I downloaded Flock today. I was curious to see why it had managed to generate a fair amount of buzz, given all the other hollow buzz around Web 2.0. Maybe this application was different?

Well, it is different, in the sense that it is actually a full-blown application, whereas much of Web 2.0 consists of simple features that can never stand alone as companies. But the fact that Flock is an application is also one of its downfalls - it's a browser. Who needs another browser?

More pertinently to this discussion, who beyond Silicon Valley could have thought that the world needed this kind of browser? It's a browser that aggregates many of Web 2.0's worst buzzwords (RSS feeds! del.ici.ous tags! Flickr photos!), buzzwords that virtually no one outside of Silicon Valley cares about. (It's a bit like a flocked Christmas tree. You know, that white, …

Steve Hamm over at BusinessWeek has an interesting take on the launch of MySQL 5.0 and the impact that open source is causing to the large closed source database companies.  He cites Evans Data recent survey results that show open source database deployments up by 20% in the last six months and use of MySQL up by 25% during this time.  Given the size of the MySQL installed base (over 6 million active installations) this is very significant growth.  Forty-four percent of corporate developers surveyed indicate that they use MySQL.  That's something we're very proud of at MySQL, and Hamm also makes the point that it's a trend that could have serious implications for old school database vendors who make a lot of their revenue on licenses and …

It’s a great day. At least for me. The well anticipated mySQL 5.0 is out! Go get it. Use it.

Dear user of MySQL,

It is my pleasure to announce the production release of MySQL 5.0, which is hereby GA (Generally Available). Since my announcement of the Release Candidate less than a month ago, no bugs have been reported that require a second Release Candidate. This, combined with the feedback from over two million downloads of MySQL 5.0 during its beta phase, give us the confidence to give MySQL 5.0 the status of Current Production Release, or GA.

In the Release Candidate announcement less than a month ago, I described MySQL 5.0 as “the most important release in MySQL’s history”, and that is certainly the case. Thus, I encourage you all to:

• get your own copy at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html
• do all of your new database development using MySQL 5.0
• upgrade your current MySQL environments to …

Following on from post about the MySQL forums, I answered a question this morning which might be of use to others. It relates to comments in MySQL Stored Routines (SQL/PSM).

I suppose a quick mention of how to write comments in SQL/PSM would be usefull. There are two types of comments in SQL/PSM firstly there is a comment characteristic value we can use to store general comments about the routine, we will look at that later, then there are in-line comments, thesw will be similar to comments you may have used in other procedural languages or programming in general.

The first is a single line comment, when ever you wish to simply show a single line comment you can use the following syntax

-- This is a comment. 

MySQL will ignore anything after the -- when it compiles the SQL/PSM code. The second type of in-line comment is the /* combination. This can be used to make comments …

Every now and again I browse the MySQL forums, it's a great way to help others, hone your own skills and also to learn something new. It's also a great inspiration for this blog, many of the topics I mention are directly related to message I see posted. I don't refer to messages directly as I wouldn't want to point out peoples mistakes publicly, which is often the reason behind a blog entry, I see a lot of the same sort of problems or assumptions and so write about it here to try and spread the knowledge around a bit.

Making mistakes or assumptions is never something to be ashamed of, as you well know I make them all the time, it's obvious people are coming to MySQL from other databases and trying to do things the same way they have in the past. Rather than worry about them we should embrace them, use them as a method for learning. The hard part comes in actually asking for help, it can often be a little difficult asking other people …

Dynamic queries (a.k.a. prepared statements) have been rather neglected in the list of new features available in MySQL 5.
However, they are simply priceless when you try to achieve something unusual.

Let's start with a common problem. You would like to get the list of your tables with the number of records for each one.
In the old times before MySQL 5, you would do SHOW TABLE STATUS. But that output is large, difficult to display, and it has a serious fault, since for InnoDB tables the number of rows is a calculated guess, rather than a precise count.
What you'd really want is this (using the world sample database)

SELECT 'City' AS `table`, COUNT(*) as records FROM City
UNION
SELECT 'Country', COUNT(*) FROM Country
UNION
SELECT 'CountryLanguage', COUNT(*) FROM CountryLanguage

 …

PortaWiki is for collecting, sharing and collaboration on portability issues that arise during software development and porting. There are entry points per topic and per platform.

The idea for this came up at AUUG 2005 in Sydney, originally by Peter Gutmann (cryptlib). People from MySQL AB and the OpenBSD / OpenSSH project immediately responded positively, so Stewart Smith set up this wiki to get things started. Darren Tucker from OpenSSH has been quite busy adding items since, also.

Please contribute what you know/find and help build this essential resource! And do add your Project/name on the main page under "Participating Projects" so people can see who is active.

If you checked my blog yesterday you may have seen a post titled "Finding a name for MySQL Stored Procedures". The general theme was trying to find a smaller and more snappy method of refering to stored procedures within MySQL. I got a fair few comments from people about the blog which were generally positive and welcomed the idea.

However, I recieved an email from MySQL AB requesting that we didn't use the name I had decided apon. The reason begin that it included a My prefix and MySQL AB feel that doing so dilutes the trademark. This can be seen in action for example in the renaming of MyODBC to Connector/ODBC.

I of course don't have a problem with this, the intention of giving stored procedures a name was more to do with keeping things short and also removing the ambiguity of the word procedure when actually talking about functions.

The big question is do MySQL stored procedures actually need a name? …

Yes, finally ;-)
I have of course been playing with MySQL 5.0 features such as triggers and stored procedures for some time.

Last week at the AUUG conference I also taught a tutorial on the new 5.0 features, which was very popular both with seasoned MySQL users and "RDBMS migrants" alike. I think it's becoming clear that many people are rapidly moving to 5.0, and starting new projects on 5.0 straight away. That's great.

Of course, if you read Planet MySQL this is probably the zillionth message on the topic ;-)