In this blog I have repeatedly mentioned the European Parliament’s upcoming resolution on future European patent policy in general and the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) in particular. After a long and intense debate, which went mostly unnoticed by the general public, the three largest groups (international-level parties) in the EP - the conservative EPP-ED, the social democratic PES and the libertarian ALDE - yesterday sealed a pretty reasonable compromise.  Since those three groups have about 550 of the chamber’s 732 seats, it’s a mere formality for that compromise proposal to be carried by a solid majority. The vote will take place in Brussels on Thursday of next week (October 12).

Initially, the chief negotiators of EPP-ED and ALDE wanted the EP to say an unequivocal Yes to the Commission’s plans to get the EPLA ratified with the involvement of the EU. At the same time, the PES, Greens/EFA, …

There has a been and continues to be a lot of discussion on the forums for people who are not able to connect to MySQL for one reason or another. Some aspects of this issue have been dealt with, particularly Bill Karwin's article which he published on the MySQLForge Wiki, which I have linked into any number of MySQL Forum threads by now.

I should like to conduct a broader discussion, as to some users, not able to connect does not mean strictly that an initial handshake of any sort could be established with the server, but includes a far broader scope of problems ranging from the server not even being installed let alone running, scripting languages, e.g. PHP, being misconfigured, invalid credentials, or even false …

I recently took two certification MySQL 5 exams. At that time, I was on vacation, but now that I am back I would like to share with the community some advice on how to pass the exams.
Son't worry, it is not about cheating. But read on, and you'll decide if it was worth listening.

1. read the bookSo much for the ones who thought I was teaching some tricks. Nothing like that. Let me tell you why you should read the book.

• You could read the (free) online manual instead. No questions about that. If you read the whole manual, you will know all is needed to pass the exam. But you will have to read twice as much as the book (about 1300 pages of user manual instead of 672 pages of certification book).
  
• The book will tell you what is important for the exam and what isn't. True, even if the …

Applications occasionally require redesign. However, redesigning an application cannot be done in one step because the application is distributed or several versions of applications must be supported. MySQL 5.0 provides the necessary means to stealthy migrate your data. In a short overview let's look at what we plan to do:

[English readers: this is the start of a new series called "/dev/video" (current project name, may change without further notice) which targets PHP and other web application developers and covers interviews with public projects and tech talk between Mayflower employees and other people. The series will be both in English and German, this first video is in German with Thomas Bachem, Chief Architect at sevenload.de, one of Germany's hottest Web2.0 startups.]

Ich hatte am Montag die Gelegenheit, den Brückentag dazu zu nutzen, den neuen Camcorder (Sony DCR DVD-205) auszuprobieren und den Auftakt zu einer neuen Serie zu starten - wer das PHP Magazin gelesen hat, wird den Artikel zu sevenload.de gesehen …

Innodb primary key is special in many senses and I was always wondering how well MySQL is integrated with Innodb to take advantage of these special features.

Lets see which things work and which things do not:

I used the following simple table for tests:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. CREATE TABLE `innodb` (
2.   `id` int(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
3.   `a` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
4.   PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
5.   KEY `a` (`a`)
6. ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

"myisam" is same table created with MyISAM storage engine used to show difference:

MySQL Optimizer correctly knows Innodb tables is clustered by primary key in the sense it would not be faster to do external filesort than to do lookups in primary key order:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM …

I've written and spoke a lot about using short PRIMARY KEYs with Innodb tables due to the fact all other key will refer to the rows by primary key. I also recommended to use sequential primary keys so you do not end up having random primary key BTREE updates which can be very expensive.

Today I would like to share practical example when you may use long primary key with value distribution far from sequential.

For one of the projects I had the task to store meta data about thumbnails for images retrieved from various web sites in the Internet. Thumbnails themselves were stored on the disk of course but meta data such as original image sizes, file size as well as thumbnail location on the disk were stored in the database:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. CREATE TABLE `imagecache` (
2.   `url` varchar(255) character SET latin1 NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
3.   `thumb_width` …

This morning is rich for troubles
Some PHP script was to act with MySQL database, but it failed with: “Warning: mysql_connect(): Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL … Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client“.
I’ve digged a bit and solution was very simple -
SET PASSWORD FOR user@localhost = OLD_PASSWORD(?newpassword?);
This updates password to use old authentication protocol.

It now appears that our fearless leaders are pushing through legislation that will make it easier than ever to remove your freedom from you.  Mr. Bush is wanting the ability to jail anyone he wants for as long as we wants without charging them.  This is in addition to several other points in this new legislation that are all allegedly designed to help win the war on terror.  This is terrible legislation and nothing good can come from it.  However, my point is the hypocrisy of the left.  They will have no trouble declaring that everyone has a right to universal healthcare, a right to an education, and a right to a home.  We as American citizens have none of these rights.   While government run universal healthcare would be a deathblow to this country, privately run universal healthcare would be a welcome privilege.  So, too, is an education or a home.  …

SoonR is a hot new startup company that enables users of mobile devices (any mobile phone, smartphone or wireless PDA) to access all of the information they have on their PC.  By installing SoonR client software on your PC you enable access to your desktop files, contacts and even the Skype service from your phone.  You can access documents on your PC from your phone and forward them to others while away from your PC.  You can eliminate expensive long distance charges using Skype from your mobile phone.  How cool is that?  The basic SoonR service is free and they are also working on premium services that will provide additional levels of security and availability.

Not surprisingly, SoonR has been growing quickly.  Their initial prototype version was built using SQL Server running on Windows.  The developers had a lot of experience using Microsoft technology …