With 130 entries in the “MySQL” category and no MySQL-related subcategories, my blog had become impossible to search and navigate easily.

And thus I created a number of new categories for the MySQL entries within my blog. They’re listed in the left navigation bar, below the months, as well as below:

• MySQL Server, MySQL Cluster, Falcon
• Connectors: PHP, Ruby on Rails
…

Yesterday I visited the MySQL Customer Conference in Munich. First of all, GDL sucks. But the locomotive driver strike was the only negative issue on that day, the conference itself was quite good, especially Jan Kneschke's talk about MySQL performance tuning (which was mostly about combining MySQL Cluster and MySQL Proxy) and the panel discussion about storage engines with Ralf Gebhardt, Jan Kneschke and Kai Voigt as vocal and Kaj Arnö as moderator. All in all a great (but quite long and exhausting) day.

A high-performance application that has producers and consumers of some resource, such as a queue of messages, needs an efficient way to notify the consumers when the producer has inserted into the queue. Polling the queue for changes is not a good option. MySQL's GET_LOCK() and RELEASE_LOCK() functions can provide both mutual exclusivity and notifications.

This post was prompted by a message to the MySQL general emailing list some time ago, but I'm finally getting around to actually testing the theoretical solution I mentioned then. I can never just think my way through anything that involves locking and waiting... I have to test it.

I'm trying to automate some trivial maintenance tasks for my own MySQL server, and trying also to minimize the effort, so ... Here is the recipe:

Take an excellent generalized stored procedure like the one by Konstantin Osipov, see "Dynamic SQL is Stored Procedures" on MySQLForge (example 4).
Tune it a bit so that it takes into account only non system tables (I'm trying to turn it into something similar to Microsoft's sp_MSforeachtable), here is the code:

1. DELIMITER $$
2. DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS `test`.`sp_4_each_table` $$
3. CREATE DEFINER=`root`@`localhost` PROCEDURE `sp_4_each_table`(db_name VARCHAR(64), template VARCHAR(21845))
4. BEGIN
5. #
6. DECLARE done INT DEFAULT 0;
7. #
8. DECLARE tname VARCHAR(64);
9. #
10. DECLARE c …

Hurry up, submit a paper! The LinuxTag Call for Papers ends tomorrow, February 16th.

Short info about LinuxTag from the homepage:

LinuxTag 2007 opens doors from May 30 to June 2, 2007 on Berlin Expo Center under the Funkturm. We invite users and experts to learn at Europe’s leading conference and expo more about the potential of Linux, Open Source, and Free Software.

BÃ¥rd published a short note on his blog that the call for papers for the 5th annual eZ Conference is now open. Deadline for submissions is February 1st.

The conference is worth attending not only for eZ Publish or eZ Components users and geeks, it is also interesting if you’re interested in content and knowledge management or PHP/LAMP in general. Last year, I enjoyed talking to guests such as Martin White and Anne Jubert, Rasmus Lerdorf and David Axmark …

After speaking at Yahoo earlier, I drove a few miles down the street to Google for MySQL Camp. I caught the last session of the day, by Googlers saying how they used MySQL internal to Google. (I assume for the Adwords application.) Here are the stream-of-talking notes I took. The most fascinating bits I took out of it is how they take a partitioning/sharding strategy similar (but notably different in some ways) to WordPress.com and that they use DNS to manage all load balancing, high availability, datacenter failover, etc. DNS is a pretty powerful building block.

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If you’re interested in finding out more about SEO, SEM, and just general web design tips, I recommend you visit Web Jam Session A list of Sessions is available for those interested. Two of my friends are speaking at this conference, so I’ll be there to listen to what they say, as well as make fun of them from the audience. I know I’ll be quiet during the “Web Site Promotion” talks by Google and Yahoo!, as well as the CSS sessions. I normally do not talk about events etc that I am interested in attending, but as I make the personal transition from going to just technical events, to somewhat more “marketing/design” type events, I wanted to know what other events you guys go to.

From Monday to Wednesday we at eZ Systems AS had our internal developers conference in Skien, Norway.

Since I joined eZ systems only recently, this was the opportunity for me to get to know all employees that gathered from all over the world. Most of the Tuesday was reserved for a "Crew Day" with some "team-building" which took place in a forest nearby.



On Thursday and Friday the eZ publish conference 2006 took place.

During the conference I met with Sébastien Hordeaux of WaterProof SARL, the …

The PHP Vikinger is a community-driven PHP event that will be held in Skien, Norway on June 24th an 25th. Like the famous Foo Camp and Bar Camp, PHP Vikinger is driven by its attendees. The people who come choose and present the sessions at the event.

Attendance is by a mix of invitation and registration. 50 invitations have been sent to various PEAR and PHP contributors and 50 spots are open for people who register. Additionally, the invitees have been asked to nominate another 50 people who should be invited to the event.

The event is …