I’ve written an article highlighting some recent developments with XML support in MySQL 5.1 and MySQL 6.0. Topics include:

• Outputting MySQL data in XML format; includes a look at the 3rd-party lib_mysqludf_xql library
• Getting XML into MySQL; includes a discussion of the LOAD XML statement (new in MySQL 6.0)
• The ExtractValue() and UpdateXML() functions (new in MySQL 5.1)
• Security issues, including a look at a little nasty known as “XPath injection”

You can read it at the MySQL Developer Zone.

Alexander Barkov contributed a nifty stored procedure and a very helpful pre-publication review. Thanks, Bar!

We are hitting a few walls with a CouchDB deployment and both Damien and I are a bit puzzled. This posting tries to attract someone with a clue to help us out. Our problems might result from not understanding the documentation correctly, but with evidently inaccurate material, we stand little chance. Here it goes.

Spidermonkey hogs memory

Or its garbage collection is a little ineffective. CouchDB uses Spidermonkey, Mozilla’s Javascript engine to create views on its databases. The user provides a Javascript function and CouchDB uses Spidermonkey to determine which documents to include in a View. The Javascript script that evaluates and executes the user’s function runs as a daemon.

We have a global variable there, map_results (declaration in line 19) that gets reset to {} for each document and map …

I seem to be getting a lot of requests on my webserver of the form: "GET /<directory-path>/pmapper-3.2-beta3/incphp/globals.php?__SESSION[PM_INCPHP]=<some-url>?" where replace the <directory-path> and the <some-url> with a path on your server and some random website respectively. It appears to be a probe to test for some vulnerability but I don't have the full request logged, only the request up

A

Dear lazyweb,

I want to mine a code repository for data to map past bugs to sourcecode files.

I have written a small PHP script (the initial version of the script can be found here) to import the relevant data from a Subversion repository into the following tables of a relational database:

bugs            changes         paths
--------        --------        -------
bug_id          path_id   <-->  path_id
revision  <-->  revision        path

What I need now is two queries to ask the database for

• paths that are most commonly changed during bugfix commits and
• paths that are commonly changed together …

To illustrate how easy and straightforward writing applications for CouchDB is, we are going to build a simple todo-list application in Javascript. You should be familiar with HTML and Javascript and the DOM. You do not need any Ajax experience. Although we are going to use it, all will be abstracted away.

The interface is quite plain, as is the functionality. This is only to demonstrate how to work with CouchDB and not meant as a real application. We could turn this into something nice with some spit & polish.

How it works

We take a top level view here, working our way from the user’s perspective down to the actual code. This ensures we do not screw up the …

I'm onsite at a customer's site this week. One of the questions I was asked, was if they have any problems with upgrading to 5.0, could they migrate quickly back to 4.1.

I thought this was a simple (but fair) question, so I devised a test:

1. They send me their 4.1 database (from mysqldump)
2. I import it into my 4.1, then mysqldump (eliminate variables)
3. Import that dump into 5.0, export it.
4. Import that export into 4.1, export it.
5. I then run diff over the file in step 2 and in step 4.

In theory the diff should be identical (except for the the date in a comment). However, this isn't always the case!

CouchDB got its own TCP port assignment from the IANA. Yeah! The latest release (0.7.2) already configures your default installation to use this port and the accompanying documentation and the wiki should be up to date as well. A big thanks to Noah Slater for taking care of the procedure.

Oh, and it is 5984.

Have you ever wanted to know who’s the top committer in your company?
In my previous company we etablished the term “CVS King”, a title comparable to “Employee of the month”. The developer with the most cvs commits was the “CVS King of the month”. We determined who was the “CSV King” using commit emails that were sent to all developers on each cvs commit.
Two years ago we switched to Subversion, so now we’re talking about the “Subversion King”. Naturally all this is anything but serious ;)

Anyway, today i programmed a little php script that uses a different approach to determine who is the “Subversion King of the Month”. It’s counting the line delta directly from the svn repository using svnlook. So the developer with the most lines added to …

After successfully passing the MySQL 5.0 Developer exams earlier this year the next step was preparing for the Zend Certified Engineer.

For preparation I first took php|architect's Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide from the bookshelf and started reading. The book gives a good overview of the topics covered in the exam and I even learned a few things while reading that I did not knew of before. Unfortunately it contains too many errors and mistakes in the printed examples and there is no errata on the internet.

After reading through the book I first did not really knew how to proceed in preparing for the exam. I did not have the feeling of being prepared to pass an exam, although I would think myself of a quite good and experienced PHP programmer. A really good thing is that everyone at Mayflower has the possibility to take some text exams at …