OK, so I was up in Cleveland visiting friends for the holiday and got into a discussion with a writer friend of mine who is unabashedly disinterested in the blogging world. She asked me how I had time to read all the blog entries from the feeds which interested me. I answered that it was oftentimes difficult for me to get to all the entries which I found interesting, but that I had a fairly simple system set up to help me.

In a nutshell, here's my system (screenshot below, click for a larger image). I use Thunderbird's built in RSS reader functionality to subscribe to the blogs and aggregator services, like Planet MySQL and Planet GNOME, that I find to be good reading. I have tried different applications, most notably Liferea, but have come back to using Thunderbird …

?Sleepycat employs a lot of database people with, like, 25 years of experience,? [Josh] Berkus [evangelism guy for PostgreSQL] said. ?One problem MySQL has is that most database people working there are new to the database field.?

that is a laughable statement that simply demonstrates that josh has little insight into the breadth and depth of experience of the mysql development team. it includes a number of developers with long experience in the database industry and recognized experts in the database field. the jokers like me who just brought a non-database background to their jobs are not representative of the whole development team. i can understand why josh got it so wrong, though. those of us who came through the open-source community tend to be more visible in that community.

the quote comes from this eweek opinion piece by lisa …

Having a smart class this week in Amsterdam, I needed to make up some additional exercises. One was inspired by Tobias. Here it goes.


Among all European non-capital cites where English is not official, which is the one with the highest number of English speaking people?


Solution:


SELECT City.Population*CountryLanguage.Percentage AS Nmb,City.Name
FROM City JOIN Country ON City.Country = Country.Code
JOIN CountryLanguage ON Country.Code = CountryLanguage.Country
WHERE Country.Capital <> City.Id
AND Continent = 'Europe'
AND CountryLanguage.IsOfficial = 'F'
AND CountryLanguage.Language='English'
ORDER BY Nmb DESC LIMIT 1;

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I promised this set of functions back in April 2005 at the MySQL UC in Santa Clara where I talked about the new features of MySQL 5.0 and stored procedures, triggers and views in detail.

Starting with 5.0.13 the ground work for dynamic SQL was laid out as it was possible to use PREPARE inside a stored procedure. At Planet MySQL were already multiple references to it. As I already had the functions itself ready I had to turn them into dynamic SQL to get rid of the static binding to a single table.

Now you can get:

• sp_tree_depth
• sp_tree_get_subnodes
• sp_tree_get_parent
• sp_tree_delete_subnodes
• sp_tree_delete_node
• sp_tree_move_subnodes
• sp_tree_move_node

and use it with:

-- get depth


CALL sp_tree_depth('world_tree', 1, @a);
SELECT @a AS 'sublevels below Earth'; …

I had a conversation with Daniel Dittmar, one of the developers on the SAP team today. I am trying to get familiar with the MaxDB codebase, and it's difficult to do without at least a bit of explanation. The inline English documentation is written by native German speakers, so it's often difficult to discern. Having this map will help me quite a bit. I hope it helps some others as well.

Thanks very much to Daniel for putting an evening in to documenting this.




12:56 < cj> DanielD: can you point me to some docs on the maxdb source code?
12:56 < cj> why are the different parts named with such short and
difficult-to-remember names? :)
12:57 < DanielD> partly, because if you work with them day in, day out, you
remember them anyway and they are easier to type
12:57 < cj> :)
12:58 < DanielD> what documentation there is, is either …

I learned today that I won one of the three Grand Prizes of the MySQL 5 contest. I was just on the phone with our marketing officer when Arjen's mail popped in this morning and I almost burst her ear yelling something like "I'll fly to Santa Clara"! Of course she had no clue what I meant, but she still realized that something made me really, really happy.

So I want to send a big "Thank you!" to the MySQL community team. Being really just the "new kid on the block" as Arjen puts it in his blog, the decision hit me by surprise. Yes, I continuously filed some bug reports since quite a while (the first one dating back to MySQL 4.1.1), but it's only a few week ago since I started my blog.

Well, I actually planned to start my blog for one year now and collected some of the ideas …

I'm not a digg reader, I've only looked at the website once and that was because of a story on some website that I saw that was comparing Slashdot's traffic with Digg site.

Which I might add was complete and udder crap. I've had access to Slashdot's web stats for years and I can tell you that the chart presented drastically underestimated Slashdot's traffic. Slashdot's traffic isn't that much compared to Livejournals, or obviously something like Google but its a multiple of what was presented in those graphs (I make zero cash on Slashdot BTW, but I do have friends who make their living from it).

This is not to knock the work that Digg is doing, I'm happy to see collaborative sites get big. They offer a view of what the ochlocracy see as important. Slashdot on the other hand is a lot about what Rob sees as important and that is what makes it interesting. Its the presence of an …

So, in a previous post I talked about smart code. Today I put myself square into a discussion about ENUM and SET. ENUM is an enumerated list of values; similar to a pull-down menu, where the only values allowed in that field are the ones defined, with the option of also having a null column.

The ENUM field takes the idea of normalizing the data and eliminates the need for a join on that data. It also makes data integrity easy — if the value you’re trying to enter is not in the ENUM column definition, MySQL throws an error.

ENUM is not a standard SQL data type. It is MySQL specific.

As an example, in the real world I run a database for an international not-for-profit. …

As you know, MySQL 5 stored routines language does not provide any sort of array structure. While this is not a problem when dealing with normal SQL, since arrays are a symptom of non-normalized data, when using a programming language, it becomes quite a strain, and the programmer is often struggling to achieve results that would be really natural and simple using an array, but are made unnecessarily hard by lack of them.
Thus comes into existence this library of routines that emulate arrays in MySQL 5.
ImplementationArrays, as part of the MySQL General Purpose Stored Routines Library are implemented as datasets, all belonging to one table, and identified by a unique name. The details of the implementation are hiddenby the interface, and you should not worry a lot about it.
General concepts about the array libraryWhenever possible, each routine is …