Cool, it appears I've been nominated for the 2007 Queensland Pearcey State Award - that's quite an honour!

The Pearcey Foundation takes its name from Dr Trevor Pearcey who in 1949 led the team that designed and built Australia?s first digital computer, CSIRAC, and which was in fact the world?s fourth digital computer ever to be built.

Now, coming from The Netherlands I lack a certain amount of education in terms of Australian ICT history, but I was at the Melbourne Museum the week before (for the AUUG 2007 conference), and actually visited CSIRAC which is (at least some parts) on display there. It features nifty technology like …

Perhaps I was a little quick to congratulate Neelie Kroes on a job well done forcing Microsoft to extend its interoperability protocols to open source software vendors and developers. It now appears that the terms of the agreement mean that it is incompatible with the GPL.

?I told Microsoft that it had to make interoperability information available to open source developers. Microsoft will now do so, with licensing terms that allow every recipient of the resulting software to copy, modify and redistribute it in accordance with the open source business model,” noted Kroes.

Glynn Moody …

MySQL is listing a good overview of the bugs they still have open in 5.1
This list comes very handy as I have on my todolist to figure out which bugs they still have open in 5.1 Cluster to see if we are impacted by one or more of them.
Now I don't have to manually go trough the lists anymore ..

thnx MySQL !

Perhaps it wasn't entirely clear what the last posting meant by "reentrant". It means that the external language stored procedure can issue a query within the same thread context that executed the stored procedure.

Thanks to the question posed by Bill Karwin, I have tested this scenarios to demonstrate:mysql> lock table mysql.proc write; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> call test2('

Recently we have been doing some work with export and import of data from and to MySql databases. Our customer wants to be able to export configuration data from one MySql instance and import it into another.

The obvious tool to use is mysqldump. But since we need to edit the exported data (just replace some codes) before importing it into the other instance we use the --tab option. This means that instead of one big file (or actually redirected standard output) we get two files per table, one with the CREATE TABLE command and one with the data.

In the next step we run some scripts to modify the data. This is quite easy, since data is in text files with one record per row.

Finally we import the data into the new instance. While the default mode of mysqldump creates a file you can run in the command line client, mysqldump --tab does not. You have to create that yourself, but it is not very complicated. …

Wouldn't it be fun to be able to embed web-service routines into MySQL as if they are stored procedures?

CREATE FUNCTION xml_current_time() RETURNS DATETIME NO SQL
        LANGUAGE XMLRPC
        EXTERNAL NAME "xmlrpc://time.userland.com/RPC2;currentTime.getCurrentTime";

Perhaps not a completely useful example... but an interesting goal to achieve. I have written up some code and pushed it to the experimental repository. I haven't tested it yet but I may do later today if I don't get too preoccupied catching up watching NBC's "Heroes". Snapshots created automagically at midnight, Pacific time.

Brian mentioned Gemini on his blog... As many people remember, there was a stunned silence for a while when Oracle purchased InnoBase OY only 2 years ago... Very similar to the stunned silence about 6 years ago when the suits at NuSphere tried to do a SCO. Back on to the topic at hand... Gemini. About two years ago, Brian fed me a copy of the Gemini engine saying that "Hey, you remember Gemini? Here's the code. Get it working. Don't talk about it and call it 'Amira'.". Perhaps not exactly his words but close enough.

So the Amira project had a shaky beginning... I ported the code to work on MySQL 5.0 and started examining it, removing platform-specific code, and improving the performance of it. From the first working run to the last, I think performance improved by about a factor of 10 but I don't remember specifics. The Amira project was cancelled 2Q2006. I suppose …

Yay! It's the weekend!

Why does the weekend make me cheerful? I get time to spend on personal projects, although my sweet wife does complain that my 'personal projects' don't look much different than my day job.

This project, I have been doodling with for quite a while. It spawned from a little project that Eric Herman and myself started to look at 2 years ago with what we called "MySQL UDF v2". At the time, it included a whole plug-in and unit testing framework. Since we have to work with what is in the server, we dropped our plug-in and unit test framework after the current MySQL 5.1 plug-in system suddenly appeared: Somehow, I ended up maintaining it but that's another story.

A more modern and sane system for user-defined functions is still our goal. One part of our concept is to minimize the amount of 'heavy lifting' that needs to be …

Wow, it actually worked with only minor changes to the code. Check this out:

mysql> create function xml_get_state(id int) returns text
    -> no sql language xmlrpc external name
    -> 'xmlrpc://betty.userland.com/RPC2;examples.getStateName';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select xml_get_state(40);
+-------------------+
| xml_get_state(40) |
+-------------------+
| South Carolina    |
+-------------------+
1 row in set (0.42 sec)

Now I just need to check that it works for more complex resultsets... Trawl the web for open-access trivial XML-RPC services or build a test XML-RPC server?

Ok, this is a late late blog post because the code was done and pushed into the work tree not last weekend, but the weekend before. I think it is a pretty significant feature to blog about but for some strange reason, it completely slipped my mind.

Check this out:mysql> call test2('select count(*) from mysql.user; select count(*) from mysql.proc'); +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 3