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!!!

So, before hopping on my plane from Seattle to Chicago on Tuesday, I met with one of the C# compiler developers at Microsoft (thanks to CJ for arranging!) and this was indeed a very interesting chat.

You may know that 40% of the MySQL userbase uses the Windows platform in one form or another. What you may not know if you don't use Microsoft stuff, is that Microsoft is actually surprisingly open about many things; you can get inside info about what they're working on, documentation on nearly everything, and so on. Basically, one of the few things not open is their sourcecode ;-). I'll grant you that's a key aspect in many cases, but still... consider that Google uses open source and releases some too (see code.google.com) but is otherwise a very closed company. Just to give a crude comparison how the world is not just black&white.
Anyway, talking to this developer was just one programmer talking with another (he used to work …

The second thing on my list coming away from the MySQL Users Conference (first was a question about limits in mysqldump) was to do a writeup on how to use Linux LVM (Logical Volume Manager) to take quick snapshots of your database. Many folks are using this as an alternative to the tools provided with MySQL. It's a good choice for a backup when you need to backup in order to restore the entire database from files.

Taneli has already done a write-up of the steps to complete this process, I want to add in a few things:

LVM not a True Online Backup

LVM doesn't do a true online backup, although it gets close. The actual LVM snapshot command is fast, but to get a good copy of your …

I want to thank Jay Pipes for showing me MySQL Forge. It was nice to finally meet him at the MySQL Users Conference. At his request, I posted my backup script to MySQL Forge, which covers a lot of things that are missing from the mysqldump utility, such as properly backing up a slave (with the relative master's log file & position). I've found this script very useful to perform general backups as well as using this to build a new slave.

In MySQL 5.1, a new engine has been provided that assists with the management and use of delimited data found in common flat files. Robin Schumacher takes a quick look at this new engine, along with the features and benefits it provides users of MySQL.

tim bray coined MARS: it stands for ?mysql + apache + ruby + solaris.? (get the shirt.)

bill de hóra proposed MADD: ?mysql + apache + django + debian.?

when forwarding the above to an internal mailing list at mysql, i proposed MAUDE: ?mysql + apache + ubuntu + django + eclipse.? the logo would be a picture of bea arthur, of course.

but mårten mickos, ceo of mysql, came up with MARTEN: ?mysql + apache + ruby + tomcat + eclipse + nagios.?

or would that be åpache?