Assume that you have a list of numeric values mixed with numeric 
values appended with characters - like 2a, 12, 5b, 5a, 10, 11, 1, 4b.



Sorting on a list like this would usually end up so:

mysql> SELECT version
-> FROM version_sorting
-> ORDER BY version;
+---------+
| version |
+---------+
| 1       |
| 10      |
| 11      |
| 12      |
| 2a      |
| 4b      |
| 5a      |
| 5b      |
+---------+
8 rows in set (0.03 sec)

To sort the list based on the numeric values, simply do this:

mysql> SELECT version
-> FROM version_sorting
-> ORDER BY CAST(version AS UNSIGNED), version;
+---------+
| version |
+---------+
| 1       |
| 2a      |
| 4b …

I've seen a lot of SQL code that uses an IN clause as a place to put a variable number of parameters, allowing the query to be more flexible. There are several downsides to this technique. This article discusses those downsides and explains how to avoid them.

Finally got to capturing, editing, and exporting the video from the June Boston MySQL meetup. This month Sheeri did a presentation on storing images in MySQL.

The video is up on Google, and here and here in Quicktime.

Thanks to Martin at kbglob for donating bandwidth.

This blog has been added to the MySQL developer zone!

You can reach it by going to the MySQL website and clicking Developer Zone -> blogs. This brings you to the Planet MySQL, which now contains this blog.

You can also go there directly by following this link: Planet MySQL

Blog: http://sqlbusrt.blogspot.com/

Project website: http://sqlbusrt.sourceforge.net/

Marc Fleury is giving the opening remarks at today's OSBC London, and is talking about the rise of open source. As Marc said, it's no longer a question of "Why?", but rather of "How?" with regard to open source. Open source is not going away - it's only going to thrive and dominate.

A few interesting points:

1. Debt to IBM. He talked a bit about the debt we owe to IBM for getting open source started with its $1 billion commitment to Linux, but noted that IBM seems conflicted now on that initial support for open source. It has a range of software businesses that compete with open source, rather than leverage it, in his words. True enough. In a company the size of IBM, you never get a single, consistent vision.

2. Bottom-up and top-down phenomenon: the system administrators are driving adoption from the "bottom," whereas CIOs are pushing for adoption …

Larry Ellison, billionaire CEO and founder of Oracle corporation has cancelled his $115 million gift to Harvard University.  Ellison, a college drop out, had pledged the funding to Harvard president Larry Summers in order to establish a global health foundation in his name.  Ellison is estimated by Forbes to be the 15th richest man with assets worth $16 billion. 

In late 2005, as part of an insider trading settlement, Ellison agreed to donate $100 million to a charity of his choice.  He chose his own Ellison Medical Foundation and has contributed $5 million to it, according to an Oracle spokesman.

• LA Times: Oracle's Ellison …

OK, anyone who's done any web development has eventually come across the choices one must make regarding how to handle sessions in your web applications. While there are a variety of methods of handling session interaction, file and cookie-based session management eventually reach a limit in the number of users that can be supported, as well as limitations involving web server farms, load balancing, and state management. To achieve scalability in session management, especially across a web server farm, a database is often used.

Jimmy Guerrero, senior product manager at MySQL, is giving a webinar tomorrow on scaling session management with MySQL Cluster. I, for one, am going to be attending, and I hope to see a number of community folks in the list of participants. It shoud be …

I recently was given a copy of O'Reilly's Baseball Hacks and have really enjoyed digging into a deeper level of understanding baseball. Yes, I watch a fair amount of baseball, but I'm only beginning to understand some of the strategies that come into play during the game (e.g. pitching to a batter or positioning the players on the field).

A few hacks of note:

• Hack #1: Score a Baseball Game - I never knew how scoring a game worked, very usefull to know how the stats are recorded.
• Hack #4: Follow Pitches During the Game - this is a great introduction to learning what goes on as the pitcher faces each batter, the hack also includes ways to identify the various types of pitches and pitch locations.
• Hack #8, 10, 16, 18 20 and many more - use MySQL to import, store, crunch, query and present your baseball data.
• Hack #13: …

So, I've been doing a bunch of coding on MySQL Forge over the last week, and I've added a number of new features to the Forge application. Some of the new features/changes include:

• Ability to add a project, with categories, and tags, in a single step, making it easier than ever to add new projects to the directory
• A whole new interface for tagging projects and code snippets, including the ability to remove existing tags and a review process which attempts to standardize the tags to remove redundancy. (NOTE: You now must be logged in to add tags to a project.
• A new tabbed UI for viewing project and snippet details
• Ability to copy snippet code source directly in the interface (yes, that's for you, Roland Bouman! )
• A project membership approval process. This replaces the flawed contributor implementation I devised before, …

I can not picture what $31 billion dollars means for one individual to have. I've done enough budgets in my life to understand millions of dollars, and I can grasp how entire companies run on billions of dollars, but $31 billion dollars resting with one individual is not something I can easily wrap my brain around. One decision with that much money, spend here, invest there, pull money from this account... can cause thousands of people to shuffle about.

Adding that sort of wealth to one foundation will influence our society in ways that today we can not comprehend. When I look at libraries, I look for the touch of Carnegie. His wealth long endures past his death and the death of the other industrialists of his time, but I believe the Gates Foundation will surpass them all. The social and economic power that this foundation wields is amazing.

I do not have anything in particular to say about the future of the …