The latest from the MySQL community

I’ve been using VMWare for a while.  Let’s start with why I do that.

1) Some of my newer computers are dramatically more powerful and energy efficient (all around) than my older systems.  It’s simpler/cheaper/saner to virtualize many/most/all of the older machines and run them on a single physical server.  Consolidating their respective functions onto a single server would take weeks or more of my time, so this was the way to go.

2) Being able to “pack up” an entire server and “take it with me” to different servers (or laptops) makes my life and my work a lot easier.

So I decided to try Sun’s xVM VirtualBox today.  It’s leaner/meaner/maybefaster and “Open Source”, and it supports a better set of host operating systems than VMWare Server itself, so I was actually looking forward to it.

Right up until 30 seconds into it when I encountered an apparent …

Or, “Missing information in the MySQL Manual”.

Just earlier today, I was using POW(), which I’ve grown quite fond of, simply because it makes life easier. I prefer using it like SELECT 512*POW(1024,2) to find out the number of bytes to put in a variable, for example.

First, let’s take a look at the POW function:

Name: 'POW'
Description:
Syntax:
POW(X,Y)

Returns the value of X raised to the power of Y.

Okay, so it gives us a value; but what about the data type? Let’s take 512*POW(1024,2) as an example.

5067 (blogs) > SELECT 512*POW(1024,2) AS example;
+-----------+
| example   |
+-----------+
| 536870912 | 
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

What is that? Well, it sure does look like an INT at this point, …

James Kobelius writes in Network World how the need for scalable real-time business intelligence will create a convergence of technologies centered on database virtualization:
"Real-time is the most exciting new frontier in business intelligence, and virtualization will facilitate low-latency analytics more powerfully than traditional approaches. Database virtualization will enable real-time business intelligence through a policy-driven, latency-agile, distributed-caching memory grid that permeates an infrastructure at all levels.

As this new approach takes hold, it will provide a convergence architecture for diverse approaches to real-time business intelligence, such as trickle-feed extract transform load (ETL), changed-data capture (CDC), event-stream processing and data federation. Traditionally deployed as stovepipe …

I was trying to check out the new Zabbix beta's when I ran into a couple of problems. Mostly missing dependencies but also some bugs.

The big troubles start when trying to install the frontent.
It seems like php code shipped in the last release might well work when you are upgrading but it fails when you are doing a fresh install. As I never got a Setup Wizard.

The clue is to get the most recent code from their SVN repo svn co svn://svn.zabbix.com/trunk , that actually allows you to run the setup wizard.

If you are installing the latest RPM's they are also not really requiring all the dependencies you need to run the frontend.

yum/apt-get install php-bcmath php-pear

Will get you a step further.

Another thing is the new password policy.. it seems the Admin/blank is gone.
I have no clue what the new password is but you are encouraged to set it yourselve in the mysql database

Having a status column is very common in databases today. It can be used to denote a user status: CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `user` ( `user_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment, `email` varchar(32) NOT NULL, `pw_hash` char(40) NOT NULL COLLATE latin1_general_cs, `status` enum('PENDING', 'ACTIVE', 'DISABLED') default 'PENDING', `date_created` timestamp NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, PRIMARY KEY (`user_id`), UNIQUE KEY `idx_email` (`email`) ); or user-uploaded [...]

A lot of people have been waiting for this a long time - so I am very happy to announce that we will publish the first Alpha that runs natively on Linux end of September. We will release generic binaries and the 5.1 source tarball including everything that is needed to build yourself.

This will not be a feature-complete beta release yet, but we are trying to get the basic functionality working so everybody can start modeling right away. We spent most of the last few months working on updating the Back-End implementation to use the GRTv4 and to prepare our platform-independent mForms. I expect the actual Front-End port to make good progress.

Let me share two screenshots I just made on Ubuntu, our Linux distro of choice. The first one shows the MySQL Model page. The Sakila demo model has been loaded.

The second …

GROUP_CONCAT() function is used to concatenate column values into a single string. It is very useful if you would otherwise perform a lookup of many row and then concatenate them on the client end.

For example if you query:

mysql> SELECT Language FROM CountryLanguage WHERE CountryCode = 'THA';

It outputs:

To concatenate the values into a single string, you query:

mysql> SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(Language) As Languages FROM CountryLanguage WHERE CountryCode = 'THA';

Then the output will be:

Although the awareness of open source appears low, the lack of Internet-based apps poses an opportunity to bolster open source penetration READ MORE

I was trying to check out the new Zabbix beta's when I ran into a couple of problems. Mostly missing dependencies but also some bugs.

The big troubles start when trying to install the frontent.
It seems like php code shipped in the last release might well work when you are upgrading but it fails when you are doing a fresh install. As I never got a Setup Wizard.

The clue is to get the most recent code from their SVN repo svn co svn://svn.zabbix.com/trunk , that actually allows you to run the setup wizard.

If you are installing the latest RPM's they are also not really requiring all the dependencies you need to run the frontend.

yum/apt-get install php-bcmath php-pear

Will get you a step further.

Another thing is the new password policy.. it seems the Admin/blank is gone.
I have no clue what the new password is but you are encouraged to set it yourselve in the mysql database

Short Version: You can find a fantastic video here about bundling customized AMIs and registering them with Amazon so that you can launch as many instances of your new AMI as you want. The video is so good that I don’t bother writing out the steps to do the bundling (it would be pretty darn long). These are some notes about launching an AMI, customizing it, and mounting an EBS volume to it (the video linked above doesn’t cover EBS). Also, check out the ElasticFox tool which is a very good GUI for doing simple EC2 operations. Nice if you’re just getting started or doing some simple tests.

There are two ways you can go about creating a custom machine image (AMI) for use with Amazon EC2: You can create an image locally by dd’ing to a file, mounting it with “-o loop” creating a filesystem on it, …