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 …

Administrative note:

I had a bit of a mishap involving my hand and a glass door pane. The OurSQL podcast will be on hiatus for a few weeks as I recover. I injured my left hand, and I’m a lefty, so I’m typing one-handed these days. I apologize for the break in the show schedule, and hope you’ll be able to hear new podcasts about MySQL very soon!

What if which ever way you turn, you think are seeing a postcard? What if you could take the afternoon off to go skiing? What if you would one day come to assume that every city has a beautiful lake at the center and mountains surrounding? What if every movie would always be shown in the original version without having to go to that single cinema in town that did? Speaking of languages, what if you could get by with whatever language you speak, or just practice one of many languages without having to go an a trip? What if going for a snack after one of the monthly user group meetings, feels more like a speakers dinner at a conference? Yes, then you must be working in Zurich, the up and coming PHP capital of the world! :)

Seriously, all I can say its awesome down here and there are a ton of awesome companies looking for top notch PHP developers. Sizes and types greatly vary. From the small development team, to large international …

So I do not quite get it. Where is the technical difference between the Enterprise and the Community Server of MySQL now that MySQL AB has effectively back paddled from their commitment made with the initial split? If the Community Server now does not get new shiny features and be stable like the Enterprise Server, where is the difference? Jeremy is asking the same question. Where is the new test bed for community contributions?

It all seems to boil down to either there is none and MySQL AB has effectively gone back to status quo, leaving the Enterprise server as a way to make their paying customers feel like they are getting …

The short: 2007 Sysadmin of the Year Nominations being accepted — http://www.sysadminoftheyear.com. Canada and US candidates only (due to prizes and regulations. )

Last year, I found out too late about the Sysadmin of the Year Award (see my lament at http://sheeri.net/archives/157). Mark Cohen, this year’s “poster boy” for 2007 Sysadmin of the Year, contacted me to let me know that the 2007 Sysadmin of the Year contest is on. It started on Sysadmin Day, always the last Friday in July.

I asked if DBA’s count as sysadmins, and here’s what Mark had to say:

In our book, DBAs qualify.

I’ve worked with some totally amazing DBAs that not only do their job, but ALSO work as a sysadmin when asked..

Great bunch of people generally.

The press release to Forbes …