Note the title is “How I have a successful MySQL Meetup Group.” There’s more than one way to do it, I’m sure. There are 3 basic principles:

1) Try to do as little work as possible.

2) Make your colleagues do as little work as possible.

3) Always have a topic/presentation

These three principles will get you far, and should be weighted equally. Do not use principle # 1 as an excuse to not follow principle #3. As well, “doing work” includes “paying money”. With that being said:

1. Make your meetup easy to get to. This has different meanings for different areas. It may mean near a major highway interchange, it may mean near a mass transit station. Whatever it means for you, make it easy.

When the Boston MySQL Meetup first started, we had free space in an office building right in the city of Boston.

Finally!

ChangeSet
1.2396 06/05/12 12:50:50 gluh@eagle.intranet.mysql.r18.ru +12 -0
WL#3015: Logging Improvements - No Restarts(ver N3)
Added slow_query_log & general_log global upadatable variables.
Added slow-query-log & general-log startup options.
Added log_output, log_path, log_slow_queries_path global updatable variables.

http://lists.mysql.com/commits/6279

Now we can do things like “SET GLOBAL general_log = ON;” and “SET GLOBAL log_path=’/log/tmp.log’;”.

This has been something long requested so it’s great to see this slip in to the tree in time for 5.1!

This Wednesday I participated on a panel discussion about "Open Source in the Enterprise - Chances and Risks" at the JAX 2006 conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. It was a lively discussion, with good comments and questions from the audience.

One thing I found noteworthy is that many people still seem to be worried about using OSS when it comes to licensing and legal questions. In fact, these concerns seem to be more dominant than preoccupations about the technical capabilities of OSS software itself. Some claimed that they find OSS licenses confusing and do not feel certain if their usage of OSS actually complied to the licenses. I was thankful that we had Till Kreutzer from the ifrOSS on the panel as well, who (in my opinion) did a good job in dispelling a few myths …

I recently I announced that MySQLDevelopment was going to close, at the time I wasn't sure what would be happening to the content but I hoped that it would be able to live on in some form.

I had a number of requests and suggestions with regard to the site and I felt the best option was to hand it over to MySQL for inclusion in the new MySQL Forge Wiki. My timing was a little off as the site was due to close during the MySQL conference but with that now out of the way the content of the site has been transfered and is available now at..

http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Category:MySQLDevelopment

I will be passing over the domain name to MySQL also but that may take some time to be up and running so MySQLDevelopment.com will still be available in the mean time.

Now it's finally happening it's a little sad for me but …

How i discovered lucene and how did i tune it to use it with our organization... Oops, i may have to leave out specific details about its usage in our organization but i will try to give out a brief general idea.

Well.... i found out lucene thru the mysql website. Was just going thru the forums of mysql full text search engine. At that time mysql 4.0 had just rolled out and we were using the full text search engine of mysql. But it was terribly slow. Since the data size was not "that" large and number of searches could also be numbered down easily, we were able to survive on it. But we were aware that we would be hitting a bottle-neck some time later and well, we had to do something about it. Soooo... i was just browsing the forums and somewhere i found someone mention that mysql full text search is slow and a better alternative to it would be "aspseek" or "lucene". I first tried out aspseek, but it did not allow me to do a boolean …

This is a great bi-annual conference. Interesting people and talks, and very well organised. Three days of tutorials, two days main conference (two tracks), a free software bazaar on Wednesday evening, and a social event on Thursday. The official language at the conference is English. If you're in the area, check it out!

My own talks:

Wednesday morning and afternoon tutorials:

• Optimising MySQL Applications Using the Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture
  
• New Features of MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 In-depth

Friday session:

• …

I was ordering Mother's Day flowers tonight to the tune of Ozzy Osbourne's "Waiting for Darkness." (Don't ask.) I haven't heard it for years, and I started to smirk at the lyrics. Like most song lyrics, they're lame.

Playing with fire
But they're screaming
When they're burned
Out of the sunlight
Hasn't anybody learnedBefore the smirk set in, the head was banging. Great music. In my more lucid moments, I smirk. The rest of the time, I just enjoy.

The myths around open source are much the same. I've heard them so often that I rarely take time to critically evaluate what is being said. Heck, I'm as often as not the one regurgitating them. Open source developers and vendors mime the words, singing along to the catchy tune, because it serves their interests. Anything that smacks of a contrarian opinion is …

I thought I would take some time and increase my understanding of PHP and MySQL. I came up with an idea for a project and decided the lowest hanging fruit would be a script to track external links.

The script will reside on a go.domain.com subdomain with the name go.php. It takes a single parameter on the GET string named url, checks it for cleanness, checks that the referrer has the same domain name, then performs a 301 redirect and logs the request.

Here’s the table:

CREATE TABLE go_log
(
  access_time TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  user_name VARCHAR(45) DEFAULT NULL,
  user_ip INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  referer VARCHAR(500) NOT NULL,
  link VARCHAR(500) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=ARCHIVE DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

The referer and link columns are roughly twice as big as what a Google search reveals as the longest URL, just to be safe …