Twice recently I have had to import data from a flat file into a database — both sets of data were being imported to make better use of the data in the files. Importing a file is not that difficult using mysqlimport, particularly since in both cases the data was tab-delimited. I also could have used LOAD DATA INFILE.

The problem with mysqlimport and LOAD DATA INFILE is that you need to create the table beforehand. Often, though, I may not know the exact data types. Folks have written about PROCEDURE ANALYSE(), but they use it in the context of “you can check to see that your tables have the correct data types.”

David Medinets prepared this pictorial about setting up and running the PostgreSQL Virtual Appliance under VMWare Server.  In just a few pictures, you can see how easy and time efficient it is to be running PostgreSQL.
View: Configuring Virtual Appliance PostgreSQL Server

Solid Information Technology, which announced solidDB for MySQL in April, released the results of an open source survey yesterday (press release). Solid polled over 200 IT professionals on topics relating to open source adoption at the recent LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. The survey found that the greatest obstacles to developing and deploying an open source database strategy were reliability and high availability (but not the functional status quo?!). The press release includes some additional findings, which all seem to support Solid’s business model. I’d need to see the survey before making a determination as to whether it favored a point of view. Solid intends to repeat the survey at the upcoming LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in Cologne, Germany.

I've bought plane tickets to the upcoming MySQL Camp in November. This is looking like a very fun time, with lots of community members, MySQL employees, and Google developers attending. It's an "un-conference," which means there is no set schedule, and it's up to us to make out of the event whatever we wish it to be. If you've been reading my articles or using my tools, is there anything you'd like me to present on? I'd be happy to do it.

Sometimes you would like to have a result set with something like a rownum. You can do this at least in the following two ways:

According to The IND-Network Cluster we are still in a race to deliver the first 2.6 SSI style cluster .. Hmm.. maybe I'd better try to catch up then .. I didn't know there was a race .. what can we win ? Please don't tell me it's yet another iPod that everyone promises but noone delivers .. or is it just eternal f(l)ame(s) ? :)

Our web team informed me that we received a few comments from users about MySQL AB supposedly shutting down the development of the MySQLFront utility. I?d just like to clarify that this was not the case at all ? we merely asked the developers to stop violating our trade mark as outlined in our Trade Mark Policy. As I wrote some time ago, our trade marks are a very important asset to us as a company and we need to take action, if our marks are being violated.

We did not ask or force them to stop the development or to remove the program from the market completely ? this was their very own decision. In fact, we actually encouraged them from the beginning of our discussion to continue the development of the product under a …

Our web team informed me that we received a few comments from users about MySQL AB supposedly shutting down the development of the MySQLFront utility. I?d just like to clarify that this was not the case at all ? we merely asked the developers to stop violating our trade mark as outlined in our Trade Mark Policy. As I wrote some time ago, our trade marks are a very important asset to us as a company and we need to take action, if our marks are being violated.

We did not ask or force them to stop the development or to remove the program from the market completely ? this was their very own decision. In fact, we actually encouraged them from the beginning of our discussion to continue the development of the product under a …

The T-SQL to MySQL procedure converter is of course developed based on what I needed when I made it. I have made it as a window's executable because we run the system on windows (guess that is common with SQL Server installations...). There is no fancy user interface (in fact no user interface at all) because I didn't need it etc.

T-SQL constructs not handled:

• String concatenation: since + is used in T-SQL both for concatenation strings and for addition you need to know the datatype of the arguments to know if it should be converted. The tool does no attempt to do this, even if some cases (text constants, declared variables or parameters) would be quite easy.
• GOTO's and labels: The code I converted contains a lot of GOTO's. A very common construction is: SELECT /UPDATE/DELETE/INSERT
  ....
  SELECT @p_err_num = @@ERROR
  IF (@p_err_num 0) GOTO OnError
  COMMIT TRANSACTION …