I was flying back from Helsinki yesterday and was in line at Heathrow Customs behind an earnest young man. The Customs officer asked him,

"What nationality are you?", referring to something the teenager had written on his Customs declaration."Jewish."was the response."That's not a nationality. That's a religion."I rudely snickered with the men in line behind me, but it occurs to me well after the fact that the teenager was simply replying according to a different definition of nationality. (I wish I could ask the boy's pardon, though I'm not sure he heard me.) If asked what we are at our core, we're almost certainly something else before we're Americans, Nigerians, Lebanese, etc.

In like manner, and this will sound trite in comparison to the above, but I'm not in the software business. I'm in the open source business. Open source software business, if you like, but open source is the foundation and core of my interest in software. …

I will be out of the office all next week, so expect more blog posts from me! That’s not a joke — both Yannick Gratton and I will be at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, taking in all the material we can, processing it, and spewing out what I hope will be [...]

The slides are available in PDF format here.

Thanks to all of you who have participated to the webinar!

-ivan

Welcome to the 41st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. There is rarely any shortage of commentary on conferences in the world of databases. This week is no exception, with one or two waiting in the wings and another fading into the past. That would be Collaborate ‘07. Here’s a sample [...]

This is already making the blog rounds but the next pre-release version of the best development environment on the planet is out.  VPC images out and some ISO bits are available on MSDN.  Microsoft will also be making Express versions available in the next few days.  You can find all the links here.

There's a very useful aggregate function in mysql that allows you to concatenate several row values into one single row value. Here is an example:



mysql> create table t1 (
-> t1_id numeric,
-> col2 varchar(50)
-> );
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.18 sec)

mysql> create table t2 (
-> t2_id numeric,
-> t1_id numeric,
-> col2 varchar(50)
-> );
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.17 sec)

mysql> insert into t1 values (1,'a'),(2,'b'),(3,'c');
Query OK, 3 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Records: 3 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> insert into t2 values (1,1,'d'),(2,1,'f'),(3,2,'g'),(4,3,'f'),(5,3,'h'),(6,3,'i'),(7,3,'j');
Query OK, 7 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Records: 7 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> select * from t1;
+-------+------+
| …

This blog turned 1 year old last month and I think all of my readers were glad to read it. I’ve never asked for help and I offered help to people who needed it. But today I’m forced to ask my readers for help because it is the first time in my long practice when I really don’t know how to solve my problem.

(more…)

In my previous entry I wrote how to fix Wordpress so it can avoid a possible too restrictive default SQL_MODE. I guess I should have realized that the following two lines from my my.cnf option file would probably not be liked by Wordpress either:

default-storage-engine=InnoDB              #Set the default storage engine (table type) for tables. 
init-connect="set autocommit=0"            #set autocommit off on connect

So, I went back and hacked wp-includes/wp-db.php again. Now the fix read:

// …

One of the coolest mashup technologies around is Yahoo! Pipes.  It's a web-based application that enables you to visually create new web apps by aggregating web feeds and other web services in new ways.  Much like you could create pipes and filters to deal with text on Unix, this enables you to do the same with data coming from web sites. Tim O'Reilly called it "a milestone in the history of the Internet" which is pretty high praise from the guy who coined Web 2.0.  Our MySQL community manager Jay Pipes (no relation :-) worked with one of Yahoo's top MySQL gurus Jeremy Zawodny to arrange to get the guys from Yahoo Pipes into a keynote spot at the …

I just downloaded Wordpress to play around with. However, installation failed pretty miserably. The nature of the error messages led me to believe Wordpress does not like the SQL_MODE setting of my lcoal MySQL database.

By default, I have a fairly restrictive SQL_MODE for my local database server, which is set up by this line in my my.cnf option file:

sql_mode=TRADITIONAL,ANSI_QUOTES,PIPES_AS_CONCAT,IGNORE_SPACE,NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION  

Now, a lot of people don't know you can …