I was asked a simple question today by a collegue who is an experiened Java Developer and Oracle user and had just installed SUSE on his personal laptop, to align closer with his work environment. What MySQL should I install, the MySQL web site has this and this and this?

Simple question, but the answer isn’t as simple, especially when MySQL now has a number of different products encompassing client functionality in addition to the MySQL server.

Oracle got it right with the latest edition Oracle 10g Express Edition (XE). A simple one rpm install that includes the Oracle Server, Oracle client, a Web Based Administrator, Query Tool and Application Development tool. I guess as we are all experienced, the simple question isn’t something we have a some notes on handy, hence the purpose of my entry …

I just ran into MySQL Bugs: #12027: , one of the fixes for this is to run ndbd --initial again, however as I had already done that on my other node just removing the offending file also worked.

I've been browsing around infrastructure tools, starting earlier with Postfix (SMTP server), and an POP/IMAP server.

There are a few reasons I'm doing this.
From the MySQL perspective, where tools are able to use MySQL, we would like to see it used optimally and provide some assistance where needed.
From my own perspective, infrastructure tools have always been favourite ever since my early coding days. I can tell when a GUI is good or not, but I know that building them is not my thing ;-)

Infrastructure is made up of many tools, but it all needs to work together. Different people make different choices (based on their needs and preferences) and so we can't actually expect any Linux distribution to contain precisely what we need, configured the way we need it. And sometimes tools can work together in theory since they provide some kind of external interface/API, but actually setting it up can be something …

MySQL today announced that tech industry leaders IBM and EMC have joined the MySQL Network Certified Partner Program. Among other co-marketing and promotion activities with MySQL, both companies will be sponsors of next month's MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara, California (http://www.mysqluc.com).

Have you ever tried to take a snapshot from a mysql server only to find an hour later that the box ran out of disk space when trying to create the tar ball? An easy solution is to use ssh to pipe the tar data directly to another server without it even touching the disk. For those unfamiliar with unix shells or pipes a pipe allows you to tie the output of one program to the input of another. This is most commonly used to manipulate that stream of data. For example if you want to find a specific file in a directory. In these examples cartman is server A (where the commands are ran from). Stan is server B.

cartman> ls | grep mysql-5
mysql-5.0

The | (pipe) tells the shell to direct the output of ls to the input of grep which looks for the pattern ‘mysql-5′. This same functionality can be used with the tar command. This next command would compress a file and uncompress it on itself. Of course this is pointless. Until we …

I've been using del.icio.us since 2004, and it has served me well. For those who still haven't tried it, it's basically a bookmark manager with a social twist. You can get a (nearly) real-time list of everyone's PHP bookmarks, everyone's MySQL bookmarks, my bookmarks, or the blogs I read.

At the bottom of each page, there is a convenient link to an RSS feed for that page. For example, you can get a feed of the blogs I read. There's only one problem - the feeds are limited to 30 items. That's why the list of blogs on …

I’m a data modeller. I specialise in this, and for a number of years on large projects I’ve been able to focus on this single task within the System Development Life Cycle of software development for several months at a time. Unfortunately what depresses me the most, is I can’t get a full time position in what I’m an expert in. It’s not a specialised skill that an organisation can use on a full-time basis, unless it’s a large organisation, and quite frankly, Brisbane isn’t a market that can support the diversity of large organisations. (caveat, large organisations that are proactive in software development, not just large organisations that have significant IT requirements, but do not work proactively). This is why I can also do Software Development, Database Administration, and even System Administration. Again, I’m not good enough to fill one of these positions in a larger organisation as an expert, but I can generally hold …

As part of my using JMeter for the purpose of testing a new Transactional storage engine PBXT for MySQL, I’ve been investigating the best approach for handling transactions. Read more about earlier decisions at my earlier post Testing a new MySQL Transactional Storage Engine.

I found that the JMeter JDBC Sampler only supports SELECT and UPDATE Statements, and not calls to stored procedures. This is just one approach I’m considering taking.

Well, I guess it’s time to contribute code to an Apache Project. I’ve modified code and logged bugs before for Tomcat, but this will be my first attempt …

Temporary tables behave very differently across various database servers. If you’re not familiar with MySQL, some things might catch you off guard. In this article I explain some subtleties of temporary tables in MySQL and explain when you might encounter problems with them. I also show you how the platform-specific features can sometimes be very useful indeed. Creating temporary tables In MySQL, creating a temporary table has exactly the same syntax as creating a regular table, with a few restrictions (no foreign keys, for example).

In my earlier post I asked about how to create a trigger that can access the auto incremented value.

One solution is:

CREATE TRIGGER article_filename BEFORE INSERT ON adoppt.articles2 FOR EACH ROW SET NEW.permalink = CONCAT(NEW.permalink, "-" , ( SELECT MAX(id) FROM articles2 ) + 1 )

This however doesn't works properly if the lastest record, or the record with the highest value has been deleted after insertion.

Is there a reliable way to access the auto increment value for the next record? LAST_INSERT_ID() doesn't work if there was no insert in the current session.

--Frank