By nat

This is the tenth entry in the O'Reilly Radar series about how alpha geeks got into computers. Brian Aker wrote a lot of the code behind Slashdot, works for MySQL, hacks phone systems in his spare time, and is one of the alpha geeks that we love--we know it's worth paying attention to anything he plays with, because he has a great eye for the interesting and the potentially great.

Brian Aker's Story

I was lucky to grow up in a house that always had a computer. The first computer we had that I played with was the Timex Cinclair 1000 (sp?). It came with 2K of memory but we had purchased the expansion cartridge to extend the memory to an impressive 16K. We also purchased a printer for it. The printer was a tiny thermal printer that printed out paper as a scroll. …

After a little bit of playing around I got distcc to fully work when compiling MySQL today. None of this really had to do anything with MySQL in particular, and really had more to do with just getting all of the permissions setup correctly for distcc. My account on the build machine now has the following information:

export CCACHE_PREFIX=distcc
export MYSQL_BUILD_PREFIX=/home/brian/mysql-builds/example
export MTR_BUILD_THREAD=42
export DISTCC_HOSTS="localhost hell heaven purgatory"

The first tells ccache to use distcc, the second is to tell the MySQL BUILD/ scripts to always build binaries that install with a particular build directory, the third tells mysql_test to restrict itself to a certain set of ports, and the final variable just tells distcc where to send code to be compiled.

All in all it is pretty slick, though one big annoyance is the lack of ability to speed up mysql_test at …

MaxDB has a unique, top position in the list of open source database. The SAP-certified database management system combines ease of use, high availability and exceptional performance with low costs. This whitepaper presents a technical analysis of how MaxDB is designed to meet the requirements of hosting business critical SAP applications.

So, I have not been able to find a MySQL magazine in print. Why is that? We’ve got great blogs out there, you might argue, and http://www.planetmysql.org is practically its own magazine, though not in print.

Still, it seems like it would be worth the effort. Thoughts? (http://mysql-journal.com does not seem to be working for me)

In an article, Heise.de (one of Germany’s most reputable IT websites) pinpoints some internal trouble in the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure FFII (”Association of SWPAT opponents stands before a Palace Coup“). The FFII threatens to split into several factions, with current president Hartmut Pilch being challenged by “the comparatively young programmer” (in Heise’s words) Jonas Maebe from Belgium in next week’s presidential election in Brussels.

I am worried.

First of all, the FFII was instrumental to the defensive victory against SWPATs this summer in the EU. MySQL AB was a prime sponsor and backer of the …

I posted an ignorant comment last night to the MySQL bugs database when I mixed up the different functions used to determine the current user. I didn't realize there was a new function CURRENT_USER() added to MySQL 5.0 but thought it was yet another alias for SESSION_USER(). As a compensation for my mistake I've written this comparison of the two.

Both functions and their aliases actually return the name and host of the current user in the same format, but still they're not at all the same:

SESSION_USER(), USER(), SYSTEM_USER()

Return the credentials (an UTF8 string of the format user@host) that were used for login with the current connection. All three variants are synonym.

CURRENT_USER(), CURRENT_USER

Return the name of the grant (as stored in the …

Roland Bouman sent me an email yesterday alerting me to an idea presented by Giuseppe Maxia on the MySQL Stored Procedures forum a couple days ago. The idea, in a nutshell, is to create a repository or library of tuned and tested MySQL stored procedures, similar to something like CPAN for Perl modules.

Frankly, I think it's a great idea. A project like this, given a good head of steam, would propel the movement of MySQL 5 into the mainstream and encourage hosting companies and others to adopt the newer technology. If there is enough demand for this kind of thing (which I think there would be, considering both the hype about MySQL 5 and the communities on the web alrady set up for other RDBMS vendors who support stored procedures) it will force …

In an interesting survey on COMPUTERWOCHE.de, the readership of this German IDG business periodical (141.000 decision makers every week!) is being asked “Will Open Source Databases oust Oracle & Co.?“. Right now, they’ve still only got 354 respondents, of which 42 % say Ja and 56 % say Nein. Interesting!

So, the other day I was asked by a developer to come up with a table to tally votes. Basically, there are 6 choices, and customers can vote once per day. I asked if there were any other constraints, and there were none. I specifically asked if they wanted once per calendar date, or ‘it has to be 24 hours since the last vote’; they wanted ‘once per calendar date’. And updating the current day’s vote is not allowed. Once the vote is in, it cannot be changed.

So I came up with a simple table:

CREATE TABLE `ManOfMonth` (
`uid` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default ‘0′,
`voteDate` date NOT NULL default ‘0000-00-00′,
`uidVoteFor` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default ‘0′,
PRIMARY KEY (`uid`,`voteDate`),
KEY `countVotes` (`uidVoteFor`)
)

There’s no need for a timestamp, and you can select now() into the voteDate part, and MySQL truncates the data for you (we’re using …

We were quite chuffed to see the latest issue of Linux Magazine featuring MySQL 5.0 on the cover.  There's an interview with Marten Mickos, an article on MySQL 5.0 as well as a bonus online interview with Monty.  The links below also lead to several good online articles on MySQL Cluster, understanding the query cache, replication tips and tricks and more.  Check it out! 

• Linux Magazine: Interview with Monty
• Linux Magazine: Articles on MySQL