Wow! This is my first experience with Blogs! This is all very exciting. Now that my system is all set up, I can use this to post and hopefully share some interesting stuff regarding the world of MySQL software. More to come.....

In some cases, it would be very nice to be able to get a crosstab result from a query. You can't really do that in MySQL, at least not directly; as matter of fact, you can't do it in most rdbms-es (Interestingly, MS Access does have a language construct for crosstabs: TRANSFORM...PIVOT..)
If you really need a crosstab, here are some techniques that might be of use. I'll illustrate them using the updated version of the sakila database. I really think the following stuff will be a lot more fun if you download and install this database first. If you think that's too much of a hassle, then just open the …

Earlier, I showed you how to install MySQL 5 (MySQL5) on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server. The MySQl 5 installation went just fine for us, however today when I tried to run a test script incorporating a MySQL 5 client to MySQL 4 server connection, I received the following errors

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mysql_connect()

I was aware that mysql_connect has been discontinued in C API, but why am I getting this error? I found that mysql_connect has been deprecated in favor of mysql_real_connect(). While that doesn't solve our issue at hand, I do want to take a moment to point out that Ingo Tomahogh has a good tip posted on http://dev.mysql.com about migrating your code from using mysql_connect() to mysql_real_connect function. To put it in Ingo's words: …

I'm sure you always quote all your table and column identifiers as I do. And so do all of your co-workers. Even in that tiny little script that was only meant to be a short-time hack two years ago. Then of course this article doesn't apply to you. For sure.

The update from MySQL 4.1 to 5.0 is pretty straightforward. Of course you should study the list of changes and especially the notes on how to upgrade carefully. There are some incompatible changes noted in that documentation. The different handling of some JOINs is just one example. But to be honest, for most of the part upgrading from 4.1 to 5.0 is as easy as switching the binaries (which means only changing a symbolic link if your installation is properly set up), restarting the server and …

I just finished plowing through The Keystone Advantage, a very good book that Arjen recommended to me. (Many thanks, Arjen!)

Here's the premise. We live in an interconnected world, but sometimes in technology we don't fully embrace this concept. Or, if we do, we don't behave in ways that capitalize on the insight and help our firms. The technology landscape is a network of networks, with keystones at the hubs, niche players surrounding the hubs, and dominators consuming the hubs and niche players. Understanding one's role in the technology universe (most of us are niche players), and playing that role well, can help us to thrive as a company.

Simple …

With the OSI talking to Microsoft, there's been a lot of "shared source" in the news lately. The idea is pretty interesting: Paying customers (or, in some cases, significant contributors) are allowed access to the source code. Thus, the benefits of open source can be achieved without the "tragedy of the commons," where users can take from open source without ever giving back.

Is this a better model than open source? It depends:

• You are able to collect payments from your users, but then you're back to selling those users again. For an established vendor, that might not be a big deal. For a startup, this cost could be significant.
  
• If the users can make significant contributions in return, then enforcing payment to develop source code will just add the cost of "selling" to the overhead of creating software. Note that significant contributions could happen even if only a small percentage of users …

sam ruby pulled a good quote on building in support for internationalization in web applications, which i agree is really important.

it is very annoying that i can?t use my flickr recent comments feed because the atom feed is broken due to bad utf-8 handling.

i?m thinking of doing another talk at the mysql conference next year about handling this sort of thing. there?s really no excuse for it. which makes it a little hard to do a 45-minute talk on ? it?s so easy to get right!

Yes, it's that time again.  Time to start thinking about all the cool stuff you've been working on and how you can share your wisdom and knowledge with the rest of us.  MySQL Users Conference 2005 was a HUGE success and we expect this year to be even bigger! 

If you have a .NET or Mono project that uses MySQL or Connector/Net then we want to hear from you.  You can go here to submit your session proposal.  You have to hurry!  The deadline for proposals is November 7 with all speakers being notified by November 30. 

.NET and Mono use of Connector/Net is growing everyday and we want to have a good showing at the Users Conference and show our support for Connector/Net and the .NET/Mono platform in general.  See you there!

Since I've been working a bit more on maildb the last week, I put the subversion repository back up. Sadly, the revision history has been lost for the previous version. All I had to restore it was the current checkout.

I believe the old revision history can be grabbed from the .svn/ folders in this tar file, though, if you need it:

http://colliertech.org/~cjcollier/src/maildb.tar.bz2

You may keep up-to-date by following the development in the online SVN:

svn co http://colliertech.org/svn/maildb

contact me for commit rights.
cjcollier@colliertech.org