The Boston MySQL meetup is happening next Monday, December 12th, for the second time. The meeting will be held in the same location, Optaros. As with the inaugural session, MySQL AB is providing pizza and soda. There was plenty to go around last time. There will be more MySQL, O'Reilly, and Apress stuff given away this month as well.

The topic? Philip Antoniades, MySQL Senior System Engineer, is coming up from New York to speak about new features in MySQL 5.

The group is up to 106 members now, 30 have confirmed they will be in attendance on Monday. Looking forward to another good meeting. We didn't take photos last time, planning on bringing a camera and also …

Gartner, the largest and most influential of the IT analyst firms that provides advice and guidance to large corporate users (and vendors) of technology has gotten the open source religion.  Today they kicked off their first Open Source Summit, a 3 day conference in Orlando, which follows their well established application development and integration conference.  The open source section has over 200 attendees which is very respectable for a first time effort, especially since it's a essentially an "add-on."  Gartner has also ramped up the publication of research reports on open source adoption in IT with several recent publications and more than 30 new reports ones planned in the next year.  They are also planning two more stand-alone conferences in the next year.  Clearly, there's interest not only at Gartner but among Gartner's customers, who are typically among the more conservative IT shops. 

The Open …

I'm digging this newly-discovered method for creating sample data that is time sensitive. What I mean is sample data that will work correctly when used in the future with time-based queries.

Let me explain further . . . I'd like to create some sample data to use with a stored function that looks for data that's been spaced over regular intervals in the past few hours. If the sample data has the timestamps from the database I'm using now, the function won't demo correctly because the data will be too old when it is being used elsewhere.

Using now() normally works for this kind of stuff, but I need data spread over an interval prior to whatever now() happens to be then. Lo and behold, the date and time functions documentation steered me to date_sub(), which allows you to take a date and subtrack in certain …

PHPSecurity.org, the companion web site for my new book, Essential PHP Security, is now online. Many thanks to Amy Hoy for the excellent design!

I've included the table of contents, the (unfortunate) errata, some reviews, and the code repository.

Some of the examples in the code repository might raise ethical concerns, but I tried to be very careful not to provide full-featured tools that script kiddies can use. For example, the session injection script only lets you modify …

Here's a real quote from an open source user recently:
"The more distributions the more confusing it is for the customer! You can watch that on the linux side. Microsoft is laughing while the linuxworld is diversifying instead of concentrating powers."

Question: If there were six billion Linux distributions out there, would it be good or bad for Linux?

Answer: Good. Everybody on the planet would be using and promoting his/her own Linux distro, and Linux would be the dominant operating system.

This is not as silly as it sounds. Like many markets, the dominant brand (Microsoft in this case) sells a one-size-fits-all solution for everybody, while the upstart tries to focus on specialized niches. In the case of Linux, this has happened with multiple distributions, each targeted with its own niche.

Each Linux distribution seems to have its own audience, its own personality, and its own …

Being a consultant for MySQL means that I need a lot of instances of MySQL running on my desktop, all different versions and different configurations for different customers. It also means that I need to create instances on the fly to show off a configuration option to a customer or to try something out for a customer.

My system is a SuSE Linux 10.0, and I keep the SuSE MySQL binaries on the system for reference. I also need to have the different 4.0, 4.1 and 5.0 versions ready on my machine. In order to not to disturb SuSE's rpm setup, I installed the MySQL binaries as tarballs into /usr/local. It looks just like this:


Continue reading "Instances"

I have completed another article in my series of VB2005/MySQL developer notes.

http://www.openwin.org/mike/index.php/articles/visual-basic-2005-and-mysql-5-developer-notes-part-two/

I finally got a chance to review Pro MySQL by Mike and Jay. Very goog book for the experienced MySQL user.

See the review at http://www.openwin.org/mike/index.php/books/pro-mysql/

After reading Sheeri Kritzer's blog post, the resulting comments and her own reply on the use of SET and ENUM in MySQL I wondered how these types are actually used in our databases (So, Sheeri, who's perfect anyway? Just read this post to see some other "bad" use at our site!). Luckily the information_schema in MySQL 5.0 now provides an easy way to find out how your users employ the available datatypes.

I agree with some of what Sheeri basically wrote about SET and ENUM in her Working Smarter, Not Harder post mentioned above. It was only the specific examples she gave us that completely contradict what I wrote in one of my …