Today I received the "MySQL 5.1 Cluster Certification Study Guide".

I will compare this book to the "MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide" from MySQL Press. This is the book I used to study for the MCDEV (Certified Developer) and MCDBA (Certified DBA) exams.

The MySQL study guide was published by MySQL Press which is a cooperation with a n old-school publisher.

The MySQL cluster study guide  is published by Lulu.com which is an online on-demand publisher.

Lulu.com Cons:
1. The print quality is worse.
2. The paper is less white.
3. The layout is more compact. The margins are really small.

Lulu.com Pros:
1. On-demand print. This will make updated versions possible.
2. The book is smaller (small margins) and is very easy to carry with you (handy if your …

This is my personal whishlist for MySQL.

Please let me know if I'm wrong or if there is a workaround for any of these items.

1. Per user and/or per database quota
Would very useful in setups for shared hosting. This would also prevent one database from bringing down the whole server. Separate tablespaces on different mountpoint can ease the pain, but I consider that a nasty hack.

2. External authentication
I've seen numerous scripts which fetch the authentication info from ldap, a file, another database or some other authentication store. This should be integrated into mysql. The mysql grant tables should be pluggable so it is possible to write a custom authentication plugin. We already have plugable engines and function (UDF) so this shouldn't be that hard is it?

3. Database locator
So you've got hundreds of servers.... and a multitude of databases. How to connect to …

BusinessWeek reports MySQL continuing with their IPO preparations. As a long-time user (about ten years now), and almost as long-time customer (in many companies, obviously currently and most significantly Sulake and Habbo), I wish you guys the best of luck on that road. Don't lose your sight of the ballgame while doing that -- we need you to continue to do better with the product itself while the distractions of investor communications will be great.

I'm sure we can all name a few nuisances in every software product we use, and I certainly have a few of those of the MySQL database, but what I really admire the guys for is their approach to innovating in the sales …

In a decade, on-demand virtualized utility computing will be an invisible utility, part of the vital infrastructure of the technological economy.

People will mostly have forgotten what an enormous pain in the ass provisioning computation was today. Today, we don't truly feel that pain, because it seems "normal", everyone has to suffer it together.

The situation right now is, if you have a delivery van, you have to make your own gasoline. And you have to hire and pay for your own mechanics. Seems stupid, doesn't it? It's amazing that there are any delivery vans at all …

Think of the internet itself, what it did to telecoms.

Twenty-five years ago, if you wanted a high speed data connection to a computer in San Francisco, it was a pain. You'd have to come up with a pile of money, and wait a couple of months, at best. Hardware would be dedicated and provisioned, and then finally you would have your connection. To …

In the mid-90s, at the very starting edge of the dotcom boom, I was the lead tech guy behind a project, we put a nationwide yellow pages database on the web, ypol.com.

At the time, nobody else had done it, but we were sure that many other people had had the same idea. And since it's rare for someone to care about finding a plumber or locksmith in another state in the middle of the night, of course I had location based searches from the start.

It was, in fact, my first real encounter with using Oracle, Sybase, and using Perl to interface to a DB. (This was before Perl5, so there was no DBI module, so it was all oraperl.)


It looks like someone has actually patented the idea of location based searches on a online yellow pages database, has put together an investor-based lawsuit machine, and has fired the first salvo by suing Verizon.

I'm pretty damn sure my old YPOL project is prior …

A few days ago, Alexander Barkov pushed some changes to the MySQL 5.1 tree that I’ve been waiting to see for some time — variable support for XPath functions used with ExtractValue() and UpdateXML(). (This was a fix for Bug #26518, BTW.) This will be available in MySQL 5.1.20 (or grab the MySQL 5.1 source from bkbits and build it yourself, if you just can’t wait).

Two slightly different notations are supported, depending on the context, and what sort of checking you want done on the values:

1. If you don’t want or need type checking, prefix the variable name with $@, like this: $@myvar. However, if you do this, and you make a typo, you’re on …

The after lunch talk on Business Scripting Languages, by Asuman Suenbuel and Murray Spork was something I found very hard to stay awake in. In fact, I think so did many others, some of whom walked out of the room.

The first half of the talk was filled with SAP marketing spiel, something I think should sincerely stay away from conferences that are tech-oriented. When you hear a word like “SOA”, you already know you’re in the wrong talk. Greg the architect video (link courtesy Leslie Wu), now that was funny. Saving grace, and they do mention the movies are not from SAP. Figures. SOA is like a clothes wardrobe was the other video, with some somewhat hot looking girl - sure, again, saving grace.

Model-driven development (this is not UML - this is more like the Eclipise …

I’ve had an introductory article to MySQL Cluster 5.1 Disk Data published in the September 2006 issue of International PHP Magazine.

If you’re using Cluster or you’re interested in doing so, and you’ve not yet tried out MySQL 5.1, you’ll find that disk data storage makes MySQL Cluster more flexible, scalable, and cheaper to run than MySQL 4.1 and 5.0 Cluster. In the article, I’ve outlined some reasons why this is so. The article covers the basics of creating disk-based Cluster tables, and discusses some Disk Data do’s and dont’s. There’s also some info about some other improvements to MySQL Cluster that are being made in 5.1, as well as some diagrams and sample PHP5 code for accessing a MySQL Cluster. Just in case you’re not that familiar with setting up a MySQL …

Some people might have lives, but I have a webserver.

I think I’ve now upgraded just about everything (software-wise) that’s upgradable on this machine:

• Apache 1.3.33 -> 1.3.37 (Thanks for hiding the win32 binaries under “Archives” when the *nix version is out in plain view, guys)
• PHP 5.0.3 -> 5.1.4 (This required ditching my old php.ini file and doing a new one from scratch)
• MySQL 5.1.8 -> 5.1.11 (Dead easy, even on Windows - yea, TEAM!)
• Perl 5.8.7 -> 5.8.8
• Python 2.3.2 -> 2.4.3
• Tcl 8.4.12 -> 8.5.0
• BlogCMS .3.4.6 -> WordPress 2.0.4 (The RSS feed was broken, I was getting tired of seeing my posts quoted elsewhere sans formatting, and every time I tried messing with the code, it just got worse)
• Singapore 0.9.11 -> 0.10.0 (The one part of BlogCMS that I still really liked after switching …