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 …

Of course you’ve heard about the fabulous pybots project, where community members have a distributed network of computers continuously testing every change in the development version of python against the development version of many different python applications. This ensures that any compatibility problems are caught early, well before the next version of python is released.

I’ve just about finished getting storm, the newly open sourced python object-relational mapper that we are using with Launchpad and Landscape, added into the pybots test suite. Just need to finish reading through an 18MB test log to figure out what I did wrong in the test script for the psycopg2 installation, and we should be all set, with storm being tested against MySQL, Postgresql, and SQLite. Rumour has it that Firebird support is coming soon (perhaps even …

It will be Sunday, September 23rd at Taste from 1PM to 10PM. I’ll be there, along with the Ubuntu Florida team. Hopefully develpers from MySQL and Pentaho will go also! Possible topics I am considering speaking on include Bazaar, Launchpad, Ubuntu, MySQL, hiring and managing an international development team, how to evolve your database schema without going insane, and using bluetooth PAN networking with laptops. If you are going, what would be most interesting to you?

We’ll be doing a linux install-fest, so bring along your laptops and ubuntu CDs. I’ll also be able to answer questions on how to use Bazaar with a variety of different development workflows. We also need sponsors, so check out the website to learn more.

Sadly, it’s not my bug, it’s a bug in the MySQL Documentation.

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=29915

I’m actually quite surprised nobody has run into this before, and in fact many sources quote this stating that %I and %h are the same thing.

I can’t be the only person in the world that’s ever needed hours with stripped leading zeros before. The irony is that before the submitted bug I was 5 points away from being a Basic Quality Contributor, and it would be very funny to me if this is the bug that pushed me over to qualify for a free Basic license….particularly since my company JUST bought a few licenses a month ago.

So I need to create a portal site, where we will require multiple frontends. As most portal's we need to store some state information inside a session. We also need to show how many users are online, but more importantly be able to filter searches in the member database by who is online (we do not need to filter by how long the last site interaction as been, but you never know with changing requirements).

Now in order to filter by users in the member search, we need to have some information about active sessions by user id inside MySQL database. But if we were to put the entire session data inside the database we would have to hit the master on every request to update the session timeout. More importantly we would have to deal with replication lag.

The alternative approach to working around replication lag is using memcache. But with memcache we would not have access to who is currently online in an easy queryable way when we are …