Greg, a fellow MySQL'er is visiting for the next couple of days and he mentioned an article he read at the airplane in Fortune called How I Work: Bill Gates. It got me to thinking about how I do my own work.

My days are segmented into three parts. In the evening I talk to people in Russia, in the morning I reserve time for people in Europe, and I work with Americans in the early afternoon. My week starts on Sunday evenings, and I try to go walking or sort my notes from the week on Friday afternoon when the work week for MySQL is tailing off.

Today I use Mail.app on an Apple 15in laptop to handle incoming email. I have filters that have been placed on servers using procmail to squelch the incoming email I get on both my personal and work email account. I …

At this years LinuxForum I was manning the MySQL booth together with Carsten Pedersen. We were kept quite busy with lots of people coming to tell about their use of the MySQL database for their particular project and ask about or discuss a particular issue of theirs. Which was fine, since the talks did not appeal a lot to me anyway.

One guy (I forgot who) had a small performance problem in his application. The application is a database of about 550,000 companies, storing name and various other bits of information about each company. What I would call a "small" database (since it is easily kept completely cached in ram), though not a trivial one.

This application has a facility to search for a company using any part of the company name:

    SELECT ... FROM company WHERE name LIKE …

Anyone who has used an automated unit testing framework such as Junit knows just how life-changing an automated test suite can be.   Once you've  experienced validating that recent changes have not broken old code, or discovering subtle bugs via junit that would otherwise have remained undetected , you naturally want to have this capability in all your programming environments.

Guisseppe Maxia has written a few stored procedure snippets to assist with automated unit testing of MySQL routines.  Unfortunately, the MySQL stored procedure language itself does not have the necessary abilities to fully implement the sort of unit testing we would like.  In particular, the inability for a stored procedure to capture the result sets generated by another stored procedure prevents a stored procedure from fully unit testing another. 

So I decided that …

I’ve had a bit of a windfall of books in the past 2 weeks. I purchased 2 books for the flights to/from the US, picked up an Amazon order on some Database Reference Material for some writings I’m doing, and quite a bounty at the MySQL Users Conference.

• “Screw It, Lets’ Do It - Lessons in Life” by Richard Branson
• “Losing My Virginity - The Autobiography” by Richard Branson
• “An Introduction to Database Systems - Eighth Edition” by C.J. Date
• “Database in Depth - Relational Theory for Practitioners” by C.J. Date
• “The Database Relational Model - A Retrospective Review and Analysis” by C. J. Date
• “MySQL in a Nutshell”
• “PHP in a Nutshell”
• “MySQL Clustering”
• “MySQL Stored Procedures”
• “MySQL Administrator’s Guide and Language Reference”

The MySQL management team is one of the best I've ever worked with.  It's an interesting blend of European style combined with Silicon Valley "get it done" pragmatism.  When we are discussing complex issues, we often ask questions that come from the works of Peter Drucker, perhaps the most prolific of management consultants.  Many of his best writings are surprisingly basic.  I don't mean that they are simple or dumbed down like "Who moved the cheese?" but they force a manager to focus on the fundamental questions like "What business are you in?" and "Who is the customer?"  A lot of dot bomb angst could have been saved by asking these questions.

In …

Let us recap for the audience on how to back up MySQL, or at least my favorite methods :)

1) Use Mysqldump
2) Shutdown the database or use an LVM snapshot method to back up the physical bits.
3) Use replication in combination with method 2.

And the winner for me goes to number three. So why is that?

Its cheap, and in a lot of cases I see, its very possible. This is the point where someone says, but I have 20 terabytes! I am sure you do, and in this case you can ignore the rest of what I am about to say.

One linux box with a bunch of disks with either one or multiple instances all acting as slaves is a cheap solution. From the point where you have a replication copy, you can make copies of the database off to tape or just create vectors (aka Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday... Friday one week ago) from the physical database. With this method you get live snapshots, but you end up …

This is the long and rambling story of how an extemely inappropriate TShirt found its way to a MySQL social event attended by senior management. The offending item took a tortuous eight year journey from London to Zurich before achieving infamy, or at least for its owner. First, some background.

Originally, I'm from Essex, UK. I've lived in some of the more scenic parts of Surrey and some of the most happening parts of London. However, due to a gap in finances, I'd moved back to my parents' home in Essex. Well, after being independant for a decade, the transition was jarring. So, when a friend telephoned and asked me to house-sit in Brighton, East Sussex, UK, I leapt at the chance. Best of all, I had the place to myself.

Anyhow, I re-located in Brighton. Due to my lack of driving skills, I'd arrived by train with only the stuff I could carry. Due to the vaguries and temporary …

There has been some confusion in the media in recent days, following some statements made by European Commission vice president Verheugen at a pro-patent propaganda event in Brussels. Verheugen’s remarks could be interpreted as signs of optimism that the EU Community Patent (a unitary patent for the Single Market) might materialize in the foreseeable future. However, at a closer look it seems that the Commission is already trying to position other legislative measures as the near-term priority. One of them is the London Protocol, which would bring down the language requirements for European patents, and the more important one is the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA).

I have given some comments about this to ZDNet for this article.

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