There were recently number of posts about MyISAM, for example Arjen wrote pretty nice article about MyISAM features so I thought I would share my own view on using MyISAM in production.

For me it is not only about table locks. Table locks is only one of MyISAM limitations you need to consider using it in production.
Especially if you're comming from "traditional" databases you're likely to be shocked by MyISAM behavior (and default MySQL behavior due to this) - it will be corrupted by unproper shutdown, it will fail with partial statement execution if certain errors are discovered etc.

You should not think about this however as about bugs, as many MySQL features it is designed for particular load cases when it shines and it might not be good choice for others.

In 1999 for my production application (storing billions of rows in tens of …

Groggy mentions trying to draw sequence diagrams with pic. I recommend using Spinellis excellent UMLGraph toolset that he developed while writing Code Reading. That book was wonderfully inspiring to me, and helped cement my desire to work on open source software.

From what I remember, the sequence diagram stuff was a clever set of pic macros, so that you could just describe a sequence diagram and then generate the picture. I love having pictures to use during a discussion because they help avoid confusion, but I absolutely hate drawing pictures or using drawing tools - I prefer to keep the diagrams in plain-text, source code, in a revision control system. Using pic for the sequence diagrams fits the bill perfectly. Code is …

I’ve never been much of a video game player, but I do remember Quake having this really excellent console for entering commands.

As a programmer, I find myself flipping back and forth between iTerm and applications like email and web browser very frequently. On linux, I use multiple desktops to accomplish this, on OS X I just use quicksilver and try to not be irritated that I have to readjust my windows all the time.

Hosted on the same site as the excellent quicksilver is an incredible application named visor which lets you assign a hotkey to make a terminal window appear out of nowhere, and then disappear again when you hit the hotkey. Best of all, it even maintains context. I can even run screen to get multiple windows, so bye bye iTerm.

This is going to make coding on MySQL on the mac so much easier!
Here is the link for visor:
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There is a bug in MySQL that causes an UPDATE to fail with a unique index violation, even though the statement doesn't create duplicate values. In this article I'll explain when this bug can happen, and how to work around it.

This article is a quick pointer on MySQL’s three techniques for UPSERT (update/insert) or MERGE queries. I’ve written about this before, but since SQL 2003 has a MERGE statement (which Oracle and DB2 support), many people are asking for similar functionality in MySQL without realizing it already exists. I hope this article helps you find what you need. The three tools are REPLACE INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE .

For Wikipedia junkies out there, there's a very cool Palm Treo interface to Wikipedia available called Quickipedia from Standalone Software.  This is a perfect tool for when you're stuck somewhere without access to a good browser and you need find some information.  While Google on a PDA is ok for random searches, Quickipedia blows it away for most reference information.  Say you're on your way to a meeting and someone asks you about The Mythical Man-Month which you haven't read in 20 years, and you don't want to be completely clueless.  A few clicks, boom boom and you've got a summary from Wikipedia.  Or if you're in a meeting and you're suddenly wondering who carved …

I've been digging around to find documentation on the limit MySQL places on the number of tables in a query. The error is number 1116:

Error: 1116 SQLSTATE: HY000 (ER_TOO_MANY_TABLES)
Message: Too many tables; MySQL can only use %d tables in a join

I can't seem to find documentation on what number triggers this error. There are a lot of references to a limit of 31 and 61 out on the web.

I wrote a quick script to generates a slew of tables and a large SQL statement to test the limit. MySQL 4.0.23 precompiled binaries (RPM "standard" package) running on RedHat ES Linux says the limit is 63 tables. MySQL 4.1.14 running on Gentoo Linux raises the error once statements get above 61 tables. MySQL 5.0.20 on Intel Mac is the same, once the statements gets above 61 tables the error is raised. I also found a RedHat ES 2 Linux box with MySQL 3.23.58 running. Limit there is 31 tables, so the folks who came up with this on my Google …

This interesting write-up was brought to my attention. It's about user interfaces, and the author (Hugh Fisher) believes there is compelling historical evidence to suggest that on Linux we need to get a grip on a single user interface, or else lose out completely. He notes that various specific other platforms that have had multiple GUIs in the past, each all lost to a third platform.

Your own thoughts on this? Feel free to comment and discuss!

I decided to go with a bump of the minor version for the next release of MDB2 because there are a number significant changes and additions. One of the big changes is dropping array_key_exists() whereever possible. I kind of got bitten by isset() in the past a lot. Just stupid little mistakes. However I somehow felt more confident with replacing things with empty() calls. The same change was made across all drivers which were released as 1.1.0 versions (except for the Frontbase driver that needs a maintainer and the beta drivers for Oracle and Querysim).

Aside from that the two main features are custom datatypes and query rewriting via the debugging infrastructure. The custom datatypes were already explained in a previous blog post, so I will not go into detail on them again here. However the debugging …

Bill Gates, the largest shareholder of Microsoft Corporation has said that he will retire in 2008 from the company he founded 30 years ago.  Gates, who has an estimated net worth of $50 billion, says he will retain the Chairman title at Microsoft but plans to work full time for the non-profit Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which he started in 1995.  The foundation has an endowment of $29 billion, making it the largest charitable foundation in the US.  The foundation has committed more than $10 billion in grants, mostly in the area of global health care and education.

Gates stepped down from the CEO role at Microsoft in 2000, turning over the reigns to long-time friend and colleague Steve Ballmer in order to take on the role of Chief Software Architect. Ray Ozzie, author of Lotus Notes …