Having gotten my daughter a new laptop to take off to college where she starts as a freshman in a couple of weeks, I now have her old laptop, still quite serviceable albeit older, larger, heavier, etc. So I set about setting it up as a system where I can do BK pulls of various MySQL versions, be continuously running and testing new pulls from the 5.1 and 5.2 trees.

The first thing I did was to take the laptop, a Toshiba Satellite with a 30GB hard drive, Celeron processor and 256MB RAM, reformat it and install Slackware 10.2. This is my preferred operating system except for a couple of systems that are rather low on my priority to convert, where it's vital to keep them running as Windows because of a number of applications. I set up the following partitions:

hda1  6.6GB /
hda2  6.6GB /usr
hda3  512MB (swap)
hda4 13.3GB /usr/local

The swap partititon is my standard formula, double the size of the RAM, …

I’m headed to Thailand in September (along with my friend and MySQL colleague Morgan) for an extended working holiday. It’ll be my third time there, and each time I visit, I fall more in love with the place. The culture is fascinating, the food is marvelous, and the people are some of the nicest I’ve met anywhere.

Since we’re planning to be there for a while, we figure that we can take a little time out from work and play to do some Open Source evangelising and networking. We’ve already contacted Open Source Thailand about the possibility of participating in any events they’ve got planned for Software Freedom Day. (Actually, Morgan got the ball rolling on that.)

However, we’re not limited to that particular event. Either one of …

The answer to the question posed in the title used to be, “Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X - anywhere else, and you’re on your own, mate. And forget about running it on Windows.”

The answer is now more like, “If it’s one of the Unices, chances are that we support running Cluster on it. Windows still need not apply.”

In fact, it might be easier now just to list the platforms we definitely don’t support for using Cluster, which as far as I know are these:

• Minix
• Plan 9
• BeOS
• Windows

(To see what’s officially supported by MySQL for Cluster - and to what extent - check out this page that’s maintained by our illustrious Support Department: Supported Platforms for MySQL Cluster.)

However, if you can get a MySQL client running on one …

The MySQL open source database has become the database-of-choice for the new generation of highly-popular Internet companies pioneering new "Web 2.0" innovation. Leading Web 2.0 sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Habbo Hotel, Linden Labs, CyWorld, Technorati, Facebook, FeedBurner, Feedster, Wikipedia, Digg, LiveJournal, Mixi.jp, SimpleStar, PhotoBucket, 37signals, del.icio.us, Trulia, Neopets, and Zimbra have all selected MySQL to power their explosive growth - due to the database's speed and ability to easily "scale-out" on low-cost hardware.

I wrote an article a while back about how to order updates in MySQL so you don’t violate a unique index. I said I’d write another article on how to swap numbers in a sequence with a unique index. This is that article, but I’m going to make it a little more generic: how to reverse a (possibly ordered) sequence. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, wondering if there’s a way I can do it in-place in one statement (I like to pile challenge upon difficulty).

Few days ago I wrote an article about using UNION to implement loose index scan.

First I should mention double IN also works same way so you do not have to use the union. So changing query to:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> SELECT sql_no_cache name FROM people WHERE age IN(18,19,20) AND zip IN (12345,12346, 12347);
2. +----------------------------------+
3. | name                             |
4. +----------------------------------+
5. | ed4481336eb9adca222fd404fa15658e |
6. | 888ba838661aff00bbbce114a2a22423 |
7. +----------------------------------+
8. 2 rows IN SET (0.00 sec)
9.  
10. mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT …

Read a NewsForge article today about how the two lead developers of the GPU Gnutella client have amended the GPL to include a provision that bans the software's use by military organizations. Specifically, provision states:

the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed.

Interestingly, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software movement, doesn't think distributors have the right to restrict the software user's activities by restricting the software's use in this way, though he said "Nonetheless, I don't think the requirement is entirely vacuous, so we cannot disregard it as legally void." It will be fascinating to see how this plays out, as it has further-ranging …

So, there has been quite a bit of interest so far in MySQL Camp, being held on November 10th through 12th in Silicon Valley. The venue is yet to be decided, but there have been a number of options on the table, including possibly Yahoo!, the University of Palo Alto, and, more recently, some talks with friends over at Google. Also, the proposed session topics are filling in nicely, with a nice mix of technical and non-technical content.

Also, I've had a number of people contact me to inquire what exactly is this whole MySQL camp thing about. So I thought I would share some thoughts about what the event is and is not, for those of you unfamiliar with the concept.

MySQL Camp is an unconference, as opposed to a formal, …

BusinessWeek August 16 issue cover feature is called "Valley Boys" describing the new breed of Web entrepreneurs.  The story features Kevin Rose's www.digg.com as well as other Web 2.0 startups such as FaceBook, HotOrNot, YouTube, SixApart, Del.icio.us (whose name they mis-spell repeatedly), all of whom are running MySQL to scale their business without scaling their costs. 

The story describes how the dynamics have changed with regards to venture capital funding …

When I wrote this post about invalid utf8 characters I needed a way to convert the mysql message into a real identifier for me to take a look at. Below is a quick and dirty script to figure out the bad rows.

I wrote the script below in literally 2 mins. It's really basic and basically just CROSS JOINs two versions of the table one in utf8 the other in latin1 and reports back which string column is not correct. I haven't cleaned the script up, it's ugly and for my purposes will only exist for a short period of time.

test.$TABLE = is the original table latin1 for instance
- use mysqlimport this forces data to not get converted to latin1 from utf8 by setting the character set to binary (i.e. do no convert)

$DB.$TABLE = is the new utf8 table.

#!/usr/bin/php …