A sysadmin friend of mine was describing some DBA work he was doing, and wrote this:

I’m not much of a DBA, really - if it can’t be done through phpMyAdmin I’m not likely to be doing it.

This is in stark contrast to so many so-called DBAs who say “I’m a DBA….If it can’t be done through phpMyAdmin it must be Senior DBA work.”

I’ve used phpMyAdmin for MySQL administration, and there’s just something so nice about working on commandline.

Some have pointed out that the 12 Days of Scaleout campaign is a “cheap marketing tactic.”

Why, yes. It’s inexpensive as far as campaigns go. It’s definitely marketing. The grumbling seemed to be that there was no content on how the scaleout happened and worked for these companies.

We have to remember that not everyone is a geek. While we already know and love MySQL, there are people out there who only vaguely understand what a “database” is, much less have even heard of MySQL. Many laypeople I talk to haven’t heard of Oracle!

MySQL needs this kind of marketing. Perhaps it better belongs as an advertisement in a glossy magazine, but I see no problem with MySQL using what they own — lists, forums, PlanetMySQL, its own web page — to do cheap marketing. In fact, “cheap marketing” is one of the main reasons …

As the 2007 Community Advocate of the Year, I’m taking the “MySQL 5 Wishes” meme and changing it a bit. I hope y’all don’t mind:

1) Everyone has a different level of familiarity. The community does well with this when writing articles, for instance cross-referencing older articles, linking to documentation, the MySQL Forge, etc. Not much background information other than “MySQL usage” is assumed.

However, where we fall down is when we aggregate some writings and call it documentation. The worst form of this is a tool that grows organically, from “look, here’s a script!” to a full-blown tool/patch/add-on. Sourceforge stinks for trying to make documentation, so most folks just link to their posts tagged “mytool” or whatever the name is.

Using some marketing skills would be wonderful — make a page for folks who have never seen one post about it. Voila, you get your code going from something that …

So, this is me:

Special thanx to Colin Charles for taking the picture and linking to it from his blog.

Notice that in addition to my photogenic qualities as well as the bags under my eyes, that I’m wearing an incredibly geeky necklace.

Yes, it’s true. I bought a white gold dolphin to wear around my neck, because I am THAT much of a MySQL geek.

Ask and you shall receive: http://face.centosprime.com/rdb-w/?p=68 linked to my previous post on the Data Warehousing Tips and Tricks session (http://sheeri.net/archives/204) with the comment, “I need to learn more about MERGE TABLES and INSERT ? ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE“.

So here’s a bit more:

The manual pages for the MERGE storage engine:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/merge-storage-engine.html
and
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/merge-table-problems.html

MySQL Forums for the MERGE talbe are at:
…

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/07/18/multivalued_datatypes_access/

This is an interesting read — it would be awesome if MySQL just used the “SET” or “ENUM” data types to be a placeholder for a join table, that it would create automatically for you. Of course, that’s a new level of functionality — MySQL does not implicitly create permanent tables with any commands. But it would be neat.

Thanx to Rich McIver for passing along this link:

http://www.businessintelligencelowdown.com/2007/02/top_10_largest_.html

I’m amused mostly because the article interchanges “database” with “data storage” — many of the sites have “digital documents” included in their count, and YouTube is in there completely with the amount of space their videos take up. But is all this stuff stored in databases? I do not think so. Anyone know for sure?

I stumbled across this on the fabulous http://www.everythingsysadmin.com :

from:  http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/wios07/

The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) will host a Women in Open Source Event as part of their upcoming 2007 conference, SCALE 5x.

The focus of this event is on the women in the open source and free software communities. The goal of this event is to encourage women to use technology, open source and free software, and to explore the obstacles that women face in breaking into the technology industry. The Women in Open Source event will be held on February 9, 2007 at the Los Angeles Airport Westin Hotel.

I have seen the dearth of women, in system administration as …

So, a little gotcha:

The CHAR() and VARCHAR() types are different types. MySQL silently converts any CHAR() fields to VARCHAR() when creating a table with at least 1 VARCHAR() field.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/silent-column-changes.html

If any column in a table has a variable length, the entire row becomes variable-length as a result. Therefore, if a table contains any variable-length columns (VARCHAR, TEXT, or BLOB), all CHAR columns longer than three characters are changed to VARCHAR columns. This does not affect how you use the columns in any way; in MySQL, VARCHAR is just a different way to store characters. MySQL performs this conversion because it saves space and makes table operations faster.

However, that’s not entirely accurate. Because according to the manual page at …

Download the video at:

http://technocation.org/videos/BostonMySQLJanUserGroupBrianAkerLg.wmv
- 520 kbps, 320 x 240, 354M. Small size, low quality, but you can still see the slides and hear everything.

http://technocation.org/videos/BostonMySQLJanUserGroupBrianAkerSm.wmv - 45 kbps, 320 x 120, 29M. Small size, low quality, but you can still see the slides and hear everything.

Technocation, Inc. received a donation of a Sony Handycam DCR SR80 (http://tinyurl.com/yvyfam ), extra-long battery, microphone (proprietary Sony that goes with the camera).

In a short sentence: I am impressed. The sound …