This is just a post to let you 5.0 users know that 5.0.96 is now available.

You may have read about some of the security bugs fixed in the recent 5.0.95, and now 5.0.96 is available (it’s been nearly 9 months since 5.0.94 was released – so this is quite a lot of activity as far as 5.0 is concerned).

So if for some reason you’re still running MySQL 5.0, you should at least upgrade to the latest 5.0.96.

The upgrade process should be smooth and simple if you’re already running 5.0 (just be safe and backup your data first though).

You can download 5.0.96 from here:

http://downloads.skysql.com/archive/index/p/mysql/v/5.0.96

And if you’re interested in the 5.0 changelogs, I have direct links to them here (just look for MySQL 5.0):

…

Long time no speak! Hey non-avid readers!

I’ve been keeping my head down lately working away in our support group, and haven’t had much time to get any tips down on my blog or even any thoughts in general.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been polishing up my presentation - MySQL for Oracle DBAs, which is on the last day - next Thursday, April 27th.

http://www.mysqluc.com/cs/mysqluc2006/view/e_sess/8465

If you’re reading this - and around at our user conference next week - seek me out and say “Hi!”.

I’ll work on a number of blog posts after the conference, which will give some of the information available in my presentation as well.

Look forward to saying “Hi!” to as many of you as possible!

Long time no speak! Hey non-avid readers!

I’ve been keeping my head down lately working away in our support group, and haven’t had much time to get any tips down on my blog or even any thoughts in general.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been polishing up my presentation - MySQL for Oracle DBAs, which is on the last day - next Thursday, April 27th.

http://www.mysqluc.com/cs/mysqluc2006/view/e_sess/8465

If you’re reading this - and around at our user conference next week - seek me out and say “Hi!”.

I’ll work on a number of blog posts after the conference, which will give some of the information available in my presentation as well.

Look forward to saying “Hi!” to as many of you as possible!

wow. The MySQL 5.0 download count has passed 1 Million already. You like us! You really like us! :)

Carsten Pedersen (Certification Manager of at MySQL AB) read my entry about stripping digits, and has done a good write up here on how this function could be improved, a great deal.

Have a read of Carstens link, and my previous entry if you didn’t catch it, before we progress.

As you see, I mentioned that “it performed fairly well”, but I admit given the nature of the request (a quick IRC question) I didn’t run a benchmark on it compared to something like Carsten’s REPLACE solution. I actually went with the REGEXP as the original question was actually something along the lines of “If I have a string such as “joe123″ how I can I strip the digits from the end to return just “joe”. I wrote the quick function as an example of what you can do in 5.0, as the user was still 4.x anyway, really the answer would have been a little more …

Carsten Pedersen (Certification Manager of at MySQL AB) read my entry about stripping digits, and has done a good write up here on how this function could be improved, a great deal.

Have a read of Carstens link, and my previous entry if you didn’t catch it, before we progress.

As you see, I mentioned that “it performed fairly well”, but I admit given the nature of the request (a quick IRC question) I didn’t run a benchmark on it compared to something like Carsten’s REPLACE solution. I actually went with the REGEXP as the original question was actually something along the lines of “If I have a string such as “joe123″ how I can I strip the digits from the end to return just “joe”. I wrote the quick function as an example of what you can do in 5.0, as the user was still 4.x anyway, really the answer would have been a little more …

We had a question in #mysql on freenode yesterday, asking if there was a function to strip digits from a string. The answer is of course - not natively.

I’ve been playing around with Functions and Stored Procedures a bit lately though, trying to familiarise myself with the MySQL implementation fully, and wrote this quick function which does the job, although only in 5.0:

DELIMITER //
 
DROP FUNCTION strip_digits //
 
CREATE FUNCTION strip_digits (str VARCHAR(50))
  RETURNS VARCHAR(50)
  BEGIN
    DECLARE sub_start INT DEFAULT 0;
    DECLARE res VARCHAR(50) DEFAULT '';
    
    WHILE sub_start < LENGTH(str)+1 DO
    
     IF SUBSTRING(str,sub_start,1) REGEXP '[[:alpha:]]' THEN
…

We had a question in #mysql on freenode yesterday, asking if there was a function to strip digits from a string. The answer is of course - not natively.

I’ve been playing around with Functions and Stored Procedures a bit lately though, trying to familiarise myself with the MySQL implementation fully, and wrote this quick function which does the job, although only in 5.0:

DELIMITER //

DROP FUNCTION strip_digits //

CREATE FUNCTION strip_digits (str VARCHAR(50))
RETURNS VARCHAR(50)
BEGIN
DECLARE sub_start INT DEFAULT 0;
DECLARE res VARCHAR(50) DEFAULT '';

WHILE sub_start < LENGTH(str)+1 DO

IF SUBSTRING(str,sub_start,1) REGEXP '[[:alpha:]]' THEN
SET res = CONCAT(res,SUBSTRING(str,sub_start,1));
END IF;

SET sub_start = sub_start + 1;

END WHILE;
RETURN res;
END;
//

Here’s a couple …

One of the major new pieces of functionality within the 5.0 release of MySQL is something called “Triggers”. Triggers are objects that are related to tables which are executed, or to show where their orginial name came from “fired”, when a triggering event is performed against its associated table. These events are those statements that modify the data within the table that the trigger is associated with - INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE - and can be fired either BEFORE or AFTER row the row is modified - or indeed both.

Triggers are very much like stored procedures, as if you want to execute multiple actions when a trigger is fired you can encapsulate these within a BEGIN … END construct. They also have a couple of extra keywords - OLD and NEW- which refer to the values of the columns before and after the statement was processed, respectively. INSERTs only allow NEW (as no value existed beforehand), UPDATEs allow both NEW and OLD, and …

One of the major new pieces of functionality within the 5.0 release of MySQL is something called “Triggers”. Triggers are objects that are related to tables which are executed, or to show where their orginial name came from “fired”, when a triggering event is performed against its associated table. These events are those statements that modify the data within the table that the trigger is associated with - INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE - and can be fired either BEFORE or AFTER row the row is modified - or indeed both.

Triggers are very much like stored procedures, as if you want to execute multiple actions when a trigger is fired you can encapsulate these within a BEGIN … END construct. They also have a couple of extra keywords - OLD and NEW- which refer to the values of the columns before and after the statement was processed, respectively. INSERTs only allow NEW (as no value existed beforehand), UPDATEs allow both NEW and OLD, and …