I’ve had a bit of a windfall of books in the past 2 weeks. I purchased 2 books for the flights to/from the US, picked up an Amazon order on some Database Reference Material for some writings I’m doing, and quite a bounty at the MySQL Users Conference.

• “Screw It, Lets’ Do It - Lessons in Life” by Richard Branson
• “Losing My Virginity - The Autobiography” by Richard Branson
• “An Introduction to Database Systems - Eighth Edition” by C.J. Date
• “Database in Depth - Relational Theory for Practitioners” by C.J. Date
• “The Database Relational Model - A Retrospective Review and Analysis” by C. J. Date
• “MySQL in a Nutshell”
• “PHP in a Nutshell”
• “MySQL Clustering”
• “MySQL Stored Procedures”
• “MySQL Administrator’s Guide and Language Reference”

The ever cryptic Mr. Love posted a screenshot of a very funny NetworkManager easter egg with a checkbox for “sniff key and login automatically” when configuring the connection to wireless network. I wonder if we should make a GUI in the same spirit for setting up new MySQL replication slaves, with some kind of option “crack password and copy all data automatically”.

Bookmark to:
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Finally back home after some R&R at Yosemite before leaving the US. In conclusion, to sum up my experience of the 4th Annual MySQL Users Conference “Excellent”.
Here’s my take. Friends, Functionality & New Features, the Future.

Friends

I’ve used MySQL now for over 6 years, and full time for a number of years, yet I’ve only become active in the MySQL community, particularly Planet MySQL in the past 6 months. Over that time, I’ve read a lot from members, and heard from many people. It was great at the conference to meet many of these people for the first time. The list includes: Community Members - Frank Mash, …

One image I shot on the last day, which is quite perfect:

(Click on the link for a larger image)

This is probably a dumb question, but I’ll put it forth anyway. Is there a routine or easy way to limit the number of items in a group? What I want to do is limit the number of items in a group to no more than a certain number. For instance, the last 10 times someone logged in.

I’m thinking of a routine that takes in field1, field2, # limit, and then an optional keyword of {FIRST,LAST} and maybe an optional WHERE clause. So in an example, the routine would take in:

uid
lastLoginTime
10
FIRST
uid=12345

and the routine would find the number of times uid 12345 logged in. If it’s less than or equal to 10, leave it alone. If it’s greater than 10, delete it so it gets to 10, deleting the oldest records first.

This is not something that could be done with a trigger (ie, on insert of a new login, check to see how many logins there are, and if there are 10 delete the first (oldest) …

So, the “MySQL Gotchas” page was mentioned in one of the talks at the conference last week. The page itself is at:

http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html

Now, to go through it all…..

Round 2. Question 2? From the MySQL Quiz Show. (you had to be there)

I spend the past week in florida. First visiting my parents and then spending time at php|tek where I was invited to give two talks. I was quite nervous about the first talk about "database schema deployment". My original intention was to create a working solution to handle scripting the necessary DDL and DML statements to manage schema updates. However while researching the topic I found that its even less trivial than I expected. So during my talk I was mainly giving some basic ideas along with a number of ideas to explore depending on the needs. For example if all you care about is generating DDL then things are quite simple. In the past MySQL indirectly benefited from the simplicity of the database but with foreign keys, views, stored procedures and triggers even generating DDL is not entirely …

Another one of the sessions at the MySQL Users Conference I attended was Tuning MySQL5 SQL and Stored Procedures by Guy Harrison from Quest Software. A global company with 6000+ customers.

Guy has written a number of Oracle Performance Books in the past. His work now is on the “Spotlight” product family - Database diagnositic tools converting data to graphical representations. For these products, MySQL 5 and InnoDB only is necessary, simply due to accessing the right internal information for presentation. There are Freeware MySQL product downloads.

In this presentation he stated, nothing he was talking about specifically was relatively new. He did make quite a funny comment, “He is now seeking refugee status in the MySQL …

I didn’t take any photos myself at the MySQL User’s Conference. In reflection, perhaps I should. I did make it into some photos however. A few of them here.

Stolen from Jeremy Cole’s Photos at http://jcole.us/gallery/uc2006