So I managed to answer all those questions correctly and the US Border Control officer kindly let us into the country. It was easy since the questions were the same as the last time I visited the US in 2000. Filling this sheet is always a fun time, it makes me wonder wanna know wether there exist any statistics on how many terrorists and drug trafficants get caught by accidentally filling in the wrong box :-) Then of course there are some tricky questions, what if you are traveling to the US to engange in immoral but legal activities. From what I know sitting naked in the sauna would already be suspicious here ;-D

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previously
Stroll on over to the DPM's minimalist homepage and grab the latest release tarball, export tarball, clone the git repo, or peruse gitweb.

While I did some porting work, this release has not been explicitly tested on all of the platforms yet. If there are bugs with a particular platform, please report.

This release fixes a lot of outstanding complaints I had with the power of the API, and many known obnoxious bugs and restrictions. Like the previous inability to listen on INADDR_ANY, or use unix domain sockets, etc. There are still a number of usability/troubleshooting gotchas when writing programs using DPM, but aside from the learning curve most of it should work now. There are no known crash bugs or memory leaks (aside from a "leak" in the dpml library under …

previously
Stroll on over to the DPM's minimalist homepage and grab the latest release tarball, export tarball, clone the git repo, or peruse gitweb.

While I did some porting work, this release has not been explicitly tested on all of the platforms yet. If there are bugs with a particular platform, please report.

This release fixes a lot of outstanding complaints I had with the power of the API, and many known obnoxious bugs and restrictions. Like the previous inability to listen on INADDR_ANY, or use unix domain sockets, etc. There are still a number of usability/troubleshooting gotchas when writing programs using DPM, but aside from the learning curve most of it should work now. There are no known crash bugs or memory leaks (aside from a "leak" in the dpml library under …

Hmm. I’ve spent about 31 hours in flight and in transit, to get to Orlando, Florida. Good news is that I’ve arrived, all safe and dandy.

Singapore Airlines is now flying the A340-500 to Los Angeles or San Francisco, from Singapore. Its truly got to be the best plane for long haul flights. Notice that you get direct flights to America? No more transiting in Narita. I was given a seat in Executive Economy Class (I wonder why? Maybe its because of my collected miles/status, as it used to and still does happen on United, a Star Alliance partner). What’s cool there? Power. Yes, nice, in-flight power, suitable for devices that support 110V (read: all modern laptop PSUs).

Food was great (new menus), and I tried the much recommended Singapore Sling, and realised that it tastes …

Well, none of my issues have been fixed yet but MySQL support is on top of it.

I've ran into many S1 bugs: all at the same time. Support has been able to help me identify them. Some of them have proposed fixes, some fixes are being tested in
5.0.54.

MySQL is by far the best Open source Database on the planet-support reflects that fact. I highly recommend getting a support contract to trouble shoot issues that make it into production, less learning the entire mysql code base and doing it yourself. (I know alot about the code-base but the 5 issues I am tracking was to much for me to debug alone. On top of that I don't know enough of the code base to make fixes to some of the bugs.)

If you do more then 30K selects per second across all your servers, get piece of mind that someone will do there best to address any issues that you can't figure out. Get a MySQL support contract today.

Thanks to the few people who pointed out a copyright infringement with the name 'MySQL Gadgets' for my tool. It has now been renamed 'MyQ Gadgets'. This is actually more appropriate (but hopefully not a violation of some other copyright), since I use the 'myq' prefix on my MySQL scripts as an easy, unique prefix for command line tab completion in bash.

It?s been a while since my last post. To be honest I have been extremely busy with so many personal things that I?m surprised I made it out alive.
During this time, I managed to find a new job in an international advertising company that has an office, here in Beijing. I still haven?t completely managed to get my visa situation completed here in China (a word of caution, with the Beijing Olympics coming up soon, there has been a serious crack down on foreigners living in Beijing and worsening of conditions) and I need to leave the country and come back just to renew my visa (almost all foreigners need to do that).

In my new job, they use Oracle databases, so I?m worried about how much time I can spend on MySQL related issues. I am, however, committed to do my ?pet projects? on MySQL ? which is why I have this blog.

I am eager to learn what Oracle has to offer. I haven?t worked for such a large company before and …

There was only so much I could do for my 1976 Mustang. I did not have money to put an Edelbrock head in, so I spent what little I had in a new stereo, a tinted back window, a new muffler that increased the neighborhood noise level a notch, and a couple of other random parts. In the end, it really did not go any faster, and I was $650 poorer.I liken my experience with SELF JOIN to my 1976

Reading Marc Fleury's post on the subject of open source and proprietary software (a response to my post on Benchmark's investment in Engine Yard), you'd be tempted to believe that the world is growing more proprietary. Reading InfoWorld's response to Marc, you'd be certain that yes, the world is definitely closing off.

Unfortunately, the data suggests the inverse.

It seems quite clear to me that the software industry is rapidly, in some cases, and gradually, in others, opening up. Very few can get away with foisting a heavily proprietary model on the market anymore. Were a startup to launch today with a great new idea for a proprietary …

Last night I performed an upgrade of 5 of our production servers to version 5.0.52 ( solaris 10 / 64 bit x86). We have been testing for over a month and in the 11th hour discovered that there is a bug in the mysql command line utility.

I was creating a blank copy of one of our production databases ( schema only) on an upgraded test system using a script generated by our design tool. During this, I encountered an interesting error that prevented the creation of a table with a column named "extra_file_delimiter". Further testing revealed that the 5.0.52 through 5.0.54 releases have a bug in the mysql client which parses the word "delimiter" incorrectly.

As a work-around, I've also deployed the 5.0.50 release in a separate directory and replaced the 5.0.52 mysql utility with a symbolic link to the 5.0.50 version. Ugly for sure, but we decided to do that since we had so much …