Some queries that seemingly require the use of subqueries in the FROM clause (commonly called derived tables) can be written without them. This is useful for earlier versions of MySQL, which do not support subqueries. In this article I’ll explain how to get the effect of subqueries without actually using them. The basic principle that makes this work is this: a subquery in the FROM clause really works like an anonymous view, and can be accomplished as joins to base tables, as long as the joins don’t interact.

blogging.la follows up on the old proposal for the city of los angeles to adopt open source and apply the money saved to hiring more police officers, and finds that the proposal appears to have gone off the rails. i wish i could say i was surprised.

but something that comes out in the report filed about current open source usage by the city is there are several departments using mysql, including the city ethics commission, and several others that think they could use it. cool.

Just a quick tip: let's say you are trying to restore a backup done with mysqldump that contains multiple databases, but you only want to restore a single database.

Start my launching mysql client with –one-database

mysql -u root -p --one-database mydatabase

Then use the SOURCE command:

source ~/multidatabase.sql

The –one-database option forces the mysql client to ignore statements intended for any database other than the one you specified when you launched the client, allowing you to restore your database without affecting any other databases.

Well, it looks like preparation for the 2006 MySQL User's Conference and Expo is underway, with the http://www.mysqluc.com/ site updated to reflect the 2006 conference.

What we can discern so far is that the theme is this:

Discover. Connect. Succeed. Scale Your Business with MySQL

The dates will be April 24-27, 2006, and the conference is going back to last year's location is Santa Clara, California.

The Call for Participation is open till November 7, and I am starting to brainstorm some sessions. This will be my fourth MySQL User's conference, and I want to try some new content. In 2003 I spoke on VB development with MySQL, in 2004 I spoke on Migrating Access and SQL Server data to MySQL, and in 2005 I spoke on Migrating Access and SQL Server data again. In other conferences I have done talks on normalization and managing hierarchical …

IE More Secure Than Mozilla? Just reading this thread on our favorite unbiased source of “news” for nerds. The poster would like us to examine some valid points, namely IE’s integration with the OS, and the higher “caliber” if you want to use that term, of bugs or flaws. Secondly, the point about the ability to uninstall firefox. He goes on to say that the report uses extremely flawed logic, and that Symantec is shilling for MS. I’d say a little bit of both is happening, and it’s happening by Symantec AND the poster.

My beef, I guess is with the statement that because it’s open source, the large number of eyeballs will make the code more secure. Sure, for the next version.. but who will upgrade ? How do you force someone to upgrade ? Sure, the latest and greatest is secure, but I have to routinely upgrade FF for my friends and …

IE More Secure Than Mozilla? Just reading this thread on our favorite unbiased source of "news" for nerds. The poster would like us to examine some valid points, namely IE's integration with the OS, and the higher "caliber" if you want to use that term, of bugs or flaws. Secondly, the point about the ability to uninstall firefox. He goes on to say that the report uses extremely flawed logic, and that Symantec is shilling for MS. I'd say a little bit of both is happening, and it's happening by Symantec AND the poster.

My beef, I guess is with the statement that because it's open source, the large number of eyeballs will make the code more secure. Sure, for the next version.. but who will upgrade ? How do you force someone to upgrade ? Sure, the latest and greatest is secure, but I have to routinely upgrade FF for my friends and family all the time. …

Finally, the 2006 MySQL User's Conference is announced. April 24-27 in Santa Clara (same place as last year?). It's 99% sure I'll be there.

The real question is if there's something I could say that's worthy of a presentation proposal. I put in a proposal last year to talk about using MySQL for large amounts of binary data (currently 1.4 million images consuming ~28G) but it wasn't accepted. Seems like with everything written in the book, and my daily management of a network of MySQL servers there'd be something interesting to talk about. The MySQL AB folks will no doubt do an incredible job talking about the new features.

A couple of ideas come to mind:

• Storing Binary Data in MySQL - data model, performance etc
  …

I just heard of contactlovedones.org, a web site to help Katrina victims get in touch with each other.

It runs on LAMP and Asterisk. Feels good!

Thanks to Yaakov Menken, CEO of capalon.com in Baltimore, for the choice of technology.

I have been looking a bit at c# 3.0's LINQ feature. Essentially it provides with c# with an SQL syntax to do what SQL does on DBMS, XML, Array and many other forms of data. What is interesting that the syntax also allows you to define not only what data you want but also the structure you want it in. Furthermore using reflection on the data source and generally the fact that you are no longer passing just a string to your datasource (SQL or XQuery) it is now possible to do compile time checking.

At first it seemed quite wierd to me. But I am slowly warming up to the idea. Pondering things a bit further I discovered that in many ways PHP has tried to push things into a similar direction. For example PEAR::DB's getAssoc() method (as well as equivalent methods …