Here is a simple function that can help coping with wrong database design, when you have a mix of NULLs and blank fields meaning the same, no value, which they shouldn't.

1. DELIMITER $$
2. DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `test`.`is_initial` $$
3. CREATE FUNCTION `test`.`is_initial` (f varchar(255)) RETURNS BOOL
4. BEGIN
5. SET @is_initial = false;
6. CASE f
7. WHEN NULL THEN SET @is_initial = TRUE;
8. WHEN '' THEN SET @is_initial = TRUE;
9. ELSE SET @is_initial = FALSE;
10. END CASE;
11. RETURN @is_initial;
12. END $$
13. DELIMITER ;

The wires are ablaze with news that some Los Angeles members of the Boy Scouts of America can earn the "Respect Copyrights" patch.  Apparently this patch is a product of teamwork between the BSA and the MPAA and involves such activities as learning about P2P file sharing systems, attend a movie and sit through all the credits and later list all the people that might be hurt by stealing the movie, along with several other requirements.  There has been a steady stream of negative comments about this story including one along the lines of "the MPAA is recruiting the BSA to do it's dirty work".

First, this story is not an attack on the BSA and so I will not dwell on my many years of service in the BSA except to say that I have been an assistance ScoutMaster and currently serve as ScoutMaster and know the BSA to be the finest club for young men on the planet.

Second, I want to say that I agree with the stories I've read …

And, the winner is……

Adam Ritter, of Nashville, Tennessee has been selected by Proven Scaling for a free ride to MySQL Camp!

Adam’s enthusiasm and very quick (within the first few hours of my original post), yet courteous and complete entry impressed us. His excitement to learn, and professionalism sealed the deal. Here’s an excerpt from his entry:

My name is Adam Ritter and I’m a recent Computer Science graduate from UT Knoxville. I’m currently looking for a job and I realized that being a DBA is what I want to do. I had started working with MySQL back in a course on Database Design and Management course I took in school. This course started the fire inside of me but unfortunately, it was over all too soon and I was left wanting to learn more. I’ve …

So what happened? Well, two days ago I noticed connection issues while trying to create a blog post on MySQL?s new enterprise offering (more on that later). I sent in a support request to Tera-Byte, my colocation provider. After a while I checked and noticed that I could connect via SSH, but that the server was rejecting my private key and my password.This had me concerned so I called Tera-Byte and asked what was happening. Turns out that they had mistakenly deleted my virtual private server. But they were kind enough to not only increase my new virtual private server?s memory from 360 megs to 512, but also credit me one month?s fees. I was in shock at this news and thanked the tech for the upgrade and refund and hung up.After I got off the phone I skipped past the denial and bargaining stages of grief and arrived at anger. So, calling Tera-Byte back up to ask how exactly this …

I recently published an article on O'Reilly about monitoring tools for MySQL. Of course I believe innotop is the best in its class, so I mentioned it. But I also recently added some features to innotop, and made a stability fix too.

Slashdot | MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos Answers Your Questions:

Its an interesting interview. And as Stewart pointed out, it seems that this must be the first Slashdot comment in where I get named fully. Heh. Kudos to Julien :)

Actually if you continue reading on the comments, you’ll notice that Marten responds to a lot of the threads - that in itself is impressive, right? When was the last time you saw a CEO write on Slashdot?

Okay, back to your daily grind… lets hope that doesn’t involve Slashdot.

I recently published an article on O’Reilly about monitoring tools for MySQL. Of course I believe innotop is the best in its class, so I mentioned it. But I also recently added some features to innotop, and made a stability fix too. Innotop upgrade: new features, stability Now you can easily monitor open tables with innotop. Just get the latest version (your configuration file will be upgraded seamlessly) and press the ‘O’ key (that’s capital “oh”).

Linux Desktop Vendor Xandros Reorganizes, eWeek, Steven Vaughan-Nichols (Article)

Organization to pay Debian developers begins work, Linux.com, Bruce Byfield (Article)

Compiere User Community Splits; Code Forks, eWeek, Peter Galli (Article)

MySQL CEO Marten Mickos Answers Your Questions, Slashdot, Robin Miller (Article)

Enterprise 2.0 needs Digital Foundation, Enter The JBoss Matrix, Marc Fleury (Blog)

…

Slashdot | MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos Answers Your Questions

I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve been mentioned by name in the 1st commet to a /. article. Yay me!? :)

For some time, MySQL has been using a unit test framework based on the Test Anything Protocol (TAP) used by Perl and PHP.

The framework consists of a C library that can be used to generate TAP output suitable for processing with, for example, the Test::Harness Perl module. In order to allow Test::Harness to execute the compiled programs, a simple wrapper called unit.pl exists in the unittest/ directory in the MySQL server tree.

The documentation for the MyTAP API is available at http://www.kindahl.net/mytap/doc/, until I can find another home for it.

All comments are welcome.