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 …

You may have noticed that my blog is rather quiet right now (and some may have noticed that my responses to emails are rather slow as well). Yes, it's vacation time.

It's the first time this year that I'm really away and spend some time without computers. Currently I stay in Helsinki to visit a friend (no, nothing MySQL-related) and will celebrate the Finnish independence day tonight together with some Finnish friends.

During the next week I will maybe put some entries online I've mostly finished but never published - but don't expect too much (my apologies for that). I'll be back from vacation on Monday, 19th of December.

After the release of the new XAMPP for Linux beta we now also could announce the release of an up-to-date BETA of the Windows version of XAMPP.

New in both BETAs: MySQL (5.0.16), phpMyAdmin (2.7.0), PHP (5.1.1) und Apache (2.2.0). Warning: eAccelerator currently doesn't support PHP 5.1.

Follow me to the XAMPP BETA area

After the release of the new XAMPP for Linux beta we now also could announce the release of an up-to-date BETA of the Windows version of XAMPP.

New in both BETAs: MySQL (5.0.16), phpMyAdmin (2.7.0), PHP (5.1.1) und Apache (2.2.0). Warning: eAccelerator currently doesn't support PHP 5.1.

Follow me to the XAMPP BETA area

Tonight is the night, many members of the local MySQL User Group here will be taking their first MySQL Certification exam. I arranged for a special deal with our certification manager Carsten Pedersen, if we do the test on paper (rather than at a VUE testing center) it can be done cheaper. So I now have a stack of exam papers here ready to go! They're computer-generated: different questions from each category, and random ordering. So cheating becomes way more difficult, even if you were able to take a peek at your neighbour's sheet ;-) The core certification test has about 70 questions, and candidates have a maximum of 90 minutes to complete the exam. Other people on planetmysql have written about their experiences taking the tests....

We'll see how it goes tonight, but I reckon we can definitely do this at other MySQL User Groups where there is a MySQL AB person present who can manage the exam. Interested, anyone?

And …

Tonight is the night, many members of the local MySQL User Group here will be taking their first MySQL Certification exam. I arranged for a special deal with our certification manager Carsten Pedersen, if we do the test on paper (rather than at a VUE testing center) it can be done cheaper. So I now have a stack of exam papers here ready to go! They're computer-generated: different questions from each category, and random ordering. So cheating becomes way more difficult, even if you were able to take a peek at your neighbour's sheet ;-) The core certification test has about 70 questions, and candidates have a maximum of 90 minutes to complete the exam. Other people on planetmysql have written about their experiences taking the tests....

We'll see how it goes tonight, but I reckon we can definitely do this at other MySQL User Groups where there is a MySQL AB person present who can manage the exam. Interested, anyone?

And …

Now that we're all going crazy with MySQL 5 and programming logic in the database it's probably worth a quick review of operator precedence in MySQL. I've listed the operator precedence highest to lowest (the MySQL docs do the opposite). Operators on the same line have the same precedence:

BINARY, COLLATE
!
- (unary minus), ~ (unary bit inversion)
^
*, /, DIV, %, MOD
-, +
<<, >>
&
|
=, <=>, >=, >, <=, <, <>, !=, IS, LIKE, REGEXP, IN
BETWEEN, CASE, WHEN, THEN, ELSE
NOT
&&, AND
||, OR, XOR
:=

And just for kicks I'll throw in the Perl operator precedence to see the precedence of the operators I'm most familiar with (never hurts to review):

terms and list operators (leftward)
->
++, --
**
!, ~, \, unary +, unary …

After the release of the new XAMPP for Linux beta we now also could announce the release of an up-to-date BETA of the Windows version of XAMPP.

New in both BETAs: MySQL (5.0.16), phpMyAdmin (2.7.0), PHP (5.1.1) und Apache (2.2.0). Warning: eAccelerator currently doesn't support PHP 5.1.

Follow me to the XAMPP BETA area

Right now, I’m craving the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database. Specifically, to compare tables for similarity. Sure, I can diff the results from SHOW CREATE TABLE, or mysqldump, but having the INFORMATION_SCHEMA will be much more handy.

Sigh.