Open Query blog

Nothing to do with MySQL, but I just love observing how technology can make us waste more time. Speech recognition is a wonderful idea, but …. oh just watch this:

Of course, watching this video to the end will cost you about 10 minutes, but it could be worthwhile education. Technology can be very useful. But [...]

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That story via MacWorld UK, very interesting. So first of all this allows people to edit photos (bitmaps) online. Secondly, Adobe doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel but instead simply plugs into existing infrastructure like Facebook (and I would hope also Flickr). This is smart, as no one can rule it all, you really can’t [...]

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I was just reading Matt Asay’s post on Open source’s “superficial impact” on the database market. I don’t think it’s a matter of “having to start somewhere”.
The assessment/conclusion trail of the 451 Group (and other experts, analyst and even regular people in the industry) is typical of most, and it’s adequately covered in “The Innovator’s [...]

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There was a proposed project of particular interest to me in the MySQL list for Google’s Summer of Code, an Obfuscator. This tool would take a schema/dataset and obfuscate it in such a way that it can be posted on forums or submitted to MySQL in a bug or support request, without divulging any sensitive [...]

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Just before the Easter holidays I posted this challenge for a MySQL schema. For lack of submissions to far, I’ll leave it open for a little bit longer.
Perhaps you reckon the challenge sucks In that case please comment and tell why! That’d be good feedback. Otherwise, do take a stab at it. [...]

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Not sure about prizes yet. I have Open Query pencils (recycled newspaper) and they’re transactional with rollback (the eraser but perhaps I’ll come up with something else for this. Anyway, your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is:
Design a MySQL schema, and show me some sample queries (to prove your design works), [...]

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Not just a website… a government maintained website! http://www.toiletmap.gov.au/
I encountered this while browsing for camping sites around South-East Queensland.
It’s done by a project as part of the “National Continence Management Strategy” of the Australian federal govt department of Health and Aging. There ya go…
I always tell people that Australian govt is quite good [...]

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Indeed, this is usually a big no-no. But I have a customer where this is used, validly. Except it wasn’t quite right.
Information from branches is replicated back to HQ, and since a slave can’t have multiple masters, they have one slave instance for each branch. Each branch uses its own database names and the mysql [...]

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Is there a difference? Yes there is, and it’s very significant both in functionality as well as in speed.
COUNT(*) counts rows. If the underlying table is MyISAM, and there’s no WHERE clause, then this is extremely fast as MyISAM maintains a row count of the entire table. Otherwise, the server just needs to count the [...]

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I frequently see a question fly past on why an expression like WHERE col = NULL does not come up with the desired result, even though it superficially looks perfectly sane. To address this, we can recap some high school maths, and at the same time finally find out that some things learnt there are [...]

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