MySQL AB today announced it will be presenting a free, one-day technical training class for senior Oracle database administrators (DBAs) in the U.S. Government and other organizations who are interested in expanding their professional skill-sets by learning advanced MySQL techniques.

Date: Thursday, January 24, 2008
Time: 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. (Breakfast and Lunch included)
Location: Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, Polaris Suite, Washington, DC
Registration: www.carahsoft.com/mysqldba

It's official. I'm moving from the Support team in MySQL to the training team on March 1st.

Multiple database connections are a great feature, but if you plan to generate a schema for each database, you will most certainly run into some problems caused by different connection names. This Howto will show you how to solve the problem.

Connections

Let's start by defining our database connections: open up the file config/databases.yml and create at least two connections with different names (like „database” and „database1”).

all:
  database:
    class:          sfPropelDatabase
    param:
      dsn:          mysql://ptest:ptest@localhost/ptest 

database1:
    class:          sfPropelDatabase
    param:
      dsn:          mysql://ptest:ptest@localhost/ptest2

Schema

In the config/propel.ini configuration file, go to the the sixth line and edit the „propel.database.url” setting so that it matches the first database connection.

propel.database.url = …

One week to go! Then we’ll have MySQL AB?s biggest internal meeting ever, with some 400 MySQLers being shipped to Orlando, Florida.

Almost four years ago in 2004, the company met in Cancún, Mexico. A year before that in 2003, we met in Budapest, Hungary. In 2002, we met in St Petersburg, Russia. In 2001, we met in Helsinki, Finland. In 2000, they (I wasn’t on board at that time) met in Monterey, USA. As we met last time in Cancún, we were fewer people in the whole company than last September at the Developer Mtg in Heidelberg, Germany.

I’m looking forward to meeting with all my fellow MySQLers. Besides all the working and catching-up, I expect to do some running with fellow MySQLers, share some photographs, and just enjoy spending face-to-face time.

Right now, I’m preparing for …

This is a continuance from my previous entry on reversing an email address to search for a domain. Minutes after I ran the following query,SELECT COUNT(1) FROM rv_emails WHERE rv_email LIKE REVERSE('%msn.com');I was asked to do a count of the top 50 domains in our table of email addresses.So, I simply changed my previous route by performing the following steps:1) Add a 'domain' column to my

By Tim O'Reilly

I've been meaning to write for a while about MarkLogic's awesome new search tool for trolling through open source mailing lists, MarkMail.

Let's face it. While there may be a new generation that thinks that email is for old fogies, for many of us, email is a primary online tool, at least as important to us as the web. Many of us no longer file documents or attachments -- we just search for them again in our email. Perhaps most importantly, email is a primary collaboration tool--and as many of us have figured out, collaboration is one of the internet's killer apps. Searching our shared memory in a collaborative space is REALLY useful -- with open source mailing lists being a great example.

Despite its importance, very little has been done to improve on email. The clients we use today are not radically …

Ah, Christmas Holidays! Time to take a break from the daily chores... to spend some time with family... but also time to catch up on reading and spend some hours on some fun hacking.

When catching up on my reading of Dr. Dobb's Journal, I came across an interesting article by Michael Owens about writing virtual tables for SQLite, which got me thinking about a small hack I've wanted to do for a while: a table that reads an RSS/Atom feed and presents the data to the query engine. Originally, I was planning to implement this as a MySQL …

Yawn...I got paged this morning at 2:30 AM because a database backup failed. It turned out the backup partition was unmounted, with the intention of being replaced with a new one.

Unfortunately, I wasn't aware that this was being done, otherwise I would have made sure the new volume was available and configured for our backup system -- 5 minute job. All in all, not a big deal. Everything was made good and a successful backup was done.

But, I think this event is a symptom of a common problem in the IT world: Configuration problems due to an unintentional lack of communication between well meaning teams.

The IT group I work in is really no different than most others. We have UNIX administrators, NT administrators, data managers, software developers, me starring as the DBA, and of course, the operations folks who try to keep things running in the middle of the night so we can sleep.

…

This post wants to be:1. A quick glance at the new "common table expression" (aka hierarchical queries) in Firebird 2.12. A call to action for other opensource databasesSo, on with 1., Firebird recently added another great feature, common table expressions (CTE) which, to my eye at least, boils down to hierarchical queries.This is basically the ability to efficiently and easily query hierarchical