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 …

All -

I’ve been playing with the CSV engine in MySQL 5.1 and have recorded some thoughts in a new article out on our dev zone. Check it out if you’ve wondered why we added the engine to MySQL and what it’s good for.

Oh, and one bug that I forgot to include in my paper, but that should be fixed in the next beta release, is that the CSV engine is not enabled on the MS Windows platform.

–Robin

By tim

Interesting back-channel email conversation with Phil Torrone: "i talked to hb from imdb. here's what i told him i'd to do with an imdb api / access to some of the data...

1. Fastr-like game for movies. If you've ever played Fastr, you're addicted - it pulls in Flickr photos and you guess what they were tagged with - you compete with others, and it's way too much fun. For IMDB, I'd do the same, you get photos of actors, directors, stills from movies, etc. You can guess a variety of things, it's timed, you can have teams, etc - you could do ads on and between rounds, a quick "buy the DVDs/etc you saw here". This could also make a good mobile game for phones.

2. IMDB …

Seems there is some interest in running MySQL as a backend for (classic) ASP based sites, at least looking at recent posts on DevShed forums.
As questions are quite similar and I've not found a good ASP+MySQL tutorial on the web I'm posting a short example here
Here is my snippet:

1. dim adoConn
2. dim adoRS
3. set adoConn = Server.CreateObject ( "ADODB.Connection" )
4. set adoRS = Server.CreateObject ( "ADODB.Recordset" )
5. adoConn.CursorLocation = 3
6. 'adUseClient
7. adoConn.Open "DRIVER={MySQL ODBC 3.51 Driver};SERVER=localhost;DATABASE=users;UID=root;PWD=; OPTION=16427"
8. adoRS.ActiveConnection = adoConn
9. if adoConn.errors.count = 0 then
10. adoRS.Open "Select ...", adoConn
11. .....
12. adoRS.Close
13. else
14. response.write ( "ERROR: Couldn't connect to database" …

Great snippet on Dynamic SQL in stored procedures from MySQLForge!!!