By Andy Oram

I've been doing a lot of research recently into the patent system. The impetus is the history-making Peer to Patent project, and specifically an article I recently finished for the Economist magazine. ("A patent improvement" in the September 8, 2007 issue, Technology Quarterly section.)

This blog is not about the Economist article or Peer to Patent, but about how several months of immersion in the subject of patents has affected my understanding of related policy issues, and how my opinions differ from many of my friends in the software field.

Patents are necessary to promote invention

One of the fuzzier notions making its rounds in the software field condemns patents as backward and oppressive. Not just software patents--some people …

You've decided to obtain MySQL certification and that's great! Now it's a matter of how to go about it? You can go the traditional routes and take a class, or you can prepare on your own. I did the latter, and 2 exams later during MySQL Conference 2007, I passed the Certified MySQL Database Administrator (CMDBA) exams. I wanted to share my exam preparation experience, as I've never found this information in any other place. I took what I learned from how to study math and applied it to preparing for the MySQL exams. …

Version 1.5.0 of the innotop MySQL and InnoDB monitor is out. This release is the first in the unstable 1.5.0 branch, which will eventually become the stable 1.6 branch. I’m beginning to merge the various branches I’ve made to support some of our needs at my employer. This first release adds some major new features and prepares for some other large improvements and new features. What’s new Here’s what’s new:

I just sent this message to the brand new CouchDb mailinglist:

Dear Couch Potatoes (or something), I updated the CouchDb PHP Library and the Demo application BugShrink (our bug-tracker) to the new JSON API.

They are up in a separate Google Code Project. Check out the code at http://couchprojects.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ and the project pages at http://code.google.com/p/couchprojects/.

Enjoy, Jan

While not yet released, the current SVN version of CouchDb is …

I just found out that MySQL 6.0 with the Falcon Storage Engine is available as Alpha. Falcon adds ACID compliance, tablespaces and performance improvements. It's supposed to also simplify administration but I'm not sure how MySQL can be simplified. It's pretty simple now.

I've always thought that the ability to swap out the storage engine is the best feature of MySQL. It reminds me of the replaceable database drivers from my clipper days in the late 80s and early 90s.

From my reading about Falcon, it looks like one advantage will be the fact that Falcon has been engineered to take advantage of 64 bit architectures and large memory caches. User data files in Falcon can be up to 100 terabytes. That should pretty much cover most uses. It looks like you only get a single …

Since I need to write up what I added for the next version of
mysqlslap (aka... this is not what is in 5.1...), I thought I would
blog it :)

The current genesis of additions come either from user requests or...
well my own use :)

The last couple of weeks have had me spending time looking at
performance problems so I've found the need for all sorts of new
pieces. Some were just a couple of lines of code, some where many
more...

--ignore-sql-errors
Ignore SQL errors during the query run. By default errors shut down
slap. If you get errors, you have problems. Sometimes though, you
want to keep going...

Final Output
Standard deviation is now calculated and displayed (N-1). I had
visually observed a while ago that when variance goes up, engines
tend to behave wildly. Its a good rule of …

I was pointed to an article about how the “one size fits all” database model doesn’t work anymore — how Oracle, DB2 and Ingres were written so long ago, they’d have to be rewritten to meet the needs of today’s database users. Jacob Nikom pointed the article to me; apparently he contacted the author and started to explain how MySQL meets that criteria, but the author disagreed.

Read the article for yourself:
http://www.databasecolumn.com/2007/09/one-size-fits-all.html

Anyone else notice the irony of saying “all those other DBMS’s aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution, but this one is?” I think that MySQL comes the closest to a DBMS that is NOT “one size fits all”, given the multiple storage engines available. What other DBMS will allow you to use your Amazon S3 account as a table? What other DBMS will allow you to …

This week I have the honer of write Log Buffer. If you’re a fan of everything new and shiny, just sit back, because you’ll enjoy this weeks edition.

For those who’ve never heard of Arnold Daniels. I’m a software engineer at Javeline, an active member of the MySQL community and the author of lib_mysqludf_xql which is part of the MySQL UDF Repository. Well thats more than enough about me. I’m not here to get a job or a date, but to bring you the latest news.

Dreaming of Oracle features
Oracle has recently brought out version 11g of their database server. Just when you thought other DBMSs were catching …

A few days ago someone made the comment that Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle) was a bit too hard to use. The person on the chat was someone that tried to load a text file into a database table and he was having a hard time doing just that.

So let’s go back to basics in this blog post and load a delimited text file into a MySQL table.

If you want to see how it’s done, click on this link to watch a real-time (non-edited) flash movie. It’s 11MB to download and is about 2-3 minutes long.

Until next time!

Matt

My quiz about SQL mode was a bit more difficult than I expected. The question was which ones of the following statements are affected by a change from the default SQL mode to ANSI mode.

I used the INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables for examples throughout. This is to make it easy to try for yourself, without needing to create tables etc. If you use the Query Browser to try this out you should beware that setting the sql_mode might not work, since the Query Browser by default creates a new database connection for every statement. The easiest way to check this si to use the 'set global sql_mode' command, but you should not do this on a production database, since strange things might happen....

If you want to read the documentation, you find it here.

Now for the solution...

a) SELECT concat(table_name,' …