I was taking math classes at Grossmont Junior College , and developed this guide to help me stay focused on learning math. I showed it to my instructor, and he started using it for his classes. I've kept it up to date, even though I can't take classes at this time - mainly due to my work schedule. So, I decided to share this out on the web, maybe other students would find this handy. It mainly applies to college math courses, but could be useable by high school students as well.

If you're an instructor, you're more than welcome to us it in your classes. Please include the copywrite information at the bottom of the post. You can delete this intro paragraph!



Before Class

Prepare for your class by reading ahead, and working the examples in the book. Understand how the examples are solved. Use 3x5 cards to write down the …

With all the recent buzz on Planet MySQL about using LVM to perform "semi-hot" backups of MySQL on Linux, I remembered that we once created such a Perl script for a server project that we worked on in cooperation with a hardware vendor. As this particular backup method was also mentioned and recommended in my talk about MySQL backup and security on Linux and the script hasn't actually been publicly available so far, I offered to take over the ownership and release it under the GPL. The first tarball release (0.1) is now available from …

I’ll be giving my Introduction to Database Normalization with MySQL talk tomorrow at the Calgary Linuxfest at 11am.

Location is the University of Calgary ICT building.

Admission is free, so feel free to stop by.

www.linuxfest.ca

LOL!

Some aftermath from the MySQL Users conference I attended just a week ago: I just got some 'informative' mail from SCO, promoting their SCAMP Stack (Google it if you like).

The mail contains a link to a promotional article, advertising the SCAMP stack. Although I recall that SCO has bad standing due to them instantiating a lawsuit against IBM and RedHat (among others), claiming that these companies have violated a non-disclosure agreement with SCO by donating UNIX code to the Linux community, I read the paper anyway.

At the bottom, their article contains a graph comparing TCO …

A user just alerted me to an article in LWN where community editions of various OSS products are compared with certified editions. MySQL's certified edition came out with 0 defects. According to the article, the report does have a defect count for the community edition. That sounded curious to me, since the certified edition is based on the community edition of a major version, and then runs on a more conservative release cycle that only applies critical and security bugs.

Last year a Coverity report came out where a number of defects were found, which were promptly fixed in our codebase and so our community edition should be clean in this respect.

Interestingly, the reported new numbers match up with that earlier report (0.224 defects per thousand lines of code vs. 1 defect per 4000 lines …

So I have been trading email with Tim O'Reilly on "Database War Stories". I had a thought later on about this subject that I shared with Tim:

With flat files I think you have to look at how the users are making use of them. There are a lot of spots where you can keep concurrency down to a minimum, and in these cases I see flat files going over really well. Blobs are an ongoing issue. Can these really go into a database? I've seen users do it, but at some point the site gets big and people pull them back out. Putting them in a database is really sexy, but it does not really scale long term (in the back of my mind is a prototype of a new engine which sits half in and half out of the database and uses a schema like I did in mod_repository).

What I am seeing with Web 2.0 is some of the lessons that were …

Three intrepid MySQLers came to Google after the user conference to give internal tech talks. They were kind enough to agree to us hosting them for other people to see. The first two are up, so I'll mention those now, and put a link to the last one when it's available...

Click on the thumbnail to be taken to the video.

On the forge:
Simple E-mail address validator

This stored procedure is a simple e-mail address validator — it makes sure the e-mail address is in the format word@word.word, and makes sure there are no special characters:
( ) <> @ , ; : \ . [ ] */

I allow ” because technically you can have “word”@word.com.

Folks can easily add to this snippet to make it fully compliant with RFC822 if they want. (I got bored and didn’t really feel like adding all that other stuff in. )

By tim

Brian Aker of MySQL sent me a few email comments about this whole "war stories" thread, which I reproduce here. Highlight -- he says: "Reading through the comments you got on your blog entry, these users are hitting on the same design patterns. There are very common design patterns for how to scale a database, and few sites really turn out to be all that original. Everyone arrives at certain truths, flat files with multiple dimensions don't scale, you will need to partition your data in some manner, and in the end caching is a requirement."

I agree about the common design patterns, but I didn't hear that flat files don't scale. What I heard is that some very big sites are saying that traditional databases don't scale, and that the evolution isn't from flat files to SQL databases, but from flat files to sophisticated custom file systems. Brian acknowledges that SQL vendors haven't solved the problem, but doesn't …

One of the best presentations from the MySQL Users Conference last week was by Mitch Kapor.  Mitch is the author of Lotus 1-2-3, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, supporter of open source software.

I saw Mitch give an earlier version of his presentation earlier this year at OSBC and it was even better the second time around.  I think the context of the MySQL Users Conference is even more appropriate. And heck, Wikipedia uses MySQL on the backend, so what could be more appropriate?

His discussion was about why people think …