Back in March, I wrote about Partitioning in MySQL 5.1 not being usable, and since a few releases have gone out, and a few months have passed, I am re-visiting the issues I saw back then.

MySQL still doesn’t allow you to partition using a native DATE or DATETIME column. This is a major problem in my opinion, as it’s probably one of the most common uses for partitioning, but is only seen as a “feature request” by MySQL. Hopefully that will get fixed sometime in the near future.

I filed a couple more bugs today, the most serious of which was the inability to repair “crashed” partitions:

mysql> alter table ontime repair partition p_199609;
ERROR 145 (HY000): Table './flightstats/ontime#P#p_199609' is marked as
crashed and should be repaired

Here are the bugs I filed:

• …

INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE is very powerful but often forgotten MySQL feature. It was introduced in MySQL 4.1 but I still constantly see people unaware of it.

Myself I like this feature big deal because it is designed in truly MySQL style - very efficient solution for freqent task while keeping it beautiful and easy to use.

So what is this feature great for ? Well any kind of maintaining counters. If you're writing traffic accounting it could be traffic and number of packet passed for given port or IP address. For Web Applications it could be counting number of visits per page or IP address, number of times particular keyword was searched etc.

This functionality also makes it very easy to do incremental single pass log file processing and building summary tables.

Here is example:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. CREATE TABLE ipstat(ip int UNSIGNED NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
…

Techworld.com reports:

The European Commission this week appeared to take a step back from its earlier position on the patentability of software, stating that computer programs are not patentable, and that patents on them may be struck down by the courts.

For the full story, see:
http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?newsid=6081

The 3rd international conference on GPL v3 will take place in Barcelona, Spain on June 22nd and 23rd. The international GPLv3 conferences are part of a year-long public consultation process to update the GNU General Public License.

Speakers include Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, chairman at Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Georg Greve, President of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). Expert panelists from all parts of Europe, and from around the world will lead discussions on licence internationalisation, DRM, software patents, and adoption of the finished licence.

The current draft of the GPLv3 and resources explaining the background to the update are availble at http://gplv3.fsf.org/

The Conference’s schedule and further information will be published soon at
…

This morning I held a short presentation to share my vision on the project. The handouts for this presentation with the title "SQLbusRT: A first glance" are available at our SourceForge project website.

You can download these handouts directly by clicking this link: SQLbusRT: A first glance

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

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

The Apache Friends team is proud to announce XAMPP 1.5.3 for Linux and Windows. The new version of XAMPP includes fresh, green and up-to-date versions of: PHP 5.1.4, MySQL 5.0.21, Apache 2.2.2, phpMyAdmin 2.8.1 and OpenSSL 0.9.8b.

In case of Linux we also upgraded ProFTPD to the recent 1.3.0 and in case of Windows we included the new version of FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.16c.

Download XAMPP 1.5.3 here

Couple of weeks ago when testing the Disk based storage in MySQL cluster 5.1.6 I ran into some annoying unstabilities

I've updated to 5.1.9 in the meanwhile.. my cluster has been up for 5 days now it seems like the problem has been fixed in the more recent versions.

I`ll continue runnnig tests to see if it stays stable :)

"Ovid":http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/ wrote a short article "giving a glimpse of Perl 6":http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/05/lamp_linuxsapachesmysqlphpytho.html?CMP=OTC-6YE827253101&ATT=lamp+Linux+s+Apache+s+MySQL+P+hp+ython+erl+56

If that was too dry and technical for you, then instead go read about how he "he caught two idiots using his credit card":http://www.askbjoernhansen.com/archives/2005/03/25/catching_the_cr.html last year.

"Ovid":http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/ wrote a short article "giving a glimpse of Perl 6":http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/05/lamp_linuxsapachesmysqlphpytho.html?CMP=OTC-6YE827253101&ATT=lamp+Linux+s+Apache+s+MySQL+P+hp+ython+erl+56

If that was too dry and technical for you, then instead go read about how he "he caught two idiots using his credit card":http://www.askbjoernhansen.com/archives/2005/03/25/catching_the_cr.html last year.

I've always been interested in refactoring code, but one thing that is always a little harder is refactoring databases... there isn't enough documentation available on it.

I was quite excited to see a new book published this month. I've started reading it through my Safari subscription.

I've inherited a fair bit of bad code in the past. Sometimes you can see that things don't work, but you don't know what to fix. The refactoring process is all about 'smells'. A smell is a particular design pattern that might have been a bad choice.

I'm particularly fond of this 'smells' term (commonly appearing refactoring books). It makes me think of food; if it smells, it's probably bad, or rotting. That's not *always* true …