I spoke at the MySQL Conference and Expo this year about the architecture we have here at dealnews.com.  After my talk, Jimmy Guerrero of Sun/MySQL invited me to give a webinar on how dealnews uses memcached.  That is taking place next week, Thursday, October 09, 2008.  It is a free webinar.  We have used memcached in a variety of ways as we have grown. So, I will be talking about how dealnews used memcached in the past and present.

For more information, visit the MySQL web site.

Well, as Giuseppe announced, I am leaving the MySQL Community Team after almost three years. I'll still be working at Sun, but as a staff engineer on the Drizzle project in the Sun CTO organization. We are looking for someone to pick up the reins in the North American MySQL community and assume the role as Community Relations manager. Interested? Get in touch with Giuseppe or myself after reading his article about the requirements of the job.

I should add that candidates should be advised about Giuseppe. As your team lead, he may subject you such horrors as excellent project and managerial skills, a kind and encouraging shoulder on which to vent, and a deep, heartfelt connection with open source and community issues. In addition, you can look forward to working with …

First, AddThis.com (where I was the director of IT) and Clearspring have merged! A side effect of that is that I’m now (happily, on purpose, by choice) a full-time consultant! I’ll have a web site up soonish. Until then, check back here for updates. If you’re a tech firm who needs help, and don’t mind remote workers, send mail to bkjones at Google’s mail service (.com).

Some folks thought I’d passed away due to the uncharacteristic lull in posting frequency on this blog. I’m very much alive — but working for a startup and maintaining a consulting business simultaneously is hard, especially when two large projects fall into your lap at the same time. So what have I been up to?

Well, as part of the now-public merger between the company I worked for and the new company, …

After having worked for two years and one quarter of a year with MySQL AB (now Sun), I have decided to resign and pursue another career.

Before I joined MySQL AB I was working as a database consultant and application developer. I knew that joining MySQL would mean giving that up, but I was happy to do so because I really liked the MySQL product. I was also attracted by the company itself, the flexible working hours, working from home, travelling abroad, and, very important, being one of the few companies that is capable creating FOSS software on a commercial basis.

I have had a splendid time at MySQL AB, and later Sun. I met lots of smart people and travelled to a bunch of places I would probably not've had the chance to visit otherwise. I learned a lot about the …

Man, what did I do before strtotime().  Oh, I know, I had a 482 line function to parse date formats and return timestamps.  And I still could not do really cool stuff.  Like tonight I needed to figure out when Thanksgiving was in the US.  I knew it was the 4th Thursday in November.  So, I started with some math stuff and checking what day of the week Nov. 1 would fall on.  All that was making my head hurt.  So, I just tried this for fun.

strtotime("thursday, november ".date("Y")." + 3 weeks")

That gives me Thanksgiving.  Awesome.  It is cool for other stuff too.  At its very basic, it can take a MySQL datetime field and turn it into a timestamp.  Very handy for date calculations.  It also understands RFC 2822 and ISO 8601 date formats.  …

Sorry for the slight delay in publishing the slide decks from my tutorial and session at ZendCon this past Monday and Tuesday. A short flight to Ríga, Latvia, got in the way.

Below are the Open Office Impress and PDF versions of the slide decks for Legend of Drunken Query Master and Join-fu for ZendCon. Enjoy.

Legend of Drunken Query Master: The Apprentice's Journey   Open Office Impress slides
  PDF slides

Join-fu: The Art of SQL - ZendCon 2008    …

This is more of an "behind the scenes" update and I hope that you won't see any (negative) changes on the PlanetMySQL front page or the RSS feeds: I just finished and commited the conversion of the backend script that performs the parsing and aggregation of feeds from requiring MagpieRSS to SimplePie.

This will provide better support for a wider range of feed types and should also fix a few quirks, e.g. that some postings (for example the one from Kevin Burton) only showed up as an "A" in the Planet's RSS feed. It hopefully also fixes a weirdness with time zones that …

This is more of an "behind the scenes" update and I hope that you won't see any (negative) changes on the PlanetMySQL front page or the RSS feeds: I just finished and commited the conversion of the backend script that performs the parsing and aggregation of feeds from requiring MagpieRSS to SimplePie.

This will provide better support for a wider range of feed types and should also fix a few quirks, e.g. that some postings (for example the one from Kevin Burton) only showed up as an "A" in the Planet's RSS feed. It hopefully also fixes a weirdness with time zones that …

In the xml parser that I’ve been writing for rss/atom feeds I’ve encountered what many people have found; bizarre encoding issues when displaying the data from the database on a webpage. Since this is not really well explained by the searches I did on google I’ll explain it here.

Issue: you have utf-8 data coming from a source, you put it into a utf8_general_ci column of a mysql database table. You read the data from the database and display it as html/xhtml. Instead of getting things like double backquotes or long dashes you get euro signs or umlaut type of characters, usually strings of them instead of the correct format.

Potential solution: use utf8_encode and htmlentities in PHP to clean the data before going into the database. This does not work. Why? Those characters are not covered by html standards since they are above ascii code 126. See here for the full code chart: …

Good news fellow DBAs; adding to the already packed list of RSS/Atom aggregation sites out there on the internet, there is a new site catering to DBAs called Relationalnews. Feel free to add your feed(s) for aggregation, because what else do bloggers want but more visibility to search engines, right? This was basically a coding project to get familiar with CodeIgnitor as well as RSS and Atom xml feed processing in PHP. Pretty simple looking back on it, and it was generally a fun project.I’ll probably add more features to the site at a later time, with free time being what it is…So read the news! http://relationalnews.com