Today I realised that I have been programming for 25 years. Quite an anniversary! Of course, it does not really feel like that long, probably because a bit more than the first half of the time was really 'just for fun', as a kid's hobby and later during University.

I also realised that right from the beginning and through all the years I have had the Open Source mindset, even though I did not learn about Free Software until much later.

I believe there are two reasons:

1. I love reading source code.
2. I hate the wasted effort when code could be reused, but is not.

Right from the start I have been reading code. This was when software was distributed as BASIC listings in magazines that one would manually type into the computer. And I remember reading and modifying the dis-assembly of machine code programs, getting 'infinite lives' in games and learning the techniques they used to produce their …

The MySQL Lifecycle Policy determines which versions are actively supported, and for which platforms such support applies.
The basic principle is that old versions are supported for a quite long, but definitely limited period, once they have been replaced by a newer GA version. For example, since the introduction of this policy, MySQL 3.23 and 4.0 have been retired.
The policy contains also provisions for a different kind of End of Life dismissal. When support for certain platforms has been discontinued by their vendors, of the platform is not widely used, MySQL reserves the right to stop building binaries and testing code on such obsolete platforms.
The reason is simple. While hardware can be bought and stored, time is a commodity in short supply, and there is only a given amount of time that our engineers can devote to testing and supporting multiple …

Today there was a recent flurry of blog posts, starting with Charles Babcock's interview of Jonathan Schwartz about Sun's strategy of targeting Web 2.0 developers. This brought to light an interesting topic about open source development communities, the perceived insularity of Sun towards the external OpenSolaris developer community, and why Linux will apparently always be more popular and technically stronger than OpenSolaris.

The initial interview led Amanda McPherson of the Linux Foundation to take issue, and long comments on those posts from …

I've decided to start replacing L with GL in acronyms where L supposedly stands for Linux.

I'm not a big user of acronyms, because I think they are exclusionist and they obscure, rather than revealing. (This wouldn't matter if I wrote for people who already knew what I meant and agreed with me, but that's a waste of time). However, LAMP is one that I've probably used a few times, without thinking that it is supposed to stand for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. In fact, it doesn't refer to Linux, it refers to GNU/Linux. Therefore, it should be GLAMP.

Why does this matter? I try not to say Linux, unless I'm referring to a kernel, because a kernel is not an operating system. I try to be pretty careful about saying GNU/Linux when I'm talking about an operating system. An exception is a recruiting event yesterday at the University of …

My blog been added several days ago to the Planet MySQL feed, and am now one step closer to world domination.

I'll assume that most people who see this entry at their feed readers would be unfamiliar with this blog, so I should be including an introduction here. Instead, I invite you to take a look at the home page and look at some olds posts of mine that might interest you. Not everything is about MySQL, and the Planet MySQL feed takes only the ones that I've labeled as such.

The following posts are the top search engine keywords that this blog gets, so you might want to start there:

• MySQL T-SQL CASE Statement: Bad Language Design
• …

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?

(more…)

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> …