Since I know a lot of MySQLers use Perl, I wanted to pass this along. Today was the first I’d heard of this survey, so I’m thinking that there are a lot of other folks who use Perl occasionally as I do (or even regularly) that are in the dark. Apparently it began in late July, and announced at OSCON 2007, so I apologize if you’ve heard about it over and over.

Take the survey now, as you only have until September 30th to do so!

http://perlsurvey.org/

I know I’ve been away from the MySQL community for a bit….my hand injury is healing nicely, and I was able to concentrate time on things that required less typing and more mouse clicking. One such thing was the site overhaul of http://www.technocation.org to be easier to use on my side for things like embedding video and mp3 files. More user friendly for you, with regards to article names. Please feel free to vote on whether you like the new site (poll is at the top of the home page, or direct link at http://technocation.org/content/do-you-new-technocation-site%3F). You can add a comment to the poll, too, if you want to voice your opinion.

I do hope to get back into podcasting, and have one for next week. Coming very soon: Videos from MySQL Camp!

Well… there’s been some work. Even some in-progress patches. Being involved with this has just perfectly refreshed my memory of why I left the platform. Oh my it’s a horrible, horrible platform. Everything from UI to API… ick.

Expect something around soon….

Ok, another blog post tying together MySQL and Frisbee. It all started back in June. First round of the Swiss Mixed Ultimate Frisbee Championships. We played well, lost only 1 game. So good so far. Last weekend was round two. We did not loose a single game and surprise, we are already in the final, even before playing the final 2 games on Saturday next week. Hmm, now I realize it started a year ago in Viareggio. One of the top beach Frisbee tournaments in Europe, where I was planning with the Viareggio only "Strandlaeufer" team. We all swore an oath to come to play together the follow year again.

Only trouble was, that this coincided with the final round of the Swiss Championships. Bummer, I would miss out on the final! So I …

Ok, another blog post tying together MySQL and Frisbee. It all started back in June. First round of the Swiss Mixed Ultimate Frisbee Championships. We played well, lost only 1 game. So good so far. Last weekend was round two. We did not loose a single game and surprise, we are already in the final, even before playing the final 2 games on Saturday next week. Hmm, now I realize it started a year ago in Viareggio. One of the top beach Frisbee tournaments in Europe, where I was planning with the Viareggio only "Strandlaeufer" team. We all swore an oath to come to play together the follow year again.

Only trouble was, that this coincided with the final round of the Swiss Championships. Bummer, I would miss out on the final! So I …

Sorry that I need to abuse my blog for this. Usually my posts always say something about PHP, PostgreSQL and MySQL, even if sometimes most of the blog post is about Frisbee. But this time its entirely off topic, because I am trying to help my sister and her husband who was just layed-off from work without any prior notice. As a result he was pushed to do what he was thinking in the back of his head anyways, start his own business as an A/C repair service company. Of course now things are a bit rushed and so he is having trouble finding enough clients to keep him busy enough.

So I am calling out to all people in Florida. Ok he can probably not cover all of Florida. My sister and her husband are based in Sarasota. I asked and the work range is from North Port and Punta Gorda in the south to as far north as St. Pete. Anyways here is a partial "reprint" of a letter Bob send out to a potential customer:

I am a maintenance, service and …

Sorry that I need to abuse my blog for this. Usually my posts always say something about PHP, PostgreSQL and MySQL, even if sometimes most of the blog post is about Frisbee. But this time its entirely off topic, because I am trying to help my sister and her husband who was just layed-off from work without any prior notice. As a result he was pushed to do what he was thinking in the back of his head anyways, start his own business as an A/C repair service company. Of course now things are a bit rushed and so he is having trouble finding enough clients to keep him busy enough.

So I am calling out to all people in Florida. Ok he can probably not cover all of Florida. My sister and her husband are based in Sarasota. I asked and the work range is from North Port and Punta Gorda in the south to as far north as St. Pete. Anyways here is a partial "reprint" of a letter Bob send out to a potential customer:

I am a maintenance, service and …

So today I asked a question in #mysql and got no reply, so I asked the same question in #postgresql and got some interesting replies. The question was if its "good practice" to rely on the RDBMS to detect constraint violations or if one should try to avoid this by running relevant SELECT's before any writes.

Now the answer I got immediately was that everybody felt it was good practice to avoid ROLLBACKs, so they all favored SELECTs. I was not so convinced initially. The fetch requires that you maintain additional code that essentially duplicates the schema definition. I was also quite obsessed about the idea that you might have to do lock the table in order to prevent concurrent requests form interfering and causing the constraint violation to still come and bite you.

Say for example you have a table that maintains who is friends with what users. You create a relationship table and put a unique constraint to only allow every …

I am of the attitude, the day you stop learning something is the day you die. I’m not prepared to induce MySQL into both sides of that equation, however some days it never ceases to amaze me what little thing I didn’t know about MySQL.

Today I saw in reviewing SQL statements for an application SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID(). No big deal, that is expected, however I then saw UPDATE … SET id=LAST_INSERT_ID(id+1) WHERE …

Having never seen this syntax I was forced to review it’s usage. See MySQL Documentation

If expr is given as an argument to LAST_INSERT_ID(), the value of the argument is returned by the function and is remembered as the next value to be returned by LAST_INSERT_ID(). This can be used to simulate sequences:

1.Create a table to hold the sequence counter and …

One of the key things that attracts developers to the OSS world is the no nonsense attitude people are allowed to display in OSS development. Where in the closed source world, developers are rarely allowed to openly explain the pro's and con's of their product, its expected in the OSS world. People that BS will get slapped hard quickly. It doesn't pay off and at best the benefit would be short term until someone takes another look. There are no restrictions on publishing benchmarks etc. This is awesome.

Now given that everything is out in the open and that people expect perfect honesty when discussing your project or even more importantly when comparing your product with other products, it can be very non trivial. The reason being that its damn near impossible to be objective, simply because everybody weights things sightly different based on their experience. Also one of course knows the own product best.

That being said, I think …