What the MySQL team is doing with JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) in MySQL 5.7 is great! The MySQL Server Blog (Rick Hillegas and Dag Wanvik) published two key articles about new JSON functions. If you don’t follow these, let me highlight them as a set:

• JSON Functions, Part 1 – Manipulation JSON Data
• JSON Functions, Part 2 – Querying JSON Data

Most folks know how important JSON is to web development. I like the following visual that …

After you install Ruby and build the Rails framework, you need to create the mysql gem. This blog post shows you how to create the mysql gem and how to write a simple Ruby program that queries the MySQL database.

The first step creates the mysql gem for Ruby programming:

yum install mysql

It should show you the following:

Fetching: mysql-2.9.1.gem (100%)
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
Successfully installed mysql-2.9.1
Parsing documentation for mysql-2.9.1
Installing ri documentation for mysql-2.9.1
Done installing documentation for mysql after 0 seconds
1 gem installed

After you install the mysql Ruby Gem, you can write and …

I use a Fedora 20 VM image to teach Oracle and MySQL technology. Last week, I expanded the Fedora VM image to support a full LAMP stack. This blog shows you how to install Ruby on Fedora and successfully generate the Rails gems.

Connect as the root user and use yum to install the libraries. My approach is by library or small groups. Naturally, you start with the ruby library.

yum install ruby

You will see the following:

Loaded plugins: langpacks, refresh-packagekit
mysql-connectors-community                                  | 2.5 kB  00:00     
mysql-tools-community                                       | 2.5 kB  00:00     
mysql56-community                                           | 2.5 kB  00:00     
pgdg93                                                      | 3.6 kB  00:00     
updates/20/x86_64/metalink …

Everything seemed complete after configuring my standalone MySQL instance to a LAMP installation, but last night I started playing with the image files. It turns out that I failed to install the php-gd library.

There’s very little feedback when you try to troubleshoot why you can’t read an image. In fact, the error message for reading the BLOB from MySQL was only available on the local Firefox browser:

      The image "http://localhost/ConvertMySQLBlobToImage.php" cannot be displayed because it contains errors.

The fix requires root to install the php-gd library with the yum utility:

yum install php-gd

You’ll need to answer …

While I try to keep things simple, sometimes eliminating options and explanations comes back to haunt me. After posting how to open a Fedora firewall port for a LAMP stack, somebody got trapped by my instructions for installing MySQL on Fedora. They got stuck because they had the following setting in their /etc/my.cnf file:

bind-address=localhost.localdomain

I’d suggested using that bind-address value for a DHCP VMware Fedora installation in Step #7. I was trying to create an example for an isolated testing instance, which is why I set the bind-address to a localhost.localdomain value. They raised the following error when they …

After installing the LAMP stack on Fedora, you need to open port 80 in the Firewall to access the PHP programs on the Fedora instance from external servers. You can open a firewall port by launching the firewall-config application as the root user with the following syntax:

firewall-config

The firewall-config utility opens the following dialog:

Click on the Ports tab, and you’ll see the following:

…

A student posed the question about why table names are case sensitive. That’s because case sensitive table names are the default installation, as qualified in the MySQL documentation. You can verify that with the following query:

SELECT CASE
         WHEN @@lower_case_table_names = 1 THEN
           'Case insensitive tables'
         ELSE
           'Case sensitive tables.'
         END AS "Table Name Status";

The default value returned on Linux is:

+------------------------+
| Table Name Status      |
+------------------------+
| Case sensitive tables. |
+------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The default value for the lower_case_table_names value on the Windows OS is 1 not …

Somebody ran into the following error message trying to query the innodb_sys_foreign and innodb_sys_foreign_cols tables from the information_schema database:

      ERROR 1227 (42000): Access denied; you need (at least one of) the PROCESS privilege(s) for this operation

It’s easy to fix the error, except you must grant the PROCESS privilege. It’s a global privilege and it should only be granted to super users. You grant the privilege global PROCESS privilege to the student user with the following command:

GRANT PROCESS ON *.* TO student;

Then, you can run this query to resolve foreign keys to their referenced primary key column values:

SELECT   SUBSTRING_INDEX(f.id,'/',-1) AS …

I’ve been setting up a simplified lab environment to let my students learn use in class. This added content will show them how to do reverse engineering with MySQL Workbench.

It’s a complete Fedora image with MySQL and Oracle Database 11g for the course. The uncompressed image is 14GB and the compressed image is 5.3GB. I chose Fedora because it’s the smallest open source image that supports both environments, and Fedora is the closest to Red Hat and Oracle Unbreakable Linux. I’m inclined to make the instance available generally but haven’t figured out the best way to do that.

Here are the new instructions I’m adding and if you have any input leave it as a comment.

You connect as the student user, which puts you in the /home/student directory. Once connected to the Fedora OS, you open a Terminal session by clicking on Activities in the upper right hand corner, and then you …

The early release of Fedora 20 disallowed installation of MySQL Workbench but the current version allows it. Almost like Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow without the drama. All you need to do is follow my earlier instructions for installing MySQL on Fedora 20. I’d check your kernel to know whether it’s supported. You can check that with this command:

<shell> uname -r

My Fedora is at the following version:

3.14.8-200.fc20.x86_64

Then, you can install MySQL Workbench with yum, like this:

<shell> sudo yum install mysql-workbench

It generates the following log file, and if you have Oracle 11g XE …