As I write this blog I have over 90 draft blog posts. That’s 9-0. Why do I have so many posts? The main reason is I want to say something, and I’ve either not completed it, or researched it sufficiently to consider the entry complete.

This frustrates me as sometimes I just want to get the word out on something, or of my opinion, or of something great I’ve discovered. I do it for me, I don’t really care if anybody actually reads my stuff, but I’m surprised sometimes when I get comments how people actually get to see my blog.

JotThat is a surprisingly simple yet brilliant idea. It’s quite simply a site for making Jots, making quick notes, making a passing comment, noting a thought, something you want to either remember or something you want to say in a simple Jot form.

What makes JotThat in my eyes? Well it’s simple, …

I leaned a new trick today with LOAD DATA INFILE. I’m migrating some data from an external source, and the Date Format is not the MySQL required YYYY-MM-DD, it was DD-MMM-YY. So how do you load this into a Date Field.


$ echo "02-FEB-07" > /tmp/t1.psv
$ mysql -umysql
USE test;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS t1;
CREATE TABLE t1(d1 DATE);
# echo "02-FEB-07" > /tmp/t1.psv
LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE '/tmp/t1.psv'
INTO TABLE t1 (@var1)
SET d1=STR_TO_DATE(@var1,'%d-%M-%y');
SELECT * FROM t1;
EXIT


The trick is to bind the appropriate column within the file being loaded to a variable, @var1 in my example and use the SET syntax to perform a function on the variable. Rather cool.

A good tip to know.

Those that know me, know that I‘m a little paranoid about backup automation around the house (because I‘m lazy, and that if it wasn‘t automated, it wouldn‘t get done).

I‘m also a little paranoid about offsite backups, so therefore I have a VPN between my house and my parents‘ house, and send my nightly backups (via rsync) to their place as well.

Normally, when I check my e-mail in the morning, I see a little report about what got backed up. I didn‘t notice that it was missing this morning, and instead it arrived at 3:00 in the afternoon.

That seemed a little odd, so I went and looked at my cricket instance, and low-and-behold, the outbound rsync had the 768Kbps side of my DSL connection pegged since 02:00 AM. A little “du”ing around on my backup server, and I found out that a backup had taken place in the middle of a torrent of FC6. That wouldn‘t have been a problem, except that BT stores …

Those that know me, know that I'm a little paranoid about backup automation around the house (because I'm lazy, and that if it wasn't automated, it wouldn't get done).

I'm also a little paranoid about offsite backups, so therefore I have a VPN between my house and my parents' house, and send my nightly backups (via rsync) to their place as well.

Normally, when I check my e-mail in the morning, I see a little report about what got backed up. I didn't notice that it was missing this morning, and instead it arrived at 3:00 in the afternoon.

That seemed a little odd, so I went and looked at my cricket instance, and low-and-behold, the outbound rsync had the 768Kbps side of my DSL connection pegged since 02:00 AM. A little "du"ing around on my backup server, and I found out that a backup had taken place in the middle of a torrent of FC6. That wouldn't have been a problem, except that BT stores incomplete files in your …

Those that know me, know that I‘m a little paranoid about backup automation around the house (because I‘m lazy, and that if it wasn‘t automated, it wouldn‘t get done).

I‘m also a little paranoid about offsite backups, so therefore I have a VPN between my house and my parents‘ house, and send my nightly backups (via rsync) to their place as well.

Normally, when I check my e-mail in the morning, I see a little report about what got backed up. I didn‘t notice that it was missing this morning, and instead it arrived at 3:00 in the afternoon.

That seemed a little odd, so I went and looked at my cricket instance, and low-and-behold, the outbound rsync had the 768Kbps side of my DSL connection pegged since 02:00 AM. A little “du”ing around on my backup server, and I found out that a backup had taken place in the middle of a torrent of FC6. That wouldn‘t have been a problem, except that BT stores …

On Thursday I saw something I’d not seen before. An Empty Innodb Status. Now given the amount of output normally shown it was certainly a first. And it looked like:

mysql> SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS;
+--------+------+--------+
| Type   | Name | Status |
+--------+------+--------+
| InnoDB |      |        |
+--------+------+--------+
1 row in set (0.03 sec)

To answer some of the most obvious questions.

• Yes it was a working existing MySQL instance, with InnoDB correctly configured. Indeed we had been benchmarking for several hours.
• MySQL Server was running, indeed a command selecting data from the mysql schema worked just fine after seeing this (All other tables were Innodb).
• Absolutely nothing in the host MySQL error log. (This was the second most disappointing aspect)
• The Process List showed two queries that had been running for some time, everything was taking  ; 1 second. …

For all those instant GUI people out there, there is an easy way to watch the present status of your MySQL Slaves using the watch command.

$ watch -n 1 -d "mysql -uroot -pxxxx mysql -e 'SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G'"

The watch provides a view of a file or command, and shows interval updates to this output (-n  seconds> option). You can also specific a granularity better then one second for example 0.5. -d also highlights the differences for you. So while you see the following output with your SHOW SLAVE STATUS, on a loaded system you will also see bin-log and relay-log changes, and perhaps Seconds_Behind_Master.

The question is, Why is Seconds_Behind_Master the last column in this display?


*************************** 1. row ***************************
Slave_IO_State: Waiting for master to send event
Master_Host: localhost
Master_User: repl
Master_Port: …

For those that follow Daylight Savings Time in the US and Canada, watch out this weekend, because we “spring forward”!

The biggest caveat I have is: Do not arrive 1 hour late to work on Sunday or Monday.

As for MySQL, to test if you are fine, run:

SELECT @@global.time_zone;

If you get back “SYSTEM”, then MySQL is looking to the OS for timezone data, which is the default.

The real sanity check:

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP('2007-03-11 02:00:00'), UNIX_TIMESTAMP('2007-03-11 03:00:00');

This should return the same value, even though you are feeding it different times, because this is when the 1 hr change occurs. If not, and you’ve played with timezone data, remember that timezone data is only loaded when MySQL starts, so if you haven’t restarted MySQL since you patched your OS, you need to do that.

This is mostly stolen from a MySQL list post I found …

With my very heavy travel load and skilling load I’ve not had time to scratch myself. It hasn’t stopped the brain working overtime on various issues including the classic find a pattern in a string starting with a wildcard character. On a recent gig I saw the true classic.


SELECT columns
FROM users
WHERE username LIKE '%str%'
OR firstname LIKE '%str%'
OR lastname LIKE '%str%'

I went through the various options and comments on leading ‘%’, OR’s, combined columns, FULLTEXT (which doesn’t work in this case), merge indexing etc, however it perplexed me that nobody has really solved this problem, or at least shared their solutions.

I have an idea, a theory and while I’d love to prove/disprove it, I simply just don’t have the time. So here are my notes, hopefully somebody can comment positively/negatively, do some research, or encourage me to pursue it more. …

Matt Asay proposes the following definition to the answer what consititudes an "open source company" that I blogged about yesterday: "An open source company is one that, as its core revenue-generating business, actively produces, distributes, and sells (or sells services around) software under an OSI-approved license."

I see a lot of merit in this definition. However it does shut out companies like EnterpriseDB that do proprietary extensions while feeding a lot of code back to the open source parent. Of course you can point to the fact that the product they sell is not open source.

This however is the only code based business model around BSD projects. Without picking favorites, I personally do appreciate the fact that BSD style projects produce an ecosystem that …