Second day of the MySQL USers Conference 2006.
At breakfast, Arjen approached me, asking if I could hang nearby the podium during the keynote. "You may end up on stage", he said. I thought that they were going to hand me the iPod that was announced some time ago. So I went there and secured a seat as close as I could, together with Markus, Beat, Roland, and Sheeri.
However, instead of the iPod (I got it after lunch, BTW) I was called on stage to get a Community Award, and the same was granted to Roland, Markus, and …

Back in the days, when the middle "C" in "CCC" still stood for "Communication" and not for "Commerce" and the annual Chaos Communication Congress still happened at the Eidelstedter Bürgerhaus in Hamburg, such improvisation was common and necessary.

Hartmut hijacking one of the conference information system hallway monitors for his hackfest session, since a projection unit was unavailable.

(Flickr Photoset)

Serge van Ginderachter made me think a bit more about quick link to Bait and Switch from yesterday He says :

It's al whole different matter when dual licensing comes with different products. You get one edition in open source, and need to buy a closing source license for another edition with more goodies. In this case you really have pieces of code that mandatorily remain closed source. That is not a good thing.

And indeed I have to elaborate :) It's not the dual licensing as such which is the problem it's the wannabe open source companies that use their minimal open source product as a marketing feature to campaign their more featured commercial product with a similar name but with a totally different featureset. In …

I just read Eric Bergen's blog on row-based replication and application development from the presentation of Row-based replication at the User's Conference. Eric is giving all kinds of new ways to use the replication, for example that for a statement you can now configure the replication to only replicate changes to one of the tables in a multi-table statement. He is, however, missing the most important aspect: everything that we can do now and will be able to do in the future that we couldn't do with just statement-based replication. Here are some things that you can do with row-based replication that was not possible with statement-based replication.

Cluster Replication

Cluster replication is already in 5.1, but it's worth to …

In response to Kai Voigt's post about unxepected results from dates here is what is going wrong.

To add and subtract time using + and - you need to use the INTERVAL keyword either before or after the + or - like so..

mysql> select now() - interval 2 day;
+------------------------+
| now() - interval 2 day |
+------------------------+
| 2006-04-24 07:31:02    |
+------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

In Kai's example it's valid to use - on it's own but that handles the date simply as an integer and subtracts the number specified. In small cases as in the example this can seem as if it's the seconds being subtracted but if for example you subtract 100 it simply reduces the number by that amount and not by 1 minute 40 seconds as it sould for a date type.

mysql> select now() - 100 day, now(); …

This one puzzled me a bit yesterday. Why doesn?t the following query return what I expected? (BTW, this is one of the most frequent support questions :) )

mysql> SELECT NOW() - 2 DAY;

No solution provided, I keep it for the reader. Hint: Compare to the output of NOW()

Had dinner with Joe Kotke from Feedburner and Gavin King at a local sushi place, and then came back to the hotel to kick off the Java BoF.

Got a lot of interesting feedback from the small community of Java developers at this conference (have to figure out how to get more to attend…Gavin and I were both talking at lunch between each other and other Java users here at the conference that there are a lot of people using Java and MySQL together, much more so than is represented here).

Maybe one way to get more Java developers here is to do what happened in an ad-hoc way tonight, which was to have Gavin sit in on the Geronimo BoF with Jeff Genender from Virtuas, a committer on the Geronimo project. Sparks flew, it got heated (but still a good discussion with a lot of participation), but at the end both guys shook …

Had dinner with Joe Kotke from Feedburner and Gavin King at a local sushi place, and then came back to the hotel to kick off the Java BoF.

Got a lot of interesting feedback from the small community of Java developers at this conference (have to figure out how to get more to attend...Gavin and I were both talking at lunch between each other and other Java users here at the conference that there are a lot of people using Java and MySQL together, much more so than is represented here).

Maybe one way to get more Java developers here is to do what happened in an ad-hoc way tonight, which was to have Gavin sit in on the Geronimo BoF with Jeff Genender from Virtuas, a committer on the Geronimo project. Sparks flew, it got heated (but still a good discussion with a lot of participation), but at the end both guys shook …

Had dinner with Joe Kotke from Feedburner and Gavin King at a local sushi place, and then came back to the hotel to kick off the Java BoF.

Got a lot of interesting feedback from the small community of Java developers at this conference (have to figure out how to get more to attend…Gavin and I were both talking at lunch between each other and other Java users here at the conference that there are a lot of people using Java and MySQL together, much more so than is represented here).

Maybe one way to get more Java developers here is to do what happened in an ad-hoc way tonight, which was to have Gavin sit in on the Geronimo BoF with Jeff Genender from Virtuas, a committer on the Geronimo project. Sparks flew, it got heated (but still a good discussion with a lot of participation), but at the end both guys shook …

After a long day packed with sessions at the MySQL Users Conference it seems like the evening would be a time to relax, right? Wrong.

The evenings seem to be more packed than the days. Four birds of a feather sessions that all were equally interesting but overlapping tonight. Didn't make it to the "Server Failover" BoF because I wanted to check out the Perl BoF. Had to slip out of that to hit the "building a new SHOW command." Just when that was getting underway (and was looking really cool) I had to slip out to attend the "How to have a good MySQL meetup." This week is turning out to be one of the most packed weeks I've had in a long time.

But this is a very good kind of busy.

Oh, and I finally crossed paths with Frank after a lot of hit and miss. So very cool to have met and hung out …