I'm up way too late :) Praise insomnia!

Today’s quiz comes out of an e-mail conversation with fenixshadow, aka

On my system (5.0.45-Debian_1ubuntu3.1-log) , I run these commands:

CREATE TABLE t (
  ID INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
  PID INT,
  FOREIGN KEY (PID) REFERENCES t(ID)
) ENGINE=INNODB;

INSERT INTO t VALUES (1, NULL);
INSERT INTO t VALUES (2, NULL);

SELECT * FROM t yields the expected result:

+----+------+
| ID | PID  |
+----+------+
|  1 | NULL |
|  2 | NULL |
+----+------+

I now do

UPDATE t SET PID  = 2 WHERE ID = 1

and observe the result of SELECT * FROM t again:

+----+------+
| ID | PID  |
+----+------+
|  2 | NULL |
|  1 |    2 |
+----+------+

Question 1: Can you easily explain why the rows are now in reverse order?

(more…)

Yesterday I passed the CMCDEV exam.

I only used the study guide (previous entry) and the official manual to prepare for the exam.

The study guide is a good preparation for the exam.(Thanks to Roland Bouman and all other people involved with the book. The only minor issue with the book is that it didn't feel finished. Images which should've been printed in high quality and some phrases about a CD which is absent (All listed/fixed in the errata)

I filed a few bug reports while studying. (patched included :) )

So now let's wait for MySQL 5.1 to become GA.

I have not been at CeBit for quite a while, but this year I will be there as a regular visitor this Thursday (6th of March). If you would like to meet with me, please send me an email or ping me via IM/Skype! I look forward to walking around the hallways, visiting my new employer's booth and finding out what other Open Source presences and activities there will be.

Here is some of my thoughts on migrating MySQL to Sql Server. It came out of an email discussion. I’d love to hear your thoughts on migrating to a different database platform, not just MySQL to Sql Server.

I actually thought about writing a white paper or even a course on migrating from MySQL to Sql Server, but never got the time to do it. Sometimes a project doing similar things can serve as a launchpad for this endeavour, but that never came along, at least not yet. I am very interested in database interoperability field though. I’ve done MySQL and Oracle admin in the past and have published some MySQL and Oracle stuff in blogs. I have much better technical skills on Sql Server than any other RDBMS platforms, primarily because I’ve worked on it longer.

Here are some of my thoughts. I think most of it applies equally on migration from Oracle, DB2, Sybase, Postgresql, etc., to Sql Server, or the other way around. It …