OK, so I returned from vacation late last night, after putting almost 1700 miles on my car this past four days. A friend of mine had his Master's thesis show (in furniture design) down in Savannah, Georgia. It was a fantastic time, and Ezra's work is truly astonishing, but I was quite exhausted after the long drives to and from Columbus, Ohio.

You may remember that I have been helping my twin brother learn PHP and MySQL programming. I'm pleased to say that he is progressing quite well! Every time we Skype chat, he seems to have picked up more and more programming vocabulary and is understanding some of the trickier concepts fairly well. My teaching is ongoing. I have advised him to try and learn five new PHP functions every time he sits down to code, and to practice the functions by using them in his work. For instance, …

Yesterday evening I finally released the procedure converter at Sourceforge.net. I am quite satisfied with the result, it covers quite a lot. But the user interface is virtuallt non-existant, and the parsing needs some improvement. The problem is that for more complex conversion tasks (like shifting order for function parameters) I would need better parsing of the source code.

Features:

1. converts CREATE PROCEDURE/FUNCTION syntax
2. adds semi-colon at the end of statements
3. converts IF and WHILE statements to MySQL syntax
4. sorts the code in the correct order, with declarations at the top and instructions
5. after that
6. removes @, [ and ] from identifiers
7. converts comments to MySQL syntax (a space in the 3rd position for -- comments)
8. adds a CONTINUE HANDLER FOR NOT FOUND if the procedure contains cursors
9. comments out GOTO and …

After coming back from holidays on the 6th of September, I've been able to work on the project with a refreshed mind again!

I expected to have finished coding by now, but after putting all the components together, I ran into an occasional 'segmentation fault'. I've been looking for the problem, but only with the help from one of my colleagues I was able to address the causes.

For the first cause, I should explain a little bit about how ORTE handles issues:
As I explained before, ORTE works with 'publishers' and 'subscribers'. ORTE periodically invokes a callback function on the publisher side, which is meant to prepare the data for sending in a memory buffer. When the callback function finishes, ORTE reads the buffer and copies it to a memory buffer on the subscriber side. It then invokes the subscriber callback function which is meant to process the incoming data.

So what went wrong in my …

Unfortunately, after having my blog on the net for about 4 months, spam bots have found my blog. To prevent any further bot comments to appear on my blog, I've switched on 'word verification' for comments.

Please don't let it hold you back from posting comments on my blog. All your (non-spam) input is very much appreciated!

Blog: http://sqlbusrt.blogspot.com/

Project website: http://sqlbusrt.sourceforge.net/

Just the notes for the installation steps on a clean OS X Tiger Server 10.4.7 setup.

Registration is open for the AUUG 2006 conference, which will be held 11-13 October at the Rendezvous (formerly Duxton) Hotel in Melbourne, with tutorials on the 10th. Here is the Tutorial/Program Overview

I'll be teaching a tutorial on Optimising MySQL by learning about the different available storage engines (there are more than you think!) and using each when appropriate, even within a single application. I've done this tutorial before at the MySQL UC2006 in Santa Clara, and SANE 2006 in Delft (NL). It's fairly popular and the feedback from the attendees was that they found it really useful.

Stewart Smith will be teaching a tutorial on MySQL Cluster, including some …

Just the notes for the installation steps on a clean OS X Tiger Server 10.4.7 setup.

What was a 5-minute script has become a bigger project. I've made more improvements to the duplicate index checker. Soon it will require product activation and have security vulnerabilities every week. Seriously: this is the third iteration, and three strikes and you automate, so I automated. I have a test suite now (your contributions welcome), and I addressed two shortcomings readers pointed out in comments on the original article. You now get better foreign key checking, and FULLTEXT indexes are ignored.

After spending a good week at my parents in rainy but relaxing florida, I flew to Toronto to speak at php|works. The conference was great fun and especially my second talk Explaing Explain went as good as I had hoped. In the talk I was mostly talking about controlling execution plans with particular focus on MySQL and PostgreSQL. I spend longer than ever on this talk so I am happy it worked out so well. I will probably submit the same talk for OSDBcon with some minor tweaks. Since I only had 60 minutes several slides are marked "skip". Maybe OSDBcon can give me two slots so that I can cover those slides as well. The other talk building portable database applications …

The PyBots project (http://pybots.org/) is a way for people to run tests for python applications using Python binaries built from the very latest source code from the Python subversion repository. The idea is brilliant, and has application far beyond the Python project.
As Grig Gheorghiu previously announced on his blog, I’ve set up a buildslave testing MySQLdb, the python connector for MySQL. I’ll probably try to set up tests for SQLAlchemy next. You can see the builder status page here, my builder is named ‘amd64 Ubuntu Dapper trunk’.
Instructions for how to set up a buildslave are on pybots.org, and you can see the buildscripts along …