Almost a Ripley’s Believe It or Not. An prior data science student told me that his new IT department setup a Windows component that let him connect his Excel Spreadsheets to their production MySQL database without a password. Intrigued, I asked if it was a MySQL Connector/ODBC Data Source Configuration, or DSN (Data Source Name)?

He wasn’t sure, so I asked him to connect to PowerShell and run the following command:

Get-Item -Path Registry::HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBC.INI\MySQL

It returned something like this (substituting output from one of my test systems):

    Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBC.INI


Name                           Property
----                           --------
MySQL                          Driver      : C:\Program Files\MySQL\Connector ODBC 8.0\myodbc8w.dll
                               DESCRIPTION : MySQL ODBC Connector
                               SERVER      : …

I’m always updating VMs, and I was gratified to notice that there’s a Fedora arm64 ISO. If you’re interested in it, you can download the Live Workstation from here or the Fedora Server from here.

Unfortunately, I only have macOS running on i7 and i9 Intel Processors. It would be great to hear back how it goes for somebody one of the new Apple M1 chip.

I typically install the workstation version because it meets my needs to run MySQL and other native Linux development tools. However, the server version is also available. Fedora is a wonderful option, as a small footprint for testing things on my MacBookPro.

We had an interesting set of questions regarding the REGEXP comparison operator in MySQL today in both sections of Database Design and Development. They wanted to know the default behavior.

For example, we built a little movie table so that we didn’t change their default sakila example database. The movie table was like this:

CREATE TABLE movie
( movie_id     int unsigned primary key auto_increment
, movie_title  varchar(60)) auto_increment=1001;

Then, I inserted the following rows:

INSERT INTO movie 
( movie_title )
VALUES
 ('The King and I')
,('I')
,('The I Inside')
,('I am Legend');

Querying all results with this query:

SELECT * FROM movie;

It returns the following results:

+----------+----------------+
| movie_id | movie_title    |
+----------+----------------+
|     1001 | The King and I |
|     1002 | I              |
|     1003 | The I Inside   |
|     1004 | I am Legend …

Saturday, I posted how to use Microsoft ODBC DSN to connect to MySQL. Somebody didn’t like the fact that the PowerShell program failed to write a *.csv file to disk because the program used the Write-Host command to write to the content of the query to the console.

I thought that approach was a better as an example. However, it appears that it wasn’t because not everybody knows simple redirection. The original program can transfer the console output to a file, like:

powershell .\MySQLODBC.ps1 > output.csv

So, the first thing you need to do is add a parameter list, like:

param (
  [Parameter(Mandatory)][string]$fileName
)

Anyway, it’s trivial to demonstrate how to modify the PowerShell program to write to a disk. You should also create a virtual PowerShell drive before writing the file. That’s because you can change the physical directory anytime you want with minimal changes to rest of …

This post explains and demonstrates how to install, configure, and use the MySQL’s ODBC libraries and a DSN (Data Source Name) to connect your Microsoft PowerShell programs to a locally or remotely installed MySQL database. After you’ve installed the MySQL ODBC library, use Windows search field to find the ODBC Data Sources dialog and run it as administrator.

There are four steps to setup, test, and save your ODBC Data Source Name (DSN) for MySQL. You can click on the images on the right to launch them in a more readable format or simply read the instructions.

MySQL ODBC Setup Steps

1. Click the SystemDSN tab to see he view which is …

A student wanted a better example of writing a MySQL Persistent Stored Module (PSM) that maintains transactional scope across a couple tables. Here’s the one I wrote about ten years ago to build the MySQL Video Store model. It looks I neglected to put it out there before, so here it is for reference.

-- Conditionally drop procedure if it exists.
DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS contact_insert;

-- Reset the delimiter so that a semicolon can be used as a statement and block terminator.
DELIMITER $$

SELECT 'CREATE PROCEDURE contact_insert' AS "Statement";
CREATE PROCEDURE contact_insert
( pv_member_type         CHAR(12)
, pv_account_number      CHAR(19)
, pv_credit_card_number  CHAR(19)
, pv_credit_card_type    CHAR(12)
, pv_first_name          CHAR(20)
, pv_middle_name         CHAR(20)
, pv_last_name           CHAR(20)
, pv_contact_type        CHAR(12)
, pv_address_type        CHAR(12)
, pv_city                CHAR(30)
, pv_state_province      CHAR(30)
, …

In MySQL, the @@sql_mode parameter should generally use ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY. If it doesn’t include it and you don’t have the ability to change the database parameters, you can use a MySQL PSM (Persistent Stored Module), like:

Create the set_full_group_by procedure:

-- Drop procedure conditionally on whether it exists already.
DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS set_full_group_by;

-- Reset delimter to allow semicolons to terminate statements.
DELIMITER $$

-- Create a procedure to verify and set connection parameter.
CREATE PROCEDURE set_full_group_by()
  LANGUAGE SQL
  NOT DETERMINISTIC
  SQL SECURITY DEFINER
  COMMENT 'Set connection parameter when not set.'
BEGIN

  /* Check whether full group by is set in the connection and
     if unset, set it in the scope of the connection. */
  IF NOT EXISTS
    (SELECT NULL
     WHERE  REGEXP_LIKE(@@SQL_MODE,'ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY'))
  THEN
    SET SQL_MODE=(SELECT CONCAT(@@sql_mode,',ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY'));
  END IF; …

I always get interesting feedback on some posts. On my test case for discovering the STR_TO_DATE function’s behavior, the comment was tragically valid. I failed to cleanup after my test case. That was correct, and I should have dropped param table and the two procedures.

While appending the drop statements is the easiest, I thought it was an opportunity to have a bit of fun and write another procedure that will cleanup test case tables within the test_month_name procedure. Here’s sample dynamic drop_table procedure that you can use in other MySQL stored procedures:

CREATE PROCEDURE drop_table
( table_name  VARCHAR(64))
BEGIN
 
  /* Declare a local variable for the SQL statement. */
  DECLARE stmt VARCHAR(1024);
 
  /* Set a session variable with two parameter markers. */
  SET @SQL := CONCAT('DROP TABLE ',table_name);
 
  /* Check if the …

As many know, I’ve adopted Learning SQL by Alan Beaulieu as a core reference for my database class. Chapter 7 in the book focuses on data generation, manipulation, and conversion.

The last exercise question in my check of whether they read the chapter and played with some of the discussed functions is:

1. Use one or more temporal function to write a query that convert the ’29-FEB-2024′ string value into a default MySQL date format. The result should display:

   +--------------------+
   | mysql_default_date |
   +--------------------+
   | 2024-02-29         |
   +--------------------+
   1 row in set, 1 warning (0.00 sec)
   

If you’re not familiar with the behavior of MySQL functions, this could look like a difficult problem to solve. If you’re risk inclined you would probably try the STR_TO_DATE function but if you’re not risk inclined the description of the %m specifier might suggest you …

Sometimes you hear from some new developers that MySQL only makes case insensitive string comparisons. One of my students showed me their test case that they felt proved it:

SELECT STRCMP('a','A') WHERE 'a' = 'A';

Naturally, it returns 0, which means:

• The values compared by the STRCMP() function makes a case insensitive comparison, and
• The WHERE clause also compares strings case insensitively.

As a teacher, you’re gratified that the student took the time to build their own use cases. However, in this case I had to explain that while he was right about the STRCMP() function and the case insensitive comparison the student used in the WHERE clause was a choice, it wasn’t the only option. The student was wrong to conclude that MySQL couldn’t make case sensitive string comparisons.

I modified his sample by adding the required BINARY keyword for a case sensitive comparison in …