Well, after consulting with licensing guru Zak Greant and talking to one of the official powers that be at MySQL, I now have a name and a license for the new sample database.

The name? Sakila. Yup, no issues with using the name I have been using so far, which is a good thing.

The license? The new BSD license. This should make it as easy as possible for authors to use it in their books and articles without any licensing concerns at all.

I’m trying to clean up a bug I found and flesh out the docs a bit more, I hope to post what could be considered a release candidate tomorrow.

And remember, come to the session on Sakila at the MySQL UC.

(Click to be Controlled)

The hypnotoad commands you to attend my sessions at the MySQL User Conference. All Glory to the HypnoToad!

• Introduction to Database Normalization and Joins
• Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL
• MySQL 5 Applied: The Sakila Sample Database

We all deal with queries that return more rows than what our screen will let us view, wouldn't it be nice to be able paginate the results ?
Rather than having to scroll back, and scan the rows, you can use the built in pager. I didn't know about this, until Will from freenode mentioned it in #mysql. Long story short..


mysql> \P less
mysql> PAGER set to 'less'
mysql> select foo,bar from table\G



The format is much more readable than usual. Some of you may have already known about this, but I didn't. So I hope it's helpful.

the o?reilly open source conference 2006 schedule is out, and i?m not on it. (i got my rejection letter yesterday.) here?s the talk i had proposed:

?22 Small Features in MySQL?

Did you know the mysql command-line client could save you from accidently nuking whole tables with errant DELETE statements? What about how the ability to change data being loaded using the LODA DATA statement that was added in MySQL 5.0?

In this session, we'll look at these and twenty (or more) small features of MySQL and its supporting programs. Some are old classics, and some are new additions to MySQL that you might not have noticed behind all the big new features.

oh well. after the upcoming mysql users conference, i think i?m doing with conference speaking. i just don?t …

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 …