By nikolaj

MySQL CEO Marten Mickos' New Year greeting reminds us that "there will be a growing group of young software professionals not knowing that there was a time in the 20th century when software was not open and free."

With the OSCON '06 Call for Participation just open, and the MySQL User Conference only a few months away, there's no alibi for not enlisting.

If any of you are curious who my employer is, here is a good description:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/what-is-mysql-ab.html

I actually work for MySQL, Inc., the US subsidiary, but we subscribe to the same set of core values. And happen to be US citizens.

If any of you are curious who my employer is, here is a good description:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/what-is-mysql-ab.html

I actually work for MySQL, Inc., the US subsidiary, but we subscribe to the same set of core values. And happen to be US citizens.

Well, time to get back to work at MySQL. Here are the latest reno photos for those of you following my renovations:

BTW the post has its name because of a comment by my coworker Jon Stephens:

gee, i'm totally outclassed - you post photos of sludge, and my latest blog entry is about hacking a MySQL build script

Yesterday I complained about PostgreSQL's lack of the GROUP_CONCAT function, today I received a mail from Christopher Kings-Lynne with the solution: the mysqlcompat functions, which can be found at http://pgfoundry.org/projects/mysqlcompat/.

Besides an implementation of GROUP_CONCAT (not very equal to MySQL's implementation, but similar), there are many other functions that we are used to from MySQL. I installed the functions and tested the GROUP_CONCAT function and it allowed me to solve my problem without any pain. So for everyone who's used to work with MySQL and has to do some work with PostgreSQL, it's good to know that this collection of functions (in total there are 158 functions, including all the different overloading variants) exists.

Many of the developers here at MySQL dual boot between some type of Linux distro and some flavor of Windows.  They may need to make sure a new feature works on Windows or may need to work on an installer for the package.  More than once I've thought that it would be nice if Windows could read and write to my Linux drives. 

There was certainly no technical reason why it couldn't be done since Windows allows the installation of third-party file system drivers.  No one cared enough to bother, until now.  The website indicates that it supports all normal functions of a file system such as reading, writing, and file/directory operations.  Has anyone use this? 

A friend recently gave me a used copy of O'Reilly's Learning the bash Shell, 2nd ed. which I've been perusing a bit here and there, not really with the objective of learning all there is to know about bash in one swell foop, but rather to have bits of it lurking about in the back of my head for future reference. One of those bits came in handy a couple of days ago. As part of my job, I need to compile new builds of MySQL from the sources pretty frequently, and when I file a bug report, I like to be able to include the date the version I used was built. I mean, it's not like I can't do something like ls -l ~/bin/mysql/bin/mysql | cut -d' ' -f7 to get the file creation date for the client binary, but I thought it would be cool to have it in the MySQL version string so I didn't have to exit mysql or switch to another shell. I already knew that MySQL can be built using a --with-server-suffix option that adds an arbitrary string to the output of …

A friend recently gave me a used copy of O'Reilly's Learning the bash Shell, 2nd ed. which I've been perusing a bit here and there, not really with the objective of learning all there is to know about bash in one swell foop, but rather to have bits of it lurking about in the back of my head for future reference. One of those bits came in handy a couple of days ago. As part of my job, I need to compile new builds of MySQL from the sources pretty frequently, and when I file a bug report, I like to be able to include the date the version I used was built. I mean, it's not like I can't do something like ls -l ~/bin/mysql/bin/mysql | cut -d' ' -f7 to get the file creation date for the client binary, but I thought it would be cool to have it in the MySQL version string so I didn't have to exit mysql or switch to another shell. I already knew that MySQL can be built using a --with-server-suffix option that adds an arbitrary string to the output of …

MySQLs Certification Manager outlines the upcoming changes in the MySQL certification program, and why those changes were made.

I'm happy it turned out to be that simple, but the amount of such bugs and devastating consequences are humiliating.
Bug#7209 is a case of an intermittent failure when the best brain of Support department and dozens of man hours had to be spent to track the issue down to a repeatable test case. And the cause is such a trivial design mistake:

typedef struct st_hash {
  uint key_offset,key_length;           /* Length of key if const length */

  uint records,blength,current_record;
  DYNAMIC_ARRAY array;                          /* Place for hash_keys */

  /* cut */
} HASH;

gptr hash_search(HASH *info,const byte *key,uint length);

gptr hash_next(HASH *info,const byte *key,uint length);

Now, where does hash_next get the current position of the search? In …