The latest from the MySQL community

disclaimer: this is a blatant plug for a friend of mine, Kristy Bennett.

Kristy runs (among many things ;-) a company called Green & Nutty, selling so-called soap nuts (sapindus mukorossi). Actually, only the nut shells are used and no actual seeds should be part of what you get as per Australian quarantine regulations (the seeds don't contain the soap compound).

So anyway, you stick one half soap nut shell per kilo of washing in a little bag (provided) and add to washing, and that's all you need - forget about the old laundry powder/liquid or any other blah. After a handful of washes (depends on washing temp), you add a few more shells into the bag. You can also make shampoo by simply boiling a few shells for a bit; …

I got some interesting comments on my previous article about unit testing Maatkit, including echoes of my own conversion to the unit-testing religion. One of the objections I’ve heard a lot about unit-testing is how it’s impossible to test code that talks to a database. “It’s too hard,” they say. “Oh, it’s easy to test a module that calculates a square root, but a database? Way too much work!”

Note: As commenters have pointed out, I’m not necessarily using “unit” in the agreed-upon way here. Everything I say can be applied to ultra-pure unit testing too, but I go beyond that. I will hold fast to my assertions about mocking though *grin*

Is it really impossible or even hard?

I disagree. In one of my previous articles I said …

(first in what will probably be a series of blogs as we move all our projects to a replicated, MySQL 5.0 environment, and I finally get to start playing with all the useful features that come with it)Say you've got a client, Mystery Client A. Mystery Client A has hired a marketing consultant. As a part of their rebranding efforts, they have decided to refactor their company spelling convention to MysteryClientA!, for whatever reason. That's fine for replacing a few logos, but MCA has a database-driven content management system, and their name is riddled throughout the database in page content, event description, news headlines and so forth. Your job is now to sift through the entire system and apply the newly crafted spelling to the entire database. So what do you do? ...

(First in what will probably be a series of blogs as we move all our projects to a replicated, MySQL 5.0 environment, and I finally get to start playing with all the useful features that come with it)Say you've got a client, Mystery Client A. Mystery Client A has hired a marketing consultant. As a part of their rebranding efforts, they have decided to refactor their company spelling convention to MysteryClientA!, for whatever reason. That's fine for replacing a few logos, but MCA has a database-driven content management system, and their name is riddled throughout the database in page content, event description, news headlines and so forth. Your job is now to sift through the entire system and apply the newly crafted spelling to the entire database. So what do you do? ...

I’d like to share some great news — The Pythian Group and Open Query have become partners!

Open Query is a leading provider of high-quality MySQL, PostgreSQL and related training in Australia and New Zealand. They offer consulting services too, and are also known for their MySQL Graph Storage Engine. Feel free to browse through Open Query web-site for more info.

Open Query was founded by Arjen Lentz, who was employee number 25 at MySQL AB. If you follow the MySQL community then I’m sure you already read Arjen’s blog.

Since you’re reading this …

I was looking for an example of how to write a MySQL UDF for my upcoming book "Writing Web Applications in Perl, Memcached, MySQL and Apache", and decided using Curl would be fun. Maybe there are some philosophical issues of why not to do it. But I can do it, and I did do it. So be it ;) Once I started the idea, I had to at least finish it. I hate not finishing something.

The single function is http_get(). It's very simple -- it just fetches a url (doesn't yet take the "http" part, it's _that_ simple). This severely needs to be fleshed out.

So, the proof in the pudding is at: http://patg.net/http_get.txt

A Launchpad project: https://launchpad.net/curludfs

Code: …

For those of you interested in getting maximum performance out of your DRBD-based HA clusters, I am hosting a webinar on the subject on Wednesday, 8/27 at 1800 UTC (2pm Eastern, 11am Pacific).

The webinar is offered free of charge and it’s already pretty tight in terms of attendance, the event being limited to a maximum of 60 attendees. But if you’re quick, you might still stand a chance of grabbing a front-row seat. Check out this page on our website, it has all the relevant information.

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Lukas Kahwe Smith has an awesome post titled "Open Source is not making enough rich people richer" .
Indeed, there is much talk that the VC's , the Investors and different others aren't seeing the big money fast enough, according to them that is.
Does that mean that the open source industry is going bad ? Does that mean you can't make a living when working in the Open Source industry ?

Absolutely not, as he points out there are uncountable people gaining a good living with Open Source, developers working on the different projects as their day job, system administrators managing open source platforms. We are helping out customers to implement Open Source and Free Software. And there are numerous other Drupal, Mysql, Xen, shops out there. Some have their own open source products and create a business on top of …

Being able to use an Open Source DBMS to manage your data is nice, but what good would it be if you can't easily access it from your applications? One key factor to the popularity of MySQL is probably its wide range of available language bindings, which started with support for C, PHP and Perl from early on.

I've tried to gather a list of languages and their respective MySQL drivers/modules below. It's by no means complete or exhaustive, but I think I covered quite a lot of popular as well as exotic programming languages.

There is a number of connectors which are actually developed by the Sun Database Group (aka MySQL) itself and that are ready to use:

• Connector/ODBC - Standardized database driver Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix platforms.
• …

This is the last week to participate in a database usage survey. If you haven't already done so, please take a few minutes to answer 25 questions.

LewisC

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