The latest from the MySQL community

First it was the SlashDot effect, then it was the Digg effect, now it’s the Facebook effect. I have a friend at Facebook and he was talking about the effect of the Facebook Platform API that was released a few weeks ago. Sites were now struggling to cope with the effect of massive amounts of new traffic, ensuring that experienced MySQL Consultants will have plenty of scale out opportunities.

Here is an abstract from an article I read recently. Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in

Translation: unless you already have, or are prepared to quickly procure, a 100-500+ server infrastructure and everything associated with …

Well, I'm already behind but managed to find time to get KISS entry #2 out.  This is a fairly easy one and one that I've blogged about before.  Consider this screenshot of my installed programs.

Applying the KISS principle to software installation (as Apple generally does) would mean that a single icon would indicate that a piece of software is installed and dragging that icon to the trash would either complete the uninstall or at least start the process.  But, as we've already discovered, Microsoft believes in the secondary KISS meaning (Keep It Simply Stupid).  The installation of Visual Studio 2005 does not produce a single icon but instead we get a whole series of things that are installed.

What in the heck is 64 bit Prerequisites?  Sure, I know technically what it is but why on …

Today I needed the ability to create a Oracle-style sequence generator outside of the normal MySQL auto-increment functionality.

I was performing a table format upgrade and one column needed a unique index and we’re not using auto-increment on this table.

This little bit of SQL should work fine:

SELECT @sequence:=IFNULL( @sequence + 1, 1 );

You’d have to use this construct with INSERT INTO ... SELECT constructs.

So for example:


CREATE TABLE TEST_SOURCE
(
ID BIGINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
PRIMARY KEY(ID));

INSERT INTO TEST_SOURCE (ID)
VALUES (NULL), (NULL), (NULL), (NULL), (NULL), (NULL);

… will give us a TEST_SOURCE table with 6 auto-increment values.


mysql> SELECT * FROM …

MySQL AB today announced that all the database applications behind the Skyrock and Skyblog Web sites -- Europe's largest blogging platform -- are based on MySQL. The European leader plans on future international expansion, relying on the world?s most popular open source database.

Today, Lenz was putting together some stats on PlanetMySQL feeds added since January this year, and asked in an email whether he should include totals in the stats. I responded yes, and offered a quick SQL solution to get those numbers out of the database. I thought it might be useful for others, so here goes...

Note: The following views are just that: mine and not my employer's.

News Corp is considering swapping MySpace for 25% share in Yahoo.

Made me think: Is it "the" sign that Yahoo! has given up or is MySpace really worth that much?

Yahoo! holds some key IP assets and it can certainly make a come back, or so I believe. It is just a matter of leadership that can find the right balance between monetization and user experience.

Monetization today is all about contextual. Sure there are many companies today that are pitching behavioral targeting as bigger, but honestly speaking, we are not there yet. Behavioral targeting just cannot monetize as well, at least not now.

Contextual, on the other hand, is a gold mine with relevancy being the key. I cannot …

Note: My views are just that: mine. 1. Real time Query Monitoring MySQL 5.0 GA provides only 3 ways to look at queries that are executed on a server in some way or another.

Jay Pipes, Stewart Smith, Marten Mickos, Frank Mash, and Kevin Burton have all gotten into it, and Marten suggested that I should write my top five. I’m usually not into lists, but this sounds interesting, so here goes!

My top 5 wishes for MySQL are:

1. Restore some of my sanity

OK, well, this actually has several sub-wishes…

a. Global and session INFORMATION_SCHEMA …

"Which is the best opensource database?", "How does MySQL/PostgreSQL/Firebird ... (you name it) stand against Firebird/PostgreSQL/MySQL ... (you name it again)?" I'm shure we've all heard this questions many times, but now I have the definitive answer, by Jim Starkey himself, you can read the full post here, but in short is

"I think the short answer is that nobody with the experience to do this
is interested in doing it. I know that this isn't a particularly useful
answer, but I'm afraid it is the truth."

GREAT!!!

Intro

After a very long hiatus from PHP - circa php3 - I had a requirement to install PHP 5 to work with both MySQL 5.x and MSSQL database systems concurrently. I learned that PHP 5 no longer comes ready to work with MySQL directly, you have to install additional libraries, and if you need PHP 5 to play nice with that database server from Redmond, you're going to have to recompile PHP 5. I'm sharing my notes on accomplishing this task.

I'm using CentOS 4.5, but since I'll be describing how to modify a source RPM spec file to recompile PHP 5, these …