I was talking with a friend of mine recently about how different areas have tried to rival Silicon Valley for influence in high tech.  But the valley's leadership wasn't always so.  In fact, if you go back twenty-five years, the "Route 128" area around Boston was the hotbed for much of the technology innovation around mini-computers with companies like Apollo, DEC, Data General, Wang and others.  And that in turn led to the development of many of the innovations in the early microcomputer industry with companies like VisiCalc, Lotus Development Corporation, Spinnaker Software, Javelin and many others.

Tracy Kidder told the story in his Pulitzer award-winning book Soul of a New Machine published in 1981, describing the development of a new 32-bit platform that would compete head-to-head with the DEC VAX.  Instead of …

At last year’s MySQL User Conference I got the idea that it might be fun to create a web site that cataloged the various swag that one receives at such events and I registered www.swagreport.com while the idea was fresh in my mind. Well, I finally got around to loading up Wordpress and getting something started.

So, this year you can look forward to not only knowing about at the sessions I attend, but you can also keep up with the swag.

Enjoy

P.S. Anyone else attending conferences who would like to document their swag let me know and I will get you added as an author.

Andrey Hristov added "Events" for MySQL version 5.1 when he was working on his master's thesis for the University of Applied Sciences in Stuttgart. We liked the feature a lot, and now Andrey works for MySQL. An inspiring story, eh? And now MySQL 5.1 is getting stabler, it's "beta" instead of "alpha". So we can try some real work with this Events feature.

In this article I’ll explain how to control the output of the mysql client program and feed it to another program to transform the results as desired. I often transform output into HTML tables for these blog articles – at least, I do when I’m not being lazy. The mysql command-line program can accept a command and print the results directly to STDOUT. The default output behavior differs depending on where its input comes from.

A few years ago I would have argued that PHP.net and MySQL.com were a close match for the best sites for finding documentation on a specific function or command.

I have no idea when this change has happened but over the past few weeks I've gone to MySQL.com to look for a particular keyword, like "sort_buffer_size" or "Created_tmp_tables" and noticed that the search results were close to useless. But I wasn't dismayed because I figured these were obscure words that were best found by browsing to the page about configuration variables or server status.

Then just last week I was looking for information on creating descending indexes, which would likely be found on the CREATE TABLE page, which confirmed that things with search took turn for the worse somewhere.

Let's see, if I search for "CREATE TABLE" I get 54 results on the …

I wanted to try out something that first seemed to be quite simple, but then I had to see that I didn't manage to get the desired result in one single query. Maybe one of you has an idea how to do it.

Here's the table that you need for this example and a little Stored Procedure to quickly fill the table:

CREATE TABLE tt (
  id int unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
  d1 int unsigned NOT NULL,
  d2 int unsigned NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (id),
  KEY d1 (d1)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

... and the Stored Procedure ...

DELIMITER //

DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS insertIntoTT //
CREATE PROCEDURE insertIntoTT(in _rows int)
begin
declare counter int default 0;

while counter < _rows do
  set @a := floor(rand() * 20) + 1;
  set @b := floor(rand() * 1000000);
  insert into tt (d1, d2) values (@a, @b);
  set counter := counter + 1;
end …

Dear MySQL users, MaxDB users and friends,

The previous “please wait” posting was caused by a new guideline on series postings. The new guideline says that postings must be written one week before they get published. The week between the writing and the publication is used for corrections. I’m writing these lines on April, 4th but the article won’t be published before Wednesday April, 12th. We hope that in the time between writing and publishing we can catch most of the Gotchas to further improve the quality of the series. However, this series will continue to be more like a collection of blog postings than a book, a magazine article or any other “official documentation”. We try to do our best, but unfortunately we cannot apply the same amount of quality assurance and proof-reading to the MaxDB series that we do for magazine articles, official documentation or official class materials.

In this issue

In …

Dear MySQL users, MaxDB users and friends,

The previous “please wait” posting was caused by a new guideline on series postings. The new guideline says that postings must be written one week before they get published. The week between the writing and the publication is used for corrections. I’m writing these lines on April, 4th but the article won’t be published before Wednesday April, 12th. We hope that in the time between writing and publishing we can catch most of the Gotchas to further improve the quality of the series. However, this series will continue to be more like a collection of blog postings than a book, a magazine article or any other “official documentation”. We try to do our best, but unfortunately we cannot apply the same amount of quality assurance and proof-reading to the MaxDB series that we do for magazine articles, official documentation or official class materials.

In this issue

In …

It's nothing new to me and probably nothing new to most folks who work with MySQL on a regular basis that the username alone does not identify a MySQL user, but a combination of username@host.

But if you forget about it for a moment, you can easily begin to wonder about special behaviors. That just happened to me, so I just thought that I have discovered a very evil bug - but looking twice, it became quite clear to me why MySQL behaved this way.

I have two computers, both with MySQL servers, both with users called mpopp - but each server has two of them - one is mpopp@localhost and the other is mpopp@10.0.0.1__ (both with the same permissions), so it allows me to access user mpopp from each of my PCs. I created a little stored procedure on one computer and then copied this procedure to the other one - together with the new DEFINER option that's new in MySQL 5.0.20. But I didn't think about it (and didn't look …

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Mohandas Gandhi

Linux is in the "win" phase. Apache webserver is in the "won" phase. MySQL and JBoss are in the stage where the laughter turns bitter and the pushing starts. Big wins are on the horizon.

Open source applications? We're at the point the ignorance is breeding laughter. SugarCRM, Alfresco, JasperSoft, Plone, Compiere, etc. These are all applications that used to be ignored, but ignorance is no longer serving proprietary competitors well.

As a case in point, InformationWeek just ran a story on Boise Cascade's use of Alfresco for invoice management. Big customer, big need, big value.

Documentum's response? Completely off-base, ill-founded commentary ("Boise's need …