MySQL Connector/Net 5.2.4, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This release is of GA quality and is suitable for  use in production environments.  We strongly urge you to  review the change log that is shipped with the product for a thorough review of the changes.

We have a ton of fixes in this release so please review the changelog and see if your favorite bug has been fixed.  Version 5.2.4 works with all versions of MySQL including MySQL-4.1,  MySQL-5.0, MySQL-5.1, and the MySQL-6.0 beta.

It is now available in source and binary form from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/5.2.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download …

Update: If you are interested in automating this task with a simple Perl script, I created one here.

Say, you had a MySQL database that stores texts in languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic, and so on, and recently there was a server move or upgrade, and all of sudden text in the above mentioned languages didn’t display properly. What do we do to fix it then?

That was what happened to me recently. My hosting company migrated this site to a new LAMP server, and managed to screw up the character set so my Chinese entries looked like gibberish. I spent some time researching, and was able to convert my WordPress database character set to utf8 successfully. Below is the notes for my own consumption. If it helps you, dear reader, all the better!

Please follow the procedures below step by …

I’m not someone who wakes up every day and looks at how my blog is ranked by all of the various services. I check out my WordPress stats, but that’s really about it. However, someone went and did some of the work for me, and they’ve decided that, of the blogs that they read or that were suggested to them, this blog ranks #20 in a listing of 25.

I’m really flattered, but wonder if it’s an indicator that this is a quality blog, or that they should aim higher in their blog reading ;-P  Either way, listing 25 bloggers in a flattering way is a fantastic marketing technique, because most of us are probably egomaniacal enough to say “Hey! Look!” and link back to the list on *your* blog, resulting in lots of traffic. Kudos, and thanks Mobile Maven!

The Idea.

For the past month I have been exploring options and building a perfect Home Theater PC for my 50” Vizio plasma. Besides the obvious, it has to play movies, youtube videos, etc, I had a few concrete goals in mind. Here they are:

• it absolutely had to handle 1080P h264, specifically movies encoded using x264. An average movie size for this format is between 8.5 and 13 GB. There were 2 problems to overcome: the CPU had to be able to handle the decoding (my desktop dual core Conroe barely kept up) and the network had to be fast enough to stream in real time from my storage PC a floor away.
• I needed to have the easiest control over the whole thing. VNC wasn’t good enough, because I don’t always have a laptop lying around.
• It had to support 7.1 sound.
• It had to have excellent picture quality on the TV, preferably during both movies and regular browsing/reading, etc. HDMI/DVI was …

This past Tuesday I was doing more than just voting.  I was giving a live webinar on using MySQL with the Entity Framework.  We had a terrific time (demo machine crash included!) and had a great turnout.  I have been informed that we set records for most number of registrations and attendees.  I’m truly honored and hope that at least some of you got something out of it.

I’ve had a lot of people ask me for the materials from the session so I’ve made them available from my personal server.  You can get the slides, sample projects, and db script here.  The webinar was also recorded and will appear on this page eventually.

Thanks again to all who attended.  I’m hoping to give an expanded version of this session at our users conference …

Karim Lakhani has put together a business case study on Wikipedia. It is worth noting that Wikipedia uses MySQL as its database engine. 

Note that I’m talking about using these tools in some kind of professional way, and more specifically, I’m talking about using Excel as a database, and using VPS hosting to host “professional” web sites. By “professional”, I mean something other than your personal blog, picture gallery, or other relatively inconsequential site.

Excel is not a database

Here’s the thing: Excel isn’t a database. Most people who don’t work in IT don’t seem to understand this, and they’re deathly afraid to actually communicate with anyone in IT, so they take matters into their own hands, and create problems so big that IT is forced to get involved, because at some point this spreadsheet becomes “critical” to some business function. Then IT gets even more bitter toward the non-IT folk, validating some of the reasons the non-IT folk went that route in the first place, and virtually guaranteeing that they won’t come to the IT …

If that was too cryptic, here's the news: we've extended the deadline on the Call for Papers for the upcoming MySQL User Conference which will be held April 20-23 in Santa Clara CA.  You've got until Nov 5 to get your proposals in. 

If you want to increase your odds of being accepted, here are some tips:

• Make it technical, but accessible
• Include both theory and practice (e.g. here's what we did and why)
• Clearly identify who your talk is for (e.g. developers, DBAs, …

I’ve been doing a little reporting project, and I’ve been searching around for quite some time for a good graphing and charting solution for general-purpose use. I had come across ReportLab before, but it just looked so huge and convoluted to me, given the simplicity of what I wanted at the time, that I moved on. This time was different.

This time I needed a lot of the capabilities of ReportLab. I needed to generate PDFs (this is not a web-based project), I needed to generate charts, and I wanted the reports I was generating to contain various types of text objects in addition to the charts and such.

I took the cliff-dive into the depths of the ReportLab documentation. I discovered three things:

1. There is quite a lot of documentation
2. ReportLab is quite a capable library
3. The documentation actually defies the simplicity of the library.

It’s a decent bit easier than it …

So, I recently ran into one of those situations where a customer complains that his MySQL database is slow, and “it worked great until about two weeks ago”. The first thing I look at in these situations is not the queries or any code, but the indexes. Once I determined that the indexes were almost nonsensical, I had a look at the queries themselves, which proved that the indexes were, in fact, nonsensical. Running the queries as written in the code, from a mysql shell, with EXPLAIN, I was able to further confirm that the indexes (most of them, anyway) were never used.

Easy right? Just reindex the table!

NOTE: I’m going to skip the talk about all of the database design issues on this gig and just go straight to solving the immediate problem at hand. Just know that I had nothing to do with the design.

But, supposing this table has 15 million rows and is running on a machine with 2GB of RAM and only …