So I came across Google Patents the other day and thought that it was a pretty cool idea! Searching for whether a patent already exists had been a pretty hard job in the past, so having a readily available resource such as Google is a fantastic step forwards.

Especially in light of the recent Microsoft ‘FUD’.

Here’s a patent I came across whilst browsing around the various database related patents that exist out there:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=zLsYAAAAEBAJ&dq

Electronic shopping and merchandising system

Abstract
The present invention provides a merchant system for online shopping and merchandising. The merchant system architecture provides great flexibility for a merchant to adapt the merchant system to their …

When I first joined MySQL one of the things that was evident was the Support Engineers spent quite some time with customers issues that were focused on performance tuning. Performance tuning issues generally start with a engineer requesting a bunch of information from the customer such as:

• SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES
• SHOW GLOBAL STATUS (a number of times, to give us some rate information)
• SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST
• SHOW INNODB STATUS (if InnoDB is widely being used)
• vmstat output for a number of short periods
• iostat -dx output for a number of short periods

A lot of this output is pretty easy to go through when you know what you are looking for. However where we spend a lot of our time is looking through the SHOW GLOBAL STATUS output - trying to piece together the rates of change etc. so that we can get more insight in to what is hurting the database.

I also …

I learned an extremely valuable lesson today on a client site. It’s important that users of MySQL read the right version of the manual for the product they are using. It’s very easy to just goto http://dev.mysql.com/doc/ which is what I type in directly and browser the manual. While the MySQL Manual has separate sections for 4.x, 5.0, 5.1 etc, the 5.0 Manual for example reflects the most current version of MySQL 5.0. You may not be running the most current version, infact most production systems rarely run the current version.

My specific case was with Connector/J (JDBC) Reference of 5.0.4. The manual pages reflects the new 5.0.5 or todays’ 5.0.6 release and a particular default is now a different value. With …

I recently had the opportunity to return and speak at the Brisbane MySQL Users Group. I spent some time talking about MySQL User Conference 2007 Summary and Life as a Consultant. My summary of included:

• Overview
• Keynotes
• Marten Mickos - MySQL
• Guy Kawasaki
• Michael Evans - OLPC
• Rasmus Lerdorf - PHP
• Paul Tuckfield ? YouTube
• Community Awards
• Product Road Map
• Google
• Storage Engines
• Dorsal Source
• What’s Next

One question was posed to me. “What new did MySQL do this year?” being from the last User Conference. …

Yes, I know there are a lot of software development "top n" lists out there, and many dealing with writing "-[i/a]ble" software (extensible, maintainable, saleable, etc), but personally I wanted to get these concepts that have been rattling around in my brain for sometime down somewhere and hopefully start a discussion around them. Even though this isn't a wiki, I'll probably end up treating this like a living document myself.

For a long time (in software years), I've been maintaining the code base for the JDBC driver for MySQL. I also work very closely with the support team on various connectivity-related issues (JDBC, ODBC, ADO.Net, P-this-or-that, etc.) that our customers have, and have had the (mis)fortune of debugging all kinds of problems in various stacks over the years.

Sometimes we (MySQL) make debugging more of a problem than it needs to be, and sometimes it's just inherent problems in the "stack". Given that I …

Yes, I know there are a lot of software development "top n" lists out there, and many dealing with writing "-[i/a]ble" software (extensible, maintainable, saleable, etc), but personally I wanted to get these concepts that have been rattling around in my brain for sometime down somewhere and hopefully start a discussion around them. Even though this isn't a wiki, I'll probably end up treating this like a living document myself.

For a long time (in software years), I've been maintaining the code base for the JDBC driver for MySQL. I also work very closely with the support team on various connectivity-related issues (JDBC, ODBC, ADO.Net, P-this-or-that, etc.) that our customers have, and have had the (mis)fortune of debugging all kinds of problems in various stacks over the years.

Sometimes we (MySQL) make debugging more of a problem than it needs to be, and sometimes it's just inherent problems in the "stack". Given that I …

Yes, I know there are a lot of software development "top n" lists out there, and many dealing with writing "-[i/a]ble" software (extensible, maintainable, saleable, etc), but personally I wanted to get these concepts that have been rattling around in my brain for sometime down somewhere and hopefully start a discussion around them. Even though this isn't a wiki, I'll probably end up treating this like a living document myself.

For a long time (in software years), I've been maintaining the code base for the JDBC driver for MySQL. I also work very closely with the support team on various connectivity-related issues (JDBC, ODBC, ADO.Net, P-this-or-that, etc.) that our customers have, and have had the (mis)fortune of debugging all kinds of problems in various stacks over the years.

Sometimes we (MySQL) make debugging more of a problem than it needs to be, and sometimes it's just inherent problems in the "stack". Given that I …

I was asked the question today, “How do I show the details of a Stored Procedure in MySQL. The SHOW PROCEDURE ‘name’ didn’t work.”.

The obvious answer was SELECT ROUTINE_NAME,ROUTINE_DEFINITION FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES, given I like to use the INFORMATION_SCHEMA whenever possible. This lead me to think was is the corresponding SHOW command. A quick manual search got me to SHOW CREATE PROCEDURE.

What was interesting was not this, but the list of other SHOW commands I didn’t know. I did not know about SHOW MUTEX STATUS, SHOW OPEN TABLES and SHOW …

Jonathon Coombes recently blogged in MySQL Cluster Certified that he passed the MySQL Cluster DBA Certification as was the first Australian. Lucky for him I passed the exam after my presentation on the second day of the conference. I guess us Australian’s are leading the world!

As Jonathon said it was rather hard, certainly more difficult then the other DBA exams but nothing for an experienced Cluster DBA.

So as one of the last speakers, I finally got the opportunity to hold my talk on PHP6. You can find the pdf in my slides section as always. I was actually positively surprised that the room was fairly full, considering that I had seen several people head off to the airport already. I first asked how many people are still on PHP4 and a fair number raised their arms. Anyways, for some reason I felt that I was not speaking as fluent as I can, so I am a bit disappointed with my performance as a speaker. The slides however are probably the most complete resource for people who want to mentally prepare themselves for PHP6. One note of warning though: During my talk I noted that any of the changes/features listed …