So, we (dealnews.com) rolled out a new site this month, metaprice.com.  Its young and lacking features of many of the other price comparison sites, but is has great potential.  Our hope is to bring together the best features of all the other players in the market in one great application.
Part of this project required using web services with several different data suppliers.  Most support simple REST and SOAP, but some only offer SOAP.  So, given that I bit the bullet and enabled the SOAP extension for PHP5.  Wow!  I was happily surprised.  The last SOAP code I had looked at was the old PEAR code.  It was not that attractive to me.  It required a lot of work IMO to talk SOAP.

Now, with just 3 lines of code, I can get back a nice object that has all the data I need.  Kudos to Brad …

Digg this article

There are several methods to do live MySQL database backups. These methods are either storage engine specific (InnoDB hot backup, mysqlhotcopy), or require read locks (mysqldump), or require additional hardware (backup using replication, LVM snapshot). Some of these backup methods can do backups of remote MySQL servers also. So far, there is no backup method that provides storage engine agnostic, consistent full backups of local and remote servers. Goal of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) of MySQL is to consolidate all these and future methods of MySQL backup and use the optimal method for the MySQL configuration.

One of the exciting developments in MySQL is the development of MySQL Online backup. The …

I've been following the emerging Event-Stream Processing field (also known as Streaming Database or Complex Event Processing) for a few years now. The relational database movement tamed disk-bound transactional data with a set of engineering techniques built on sound theoretical principles, and streaming databases offer to do the same for data in flight.

"Data in flight" is a broad term, encompassing signals generated by sensors, deltas generated by transaction processing, patterns recognized by algorithmic trading rules and intrusion-detection systems, and records flowing within a global enterprise's service-oriented architecture. The streaming database approach - though not currently any one product - can in principle address all of these application areas.

The relational database world fractured, for a time at least, into …

I didn't know such a thing exists.

kostja@bodhi:/usr/share/vim/vim70/syntax> ls -al mysql.vim 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16078 2006-05-24 20:16 mysql.vim

kostja@bodhi:/usr/share/vim/vim70/syntax> head -7 mysql.vim 
" Vim syntax file
" Language:     mysql
" Maintainer:   Kenneth J. Pronovici <pronovic@ieee.org>
" Last Change:  $Date: 2004/06/13 20:12:39 $
" Filenames:    *.mysql
" URL:          ftp://cedar-solutions.com/software/mysql.vim
" Note:         The definitions below are taken from the mysql user manual as of April 2002, for version 3.23

To enable it in the editor:

:set filetype=mysql

Or, in your .vimrc to highlight all .sql and .test files:

if has("autocmd")
        autocmd BufRead *.sql set filetype=mysql      
        autocmd BufRead *.test set filetype=mysql
endif

... or, taming the ORDER BY clause.
Say you want to implement a custom ordering for your queries, as an example, you want to display each customer's orders with shipped orders first, then waiting orders and open orders last.
That's ordering by the 'status' column and you can't use alphabetical ordering!
In this case you'll have to implement some kind of logic in your order by clause, and a CASE is very handy, like this:

1. SELECT * FROM SALES
2. ORDER BY
3. cust_no,
4. CASE WHEN order_status = 'shipped' THEN 1
5. WHEN order_status = 'waiting' THEN 2
6. WHEN order_status = 'open' THEN 3
7. ELSE 4
8. END;

Note how the ordering is performed on the values substituted by the CASE statement and not
for the original column values.
This example is based on Firebird's EXAMPLE.FDB database.

…

Whats is it?

ODBC Trace output (also referred to as ODBC logging) is useful when problem solving ODBC issues as it shows the calls made through the various layers of software. ODBC Trace output is often requested by support folks when asked to solve an ODBC issue so including one with a request for help is often going to lead to a faster response.

There are a number of ways, and places, to produce trace output. The two most common trace sources are;

1. DM Trace Output
2. Driver Trace Output

DM Trace Output
Trace output from the DM is usually enough to solve an ODBC issue and as such is the most interesting for an initial request for help. This trace is typically turned on/off via an ODBC GUI Administrator. On MS Windows XP you can find this program in the “Control Panel -> Administrator Tools” (you may have to turn on “Classic View” to find …

I recently got a message letting me know FreeBSD users will soon be able to install the innotop MySQL and InnoDB monitor through ports. Gentoo GNU/Linux users can find innotop in Portage.

And yes, the website is:
http://mysqlcamp.org/

Not .com

On Edd Dumbill's behalf... Call for Participation -- XTech 2007 (Paris, France. 15-18 May 2007)

Proposals for presentations and tutorials are invited for XTech 2007, Europe's premier web technologies conference. The deadline for submitting proposals is December 15th, 2006. Read the CFPs and submit proposals online.

The theme for this year's conference is "The Ubiquitous Web". As the web reaches further into our lives, we will consider the increasing ubiquity of connectivity, what it means for real world objects to connect with the web, and the increasing blurring of the lines between virtual worlds and our own.

The technologies underpinning these developments include mobile devices, RFID, Second Life, location-aware services, Google Earth and more. The issues …

By Brady Forrest

Benchmark Capital funded oDesk operates an online project marketplace for hiring and managing remote technical staff. It is free to post a job. They have 5,000 developers in their network. oDesk made two announcements today at the Web 2.0 Conference.

First, they announced the oDesk Online Testing service production launch. Over 100 free tests are available in Ajax, PHP, MySQL, .NET, Java, and XML. More than 1,400 developers have been tested so far. I wonder how this will affect the hourly rates on oDesk. Will there be oDesk study guides in the future?

Second, they announced a partnership with O'Reilly Research to analyze their data and produce …