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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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