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A framework can be a great way to allow you to spend more time on the actual application or web site and less time on standard tasks. It can also greatly reduce the amount of custom code needed. Django is one of the best known web frameworks for Python, and the good news is that it works out of the box with MySQL Server 8 and MySQL Connector/Python 8. This blog will look at how to use Django with MySQL 8.

There actually is very little to get Django to work with MySQL 8. Just install it, configure Django to use MySQL Connector/Python as a backend, and that’s it. From the Django point of view, you just have to configure the database option in settings.py to use MySQL Connector/Python and your database settings, for example:

DATABASES = { …

This is yet another story of Django web-framework with time zone support and pain dealing with python datetimes and MySQL on the backend. In other words, offset-naive vs offset-aware datetimes.

Shortly, more about the problem. After reading the official documentation about the time zones, it makes clear that in order to reflect python datetime in the necessary time zone you need to make it tz-aware first and than show in that time zone.

Here is the first issue: tz-aware in what time zone? MySQL stores timestamps in UTC and converts for storage/retrieval from/to the current time zone. By default, the current time zone is the server’s time, can be changed on MySQL globally, per connection etc. So it becomes not obvious what was tz of the value initially before stored in UTC. If you …

During my years at MySQL AB I had the unfortunate task of manually maintaining the download page for enterprise customers. This involved a ton of boring, error prone work and almost always led to some sort of error every release. Some of our downloads were eventually replaced with an automated system written by the web team but the memory of all that time wasted still hurts me. So when I joined Monty Program and saw our downloads were manually maintained in mediawiki I knew something had to change.

Most of the websites for Monty Program and the MariaDB project are written with Django so this is where I started. I used our existing website code base and just created a new django application for downloads.  There are many models / tables involved in the system but the important ones are:

• Releases: A list of all the releases we have made, i.e. MariaDB 5.2.7, MariaDB …

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2010-04-15 through 2010-04-24:

• The Onion Uses Django, And Why It Matters To Us
  I love Django too.
• Open Source Network Monitoring and Systems Management - Zenoss Blog: No Node Left Behind: Datacenter Barometer: BitNami Simplifies Stacks
• mysql-cacti-templates
  Offers complete templates and a method for adding your own. Highly recommended.
• Increase maximum size of PST files
  Microsoft Outlook …

I've been working on our Freiwild Shop website today making it compatible with Django 1.0.2 (final(ly)!). Basically, what I've done is try to run it and fix where it errors following the direction documented in the manual. I think that the next days I'll see how I can optimize the MySQL usage a bit.

The shop I've build has little models and doesn't use to much fancy tricks. Among the changes:

• Templates: extends should be on the first line
  
• Models: should not contain anything Admin-related. This is actually very nice, seperating models.py and admin.py.
  
• Model Fields: maxlength changed to max_length, oldforms/newforms options disappeared, small stuff like this.
  
…

I was browsing the web on this lazy Sunday afternoon and ran across a good article on the Rarest Words blog. The author was trying to get Django installed and running with Postgres. From the author's own admissions, he is not a Postgres fanatic.

Well, this and last year I hear everywhere that PostgreSQL is the way to go and that usage of mySQL in 2008 makes people puke… But without any real arguments (besides "Postgres is the way to go").

After some not so compatible errors with these not so compatible databases, the author did get it working and ran some benchmarks. Postgres did not turn out faster than MySQL. If you ask anyone in the Postgres community which database is faster, they will say Postgres. Ask anyone in the MySQL community and there's no telling what …

Google has just announced their alternative to Amazon’s s3 called ‘App Engine’. 

I think that if this is successful it will provide a shift in some of the basic web development economics and practices, even more than Amazon’s s3 has.

why?
- Small hosting providers (ones that offer a shell account for $12/month) will be marginalized. why pay for something when you get it for free?

- M&A. It will create a 3rd platform to develop on. you currently have LAMP and Windows. The google app engine provides a 3rd. The major difference is you can’t buy it. If we acquire a company who runs on this platform we have 2 choices. continue paying google for the infrastructure, or redevelop it onto LAMP. of course this suits google as their integration costs are lessened. Google might provide a ‘open source’ version of their infrastructure.. but I doubt it.

- …

While recently migrating Tschitschereengreen.com from Symfony to Django plus changing the database backend from MySQL to PostgreSQL, there were mainly two tasks more time-consuming than I’ve had thought beforehand:

SQL dump

The old database used a latin1 encoding for the database fields and utf-8 as the server and client connection encoding. With these settings, even trying to get a correctly encoded database dump from phpMyAdmin is a bad idea.

Using mysqldump with an explicitly specified character-set is much better:

mysqldump ? ?default-character-set=latin1 …

What they need the most in the short term is someone who could do customer support between 3am and 11am, London time, so someone in Australia would be perfect

Do you happen to know anyone who might be interested in the job?

Ideally it would be someone who’s familiar with web technologies (web, DNS, e-mail servers), linux and maybe some web frameworks (Django, Rails,. ..).

The candidate would be doing customer support (answering tickets) but if they’re interested they could also do sysadmin work or even development work.

see the webfaction job page for more details