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 …

I'll be coming to the MySQL User Conference next month, then hanging around a little while longer for a support group meet.

After booking various things my bank called me about possible fraudulent charges on my credit card. Apparently I wasn't supposed to go?

I sat the MySQL Core Exam in November, and I'm happy to report that I passed!

Last month came time to sit the pro exam, and not feeling as confident after what was quite a tough core sitting, I thought it was time for some study. While some things might appear obvious to some, I thought I'd share the notes I took when I was reading it:

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• Enums and sets can be set by their 'bit' value or actual value.
  
• <=> is the null safe equivalent to =
  
• MyISAM provides no data caches (except query cache). It relies on the host OS to provide it.
  
• InnoDB can use a raw partition for its tablespace
  
• There is a general log file which can store all queries (as well as of course binary log & slow query)
  
• Temporary tables can be named the same as non-temporary tables, with the temporary taking precedence (could …

The current version of mysqldump can export a database to a tabbed output. This is nice, but it seems it can only do one database at a time.

I wrote a quick script to attempt to merge multiple tab dumps. It's incomplete -- and the chmod 777 in it is definitely evil.

Tab dumping is faster for MySQL to import than an SQL dump, and it produces a smaller file. With a bit of work, this is the way to get your exports as small as possible. This helps if you had to rebuild a slave on another network, and/or you pay too much for bandwidth!

Your thoughts appreciated.
See: http://tocker.id.au/files/mysqltabdump.phps

It doesn't look like I'll be making it to the MySQL User Conference (argh!). I've constructed a list of sessions I'll be missing out on. Perhaps some of the others in Brisbane will take notes for our user group


Monday:

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• Optimizing MySQL Applications Using the Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture : Lentz
  
• MySQL Performance Optimization : Zaitsev, Asplund
  

Peter Zaitsev is often online at the same time as me. I like to ask him all my idiot InnoDB questions -- he know's his stuff.

Tuesday:

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• The 5.1 Release : Aker
  
• Migrating a Large System to MySQL …

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

It's been a long time that I've been using MySQL, but it has just happened now that I made use of replication in production.

What's the reason for this? Well, I have a working machine (currently with SuSE Linux 10.0) and a private machine (with Windows), both running the latest production release of MySQL 5.0. On my working machine, I've set up a Wiki. I used to make regular backups on my private machine and wanted to backup my Wiki database, too.

There are certainly serveral solutions for this, but the solution that I preferred was to replicate the Wiki database to my private machine to simply backup it together with my other databases there.

Here's how I did it (not very difficult - and not at all with the help of Jay's and Mike's Pro MySQL 5 book ;-)):

First I added the following lines to the my.cnf file …

There's a good article on Silicon.com "Should Oracle Fear Open Source?"  The analysis on the impact of open source is significant, however, I think the market analysts such as Gartner still have not gotten their heads around the right way to measure open source impact.  It can't be measured in license fees the same way traditional closed source products have been; with open source there is no significant license fees.  In that regard, the estimates are woefully low.  Open source software has been growing far faster and for far longer than the analysts estimate.  At this point, MySQL is in the #3 position of market share (measured as usage) after Oracle and SQL Server and far ahead of DB2, Sybase and others.  It may take another couple of years before the analysts figure out a way to report that.

I think Oracle understands open source better than most people …

I am looking for a job starting this fall. By that time I should also hold a degree in computer science from the TU Berlin. My tasks on the job should be some how at least partially connected to open source and covering at a minimum 2 of the following 3 fields of expertise (in order of most preferred):

• SQL RDBMS like MySQL, Oracle, SQLite, PostGreSQL (especially portability and migration)
• Community Relations (helping companies work with people from the community and vice versa)
• PHP (preferably database driven intranet applications or frameworks)

I would prefer to be able to stay in Germany, specifically Berlin. Though its all a question of finding the right place and challenge. For example I have no problem telecommuting from home with occasional trips to an office; even for a few weeks now and then with a sleeping bag. Actually I …

The FFII’s Swpatcnino page continues to be the most up-to-date and complete collection of links to news items concerning software patents. Here’s an interesting article that I became aware of on that page: Shanghai Daily - IPR protection hot potato not black and white

The article talks about IPRs (intellectual property rights) in general, and patents are only one of the legal devices that are counted among them. With respect to software, I prefer a clear distinction to be made between copyright and patents, and only in a few exceptional cases I consider it accurate to refer to copyright, patents and other rights by the collective term IPRs.

A significant part of the article, which was written by a senior researcher at the Chinese Ministry …