As it's New Year's Day (for Gregorian folks), I got to thinking about MySQL and how it might wish folks Happy New Year. Perhaps someday MySQL will be a bit more like HAL and be capable of doing these things on it's own, for now it takes some work on the command-line client prompt to get a response:

mysql> SELECT DAYOFYEAR(NOW()) as 'Day of Year';
+-------------+
| Day of Year |
+-------------+
|           1 |
+-------------+
1 row in set (0.26 sec)

And there you have it, MySQL telling you it's New Year's Day! Not terribly exciting, it's obvious the MySQL doesn't know that day number 1 might be something special to some users. MySQL needs to be a little more concious of culture, perhaps allowing this kind of more direct question:

mysql> SELECT ISNEWYEARSDAY();
+-----------------+
| ISNEWYEARSDAY() |
+-----------------+
|               1 | …

My First Web Server
Originally uploaded by jzawodn.

It was nearly 10 years ago (mid 1996) that I first put my own web server on the Internet. Back in college, I managed to convince one of the staff to give my personal computer a static IP address so that I could run a web server. At the time there were no other student computers on the campus network, let alone with static addresses.

It was a year of firsts for me and for the University.

At the time my nearly state of the art computer was a 486 DX2/66 with 16MB of RAM running Linux 2.0.0. (I still remember upgrading from 1.x.x.) The computer lived at the address …

Personally last year was very interesting. Not necessarily successful, but enlightening on so many levels, that I am sure 2006 can only be a success. Now over the last few days I afforded myself the luxury (or torture) to look at other peoples code, besides pushing out one RC after another on MDB2 and related packages. Specifically I looked at some of the latest ActiveRecord, CRUD in no time, hyped up frameworks: QCodo, Cake and Symfony.

Now the first thing to do is to setup the given framework and to get some decent output. The only one that I was able to setup in a reasonable time was Cake. However even Cake failed some basics in the "how does the first wiff smell" test. Here goes a list of the issues I found to smell the worst.

1. Use of short open tags, sorry thats …

The year started in January (obviously ;-) with the publication of my first book, "Professionelle Softwareentwicklung mit PHP 5".

In February I joined the Gentoo Linux development team, attended the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM), and launched a new website for …

The year started in January (obviously ;-) with the publication of my first book, "Professionelle Softwareentwicklung mit PHP 5".

In February I joined the Gentoo Linux development team, attended the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM), and launched a new website for PHPUnit.

In March I gave a …

For those MySQL DBAs who think that binary logs aren't needed, think it over carefully. Yes, there is overhead in having binary logging turned on. Yes, it is needed for replication. But what about those other situations? Well I ran into one just the other day.
An automated job to create summarized records from an hourly load was started up. The problem was that the hourly load was only 1/4 of the way through. Whoops! After a few million records were already inserted & updated, and the damage was assessed, we know it would be a very long night, and tried come up with a plan to undo the damage.

Fortunately, binary logging was enabled on that particular machine. After "guestimating" the approximate time that the job started, I was able to work my way through the MySQL binary logs using the mysqlbinlog utility to find the SQL statements that performed the inserts and the updates. After dumping them out to file, …

I was just taking a quick glance at AMIS technology blog. This blog aggregate contains quite a few high quality Oracle related entries, as well as some entries relating to eclipse and some other open source developments.

There's an entry by Aino Andriessen referring to a an entry to Eddie Awad's blog. Eddie's been searching the web for SQL pretty printers/formatters, and he has come up with a few interesting ones.

Now, I've been needing such a utility ever since I'm using MySQL 5.0 views. Suppose you've made a complex view using a CREATE VIEW statement, and you …

Sometimes I don't know whether to consider Laura Merling, Executive Director of SDForum, a friend or a foe. She and the SDForum team (in alliance with Andrew Aitken and the Olliance team) are putting on what looks to be an excellent open source event in January. Confound her for staging a quality event right before OSBC! :-)

SDForum's Open Source Think Tank

Seriously, I like the idea, and it's something to which my recent blog entry speaks: we need more intelligent discourse between members of the open source business community. SDForum's event is designed to be just that: a think tank for leading open source executives.

I've been fortunate to be friends with the executive teams at MySQL, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, and others. Talking …