Like many other in the “Hacks” series, this book offers 100 tips and tricks for making the most of your database through querying.

See more information at:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/sqlhks/

It is about to be published (Nov. 2006). I believe you can order the final cut (as opposed to the “rough cut”), although last week they were still advertising it as a rough cut…now you can order it online, in a print book or to read on Safari.

As a technical editor for this book, I have read through all of it (or at least, all of it that was there in the draft I received) and I can say it is definitely worth the $30 USD. Most of the examples at the time I read it were in MySQL format (though they might have changed that to be more fair to other databases); while it has some material for DB2 and Access, it’s mostly a book for MySQL, Oracle and SQL …

fulltext, fulltext search, match, text text search

Life is slowly returning to order once again. I am attempting to slog through almost 1,000 messages in my MySQL folder, most of which are list questions that have already been answered, so it does not take long to get through them. However, occasionally I find a question that has not been answered, or a gem of a question that I want to expose to a wider audience.

This question fell under both categories. Basically, someone wanted stopwords in other languages, and wondered if there was a place to get them. (English stopwords …

Next week we'll have two major customer conferences in Europe, featuring some of our most talented MySQLers on best practices, performance tuning, high availability and product roadmap including some important announcements for enterprise customers.  There will also be presentations from executives, customers as well as from our partner Unisys.  Space is limited, so be sure to sign up in advance. 

• London October 17 - Hilton London Paddington
• Munich October 19 - Hilton Munich Park

I haven't had the chance to get back to blogging lately. This really is a quandry - there is so much going on at Pentaho and around the Pentaho community, I have so much to blog about... but there is so much going on at Pentaho, I haven't found the time to blog! :) So today's a fun day, because I get to catch you all up on so many great things that are happening to and for the Pentaho community.

SourceForge.net Project of the Month
Let's start with Pentaho being honored as the SourceForge Project of the Month. If you have worked with open source for even a short while, you have heard of SourceForge.net. It is THE place to go to download open source software and source code. I have heard the number of projects hosted on SourceForge.net to be somewhere around 130,000, so to be chosen and highlighted as …

Oprofile is a profiling tool that requires no instrumentation and can profile an entire system. Binaries with symbol tables (-g compiled binaries) and an uncompressed Kernel with symbol table are helpful.

Oprofile is capable of monitoring and analyzing a running -g compiled mysqld and can tell you which functions are using the most CPU time.

Sample output:
CODE:CPU: CPU with timer interrupt, speed 0 MHz (estimated)
Profiling through timer interrupt
samples  %        image name               symbol name
…

At our days there is a lot of books on different languages, technologies, databases and etc, and sometimes it is a difficult to make a good choice. As for me I don’t like books with humor, curious cases with author’s pets and other flood. I don’t like and I do not want to spend my time for reading such things. Also I do not want to spend time for incompetent authors. So from all MySQL books I have ever seen I think only two are really good enough: official documentation ? MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide. And no matter your MySQL experience you’ll find a lot of new and usefull things.

When you are connecting to MySQL with native mysql command-line tool you can specify in parameters login and password.

But mysql.exe -u root -p password

Will not work for as expected - it will ask you password once again. Really there should not be spaces between -p option and it’s value. The correct usage is:

mysql.exe -u root -ppassword

I can not see reasons for such behavior, really, but it works in such way and we can do nothing with it.



The other thing I’ve thought about is to make mysql command-line client to interact with MySQL-server through the proxy-server. And why not? Sometimes we are behind the usual proxy and can not connect to MySQL. The other side of the proxy is that we could connect to MySQL from anonymous location

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).

MySQL AB today announced that the Swedish branch of International Data Group (IDG), the world?s largest publisher of IT-related information, is migrating all its online news services to a new content management system built upon the MySQL open source database. The group?s two main Web sites -- IDG.se and ComputerSweden.idg.se -- have already completed migration, with the remaining Swedish IDG properties lined up to follow.

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 …