Yesterday I visited the MySQL Customer Conference in Munich. First of all, GDL sucks. But the locomotive driver strike was the only negative issue on that day, the conference itself was quite good, especially Jan Kneschke's talk about MySQL performance tuning (which was mostly about combining MySQL Cluster and MySQL Proxy) and the panel discussion about storage engines with Ralf Gebhardt, Jan Kneschke and Kai Voigt as vocal and Kaj Arnö as moderator. All in all a great (but quite long and exhausting) day.

Beta or not, here we come. Yea, you'd think I'd learn to check out the known bugs list before letting developers/qa have at the new database servers running in the lab with MySQL 5.1.21-b . I mean, how bad could beta really be?Well, as we should all know, beta is called beta for a reason, but sometimes we open source fanatics tend to jump on board, dealing with issues along the way. This

OK... This is my second entry on this blog. And it is about something I want every mysql/php newbie to know at the starting gate:

DON'T USE CHAR(15) FOR IP Address fields in mysql!

Well... what about the periods in ip addresses, you say?

Well... mysql has a FANTASTIC way of solving this issue! Convert the standard ip address into an unsigned integer!

ok... at first it sounds a little

Hello everyone, I think this will be a great log buffer. Dave has been sick these past two days and as a result, we do not have a comprehensive log buffer ready the way we or a volunteer usually do. This was bound to happen to log buffer at some point and today it has happened. So I [...]

How fast do you want your installation? Check this.

$ time ./express_install.pl ~/downloads/mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-i686.tar.gz --no_confirm
unpacking /Users/gmax/downloads/mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-i686.tar.gz
Executing ./install.pl --basedir=/Users/gmax/downloads/5.0.45 \
[...]
Installing MySQL system tables...
OK
Filling help tables...
OK
[...]
loading grants
sandbox server started
installation options saved to current_options.conf.
To repeat this installation with the same options,
use ./install.pl --conf_file=current_options.conf
----------------------------------------
Your sandbox server was installed in /Users/gmax/msb_5_0_45

real    0m6.773s
user    0m0.245s
sys 0m0.235s

Old times

MySQL has a long established rule of going from downloading to up and running in less than 15 minutes, as stated in various sources, like this interview …

Local MySQL offices have hosted country-specific user or customer conferences in a number of countries this autumn:

• MySQL K.K. in Tokyo, Japan: MySQL Users Conference Japan 2007, 11-12.9.2007 at the Miraikan
• Linux Data Services in Seoul, Korea: MySQL Users Conference Korea 2007, 14.9.2007
• London, UK: MySQL Northern Europe Customer Conference, 16.10.2007 at the Cavendish Conference Centre
• Munich, Germany: …

Could Microsoft acquire an open source software vendor? Yes, is the answer, according to Steve Ballmer’s comments from the Web 2.0 Summit. However, I think there’s some reading between the lines to be done here. Microsoft could certainly buy an open source user, but at this stage an open source software vendor might be a step too far.

Here’s what Ballmer had to say, according to CNET:

“We will buy smaller companies. We will buy smaller companies that make some use of open source software,” he said. “We don’t want to discourage people who would talk with us just because they do some open source.”

It’s worth considering that Ballmer was speaking at a Web 2.0 event. As CRN points out, his comment is “a tacit acknowledgment of how thoroughly open-source …

This is quite a milestone for me! At last it possible to actually do some practical work with the BLOB streaming engine (MyBS)!

For this release I have completed changes to the MySQL Connector/J 5.0.7, to allow BLOB data to be transparently stored and retrieved from the MyBS BLOB repository. The new version of the driver is called MySQL Connector/J SE (streaming enabled).

Uploading a BLOB is as simple as using setBinaryStream() or setBlob() on INSERT or UPDATE. By using getBinaryStream() or getBlob() after a SELECT you get direct access to the data stream coming from the repository. More information and some examples are provided in the documentation at: http://www.blobstreaming.org/documentation.

To try this out you need to install the latest versions of PBXT and MyBS. Both are available from: …

So, once again, I was listening to the Pro::PHP Podcast (or is it Newscast?  guys?).  They were talking about putting files in to a database table.  Now, most people will say you should never do this.  And lots of time they are right.  And once upon a time I agreed with them without question.  Then I started living in the real world where sometimes you have to do things you never thought you would.  Here are the two places where I stores files in a database.

Phorum

Ever wrote software that has to be installed on n + infinity environments.  It really sucks.  Phorum version 3.3 or 3.4 was the first to allow attachments.  We put them on disk.  The instructions for setting up a spot on disk for attachments was longer than all the rest of the install document.  The support …

Continuing in the tradition, which I hope has been as helpful to you as it has been to me, I'm opening the floor for suggestions on chapter 9 of the upcoming High Performance MySQL, Second Edition. Unlike the other chapters for which I've listed outlines, this one isn't substantially written yet. It's in detailed outline form at this point (a tactic that has worked very well for us so far -- I'll write about that someday).

I'm trying to get feedback much earlier in this chapter's lifecycle, for several reasons. Two of the most important are that this is one of the first chapters I've had a chance to really take from scratch, and the chapters I haven't written from scratch have been harder to organize, as you've probably seen from the last few outlines I posted. There's a lot of value in working top-down on this deep encyclopedia-style material.

Read on for the outline and more thoughts I just can't keep to myself.