Glom is an interesting graphical database front-end I've been meaning to try out for some time. Someone asked about graphical database front-ends on the #mysql IRC channel recently, and that prompted me to install Glom and learn how to use it. My overall impressions? It lands squarely in the middle of its target audience's needs, but still has a quirk here and there. With a bit of polish it will be a fine product, and it's already a winner over Microsoft Access and Filemaker, two similar programs with which you might be familiar. In this article I'll walk through installing and configuring Glom, a simple database design, a quick peek under the hood, an archaeologist's experiences using it, and give my opinions about Glom in detail.

Starting September I'm leaving MySQL to partner with Peter on practice as well as work with him on some Web projects.

I really enjoyed working under Peter's guidance while working for MySQL and it is great we now can work together as a partners. I thanks MySQL for two great years I had.

I also hopefully will have more time to work Open Source projects. I have number of ideas in mind which we'll now have time to implement. I'm going to implement and adapat several patches that improve MySQL usabalitity and performance.

Finally I will continue work on MySQL and LAMP Performance analyzes and benchmarks. We need to know how MySQL performs on different platforms and where bottlenecks are to be able to offer leading experience in MySQL Performance Optimization.
If you have some wishes what you'd want to see in benchmarks just let me know.

I already wrote couple of weeks ago I keep most of my systems on MySQL 4.1 still as they will not benefit from MySQL 5.0 features anyway while I do not want to likely loose a bit of performance and possibly deal with new bugs and changes introduced in MySQL 5.0 (You never know where to expect problems, ie some people reported JOIN breaking by upgrading to 5.0). Yes this stuff is in upgrade notes but if you run third party software it does not really help.

Today I had the yet another confirmation new bugs can be added even with minor updates and they could happen even pretty late in the product life time. In this case during 4.1 upgrade which is old stable version which is not as actively changed as 5.0

I upgraded MySQL 4.1.19 to 4.1.21 couple of weeks ago …

MySQL has useful extention to the GROUP BY operation: function GROUP_CONCAT:

GROUP_CONCAT(expr) - This function returns a string result with the concatenated non-NULL values from a group.

Where it can be useful?

For example to get PHP array without looping inside PHP:

Table:

PLAIN TEXT CODE:

1. CREATE TABLE services (
2. id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
3. client_id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
4. KEY (id));
5. INSERT INTO services
6. VALUES (1,1),(1,2),(3,5),(3,6),(3,7);
7.  
8. SELECT id,client_id FROM services WHERE id = 3;
9. +----+-----------+
10. | id | client_id |
11. +----+-----------+
12. |  3 |         5 |
13. |  3 |  …

Yesterday I found out that the MySQL books sold at Foyles in London, England, were not in the 'Database' section. Instead they could be found just under and next the Apache and PHP books.

I was rather disappointed. You see a whole rack of Oracle, PostgreSQL, Firebird, DB2, .. but no MySQL where (I guess) most people would first look.

The two guys from Foyles told me that this was already like that before they got there. It was probably because of the LAMP thing, one told me, that the MySQL books end up …

...is a pain. Most hotels "kind of" have broadband Internet access, where broadband is defined as an Ethernet cable or wireless. Usually it's ridiculously expensive, like $5 per hour or $20 for 24 hours. It bears no relation to actual cost. It makes dining from the minibar look cheap ;-)

I was just browsing for a hotel in Sydney (training course next week), and spotted this:Broadband available (additional charges apply, PC must have PCI slot)I know not what to say.

I have previously reported in this blog how certain European politicians and patent bureaucrats are trying, once again, to give software patents a stronger legal basis in Europe. On 12 July, the European Commission held a public hearing in Brussels, and the European Parliament is shooting for a vote on a patent policy resolution toward the end of this month.

If you’d like to know why the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) is, among other bad things, a road to software patents, please have a look at this two-page diagram (PDF file). And if you’re subsequently interested in some more background information and facts, this three-page briefing document (PDF) makes some additional reading. If you’re …

Just to remind you: tonight at 19:00 we'll meet at our usual place - please see me previous announcement for details. According to the RSVPs I received, we should be around 20 people. Paul McCullagh will talk about the PBXT Storage Engine, so this sounds like a fun evening. See you there!

Just to remind you: tonight at 19:00 we'll meet at our usual place - please see me previous announcement for details. According to the RSVPs I received, we should be around 20 people. Paul McCullagh will talk about the PBXT Storage Engine, so this sounds like a fun evening. See you there!

Spent some time on a tool for converting T-SQL stored procedures to MySQL during the weekend. It is looking quite good, but new problems keep popping up all the time. Like the differences in WHILE statement syntax, different naming of database objects etc.

Guess at some time I will have to be satisfied with a tool that leaves som problems unsolved, but not quite yet... I'll spend some more time on it before I release it.