I get emails and calls all the time from salespeople (usually from my company's competitors) looking for a job. They're watching the ground drop out from under them as open source infilitrates their accounts and starts nudging them out. Salespeople go where the money is, so they're calling me (and my colleagues at MySQL, Red Hat, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, etc.).

One call last Thursday was particularly funny. He was perplexed by how we make money, given how low our prices are.

"How do you stay in business without more direct salespeople like me?" he asked.

My response?

Specifically because we don't have more expensive sales people like him. :-)

Verbal one-upmanship aside, these conversations tend to confirm my belief that the proprietary world still doesn't grok just what deep potty it's in. (I have four kids, so I can say the word "potty" without …

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Ex-web.de Colleague Markus asked me: QUOTE:Because ... we are now changing dedicated server providers, I have already updated the Gentoo base system. Since as we are already changing everything, we might as well now migrate from MySQL 4 to 5.

So my question is: Shall I be switching from latin1 to utf8? Or should I be staying with latin1? I have been writing a german language article on character sets in MySQL and this is the translation of it.

Continue reading "Handling character sets"

We open sourcerors are fond of poking fun of Microsoft. Blue Screen of Death, bugs galore, etc. I guess the biggest software company on the planet is ripe for abuse.

But in an interesting post from TechWeb, it appears that some within the open source community actually think there might be something to be learned from the Great Satan.

Mozilla developers who spent several days this week with the Windows Vista team at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash. campus said that they're considering implementing a security feature in the upcoming OS to better protect future versions of Firefox from attack.

Vladimir Vukievi, who was one of the Mozilla team to take up Microsoft's August offer of Vista assistance, said that Vista's "Low Integrity Mode" might make Firefox less susceptible to exploits....

"We spent a while talking to members of both the …

It is really noticable that the summer is over now. While it was quite silent during the past few months, the last quarter of the year will be packed with conferences and events again.

And we will contribute our share to it, too: in addition to sending speakers to various upcoming events, MySQL will also host two European MySQL User conferences next week. The MySQL Northern Europe Customer Conference will take place in London (UK), on Tuesday, October 17th 2006. Two days later, the MySQL Central Europe Customer Conference will be held in Munich (Germany) on Thursday, October 19th 2006. Both are one-day events, with two tracks of talks in parallel. The sessions will be held by both MySQL employees as well as customers, talking about their experiences in using MySQL …

It is really noticable that the summer is over now. While it was quite silent during the past few months, the last quarter of the year will be packed with conferences and events again.

And we will contribute our share to it, too: in addition to sending speakers to various upcoming events, MySQL will also host two European MySQL User conferences next week. The MySQL Northern Europe Customer Conference will take place in London (UK), on Tuesday, October 17th 2006. Two days later, the MySQL Central Europe Customer Conference will be held in Munich (Germany) on Thursday, October 19th 2006. Both are one-day events, with two tracks of talks in parallel. The sessions will be held by both MySQL employees as well as customers, talking about their experiences in using MySQL …

It has only been two years since Tim O'Reilly coined the phrase Web 2.0 and even shorter time since Jesse James Garret created the shortcut AJAX for the base technology of modern internet applications. In this period the nature of web applications underwent a major change in user experience and development methods.

It is the age of integrated communication. Content is created using rich interfaces by users for others users, collected by feed aggregators, collaboratively bookmarked, tagged, complemented by maps and delivered as a service for mash-ups. A good portion of this services a supplied by the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Python / Perl). Since every technology has its dark companion, new security risks arose, and others grew more important.

If you are developing Web 2.0 and AJAX applications and want to know about the old and new security risks, …

Si Chen, lead/core developer for opentaps (formerly known as Sequioa ERP), talked with us recently, and there’s an interview available. opentaps is an Enterprise Resource Planning solution, which is rather scalable and has a lot of functionality. It uses MySQL, of course. Give it a twirl!

Do you use MySQL for your application that you develop? Want to talk about it? Drop me a line at colin[AT]mysql.com.

This article shows how to find duplicated rows in a database table. This is a very common beginner question. The basic technique is straightforward. I’ll also show some variations, such as how to find “duplicates in two columns” (a recent question on the #mysql IRC channel). How to find duplicated rows The first step is to define what exactly makes a row a duplicate of another row. Most of the time this is easy: they have the same value in some column.

Yesterday I had fun time repairing 1.5Tb ext3 partition, containing many millions of files. Of course it should have never happened - this was decent PowerEdge 2850 box with RAID volume, ECC memory and reliable CentOS 4.4 distribution but still it did. We had "journal failed" message in kernel log and filesystem needed to be checked and repaired even though it is journaling file system which should not need checks in normal use, even in case of power failures. Checking and repairing took many hours especially as automatic check on boot failed and had to be manually restarted.

Same may happen with Innodb tables. They are designed to never crash, surviving power failures and even partial page writes but still they can get corrupted because of MySQL bugs, OS Bugs or hardware bugs, misconfiguration or failures.

Sometimes corruption kind be mild, so ALTER TABLE to rebuild the table fixes it. Sometimes table needs to be dropped and …

I left Brisbane about 1 month ago, not knowing exactly when I would come back. Now I think I know that answer - I don't know if I will come back in a permanent sense for quite a while (but I'll be back for Christmas, and a wedding early next year). Bangkok is not my final stop though - I'm likely going to flee this place in another month; the night-life is pretty cool, but it corrupts you. Things that you don't approve of are happening in public. You don't see them at first, but once someone points them out to you, you can't miss them.

I've met a couple of good buddies now. Which surprises me, I thought that that would be the difficult part. There seems to be a bit of comradely between the expats. I came here by choice, to experience something a little different. A lot of the guys came here to work, and their company sent them to train local Thai people. There are some cultural value differences that mean that the thai people need the …