Next week, Dan Norris and I will collaborate on a presentation at Oracle Openworld 2008. Our presentation, entitled So, You Want to be an Oracle ACE?, will be on Monday, 9/22, from 11:30 am - 12:30 pm in Moscone South, room 310 — that’s the very first conference slot.

We’ve already put together our presentation, with input from many Oracle ACEs and Oracle ACE directors, complete with some great video clips. I’m excited and honored to be presenting with Dan. The official description of our presentation is:

The Oracle ACE program recognizes those who provide sustained community contributions, among other criteria. An Oracle ACE director, this session’s speaker emphasizes the value of community involvement and spends much time volunteering. It can be hard to know where and how to start. An intro to what community means (especially to Oracle) and specific volunteer activities may be all some people need to start. The session covers benefits of becoming involved in the community–so you can convince your manager to let you do so on company time.

We will also be presenting Tuesday afternoon as part of the unconference at 3 pm in Overlook I.

As I am a first-time Oracle Open World attendee, I’m a bit overwhelmed — there are over 1700 presentations! I’ll have my coworker, Alex Gorbachev as a guide, but if you see me, say hi — don’t let the speaker badge fool you, I will likely be pretty lost. :)

Note: This article is about the WHERE extension to SHOW. I specifically use SHOW STATUS as an example, but WHERE is an extension to many SHOW statements.

Often DBAs will assess the health of a system by looking at some of the status variables returned by SHOW GLOBAL STATUS (specifying GLOBAL is important; remember that SHOW STATUS is the same as SHOW SESSION STATUS).

There are many status variables that SHOW GLOBAL STATUS returns. (SHOW GLOBAL STATUS on a Windows machine, MySQL version 5.0.67 returned 249, 5.1.22 returned 256 and 6.0.6-alpha returned 295 status variables!). I have used the SHOW STATUS LIKE syntax to help give me the output I really want, particularly when I forget the exact names of the status variables I am looking for.

But I did not know of a way to perform SHOW STATUS NOT LIKE or have any other means of filtering the information. Until today, when I was reading up on SHOW STATUS.
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Smithy commented on my blog post about the rumor of Monty leaving Sun with a pointer to an article on ComputerWorld Finland that mentions:

Widenius told to Computerworld Finland on Friday that negotiations are still on.

Meanwhile, Matt Asay, who seems to think Monty actually has left Sun (even though all other reports have been clear to mention that this is unconfirmed), writes of a new investment Monty has made.

Last week I speculated about the impact of Monty leaving Sun. In the end, if he does stay, it’s wonderful for Sun. If he leaves, he will no doubt go on to continue to be wonderful for the database community at large, much like Jim Starkey.

But until Monty Says, nothing is official.

Scenario: Someone wants to know which of the over 50 MySQL users have certain privileges.

There are many ways to solve this problem. Some of these scenarios are tedious and repetitious, others take no time at all.

The issue, of course, lies in what the “certain” privileges are. If it is “who has the SUPER privilege?” then a simple

SELECT user,host FROM mysql.user WHERE Super_priv='Y';

is sufficient. If it is “who has write access to the foo database”, you might write:

SELECT user,host FROM db WHERE Db='foo' AND Select_priv='Y';

but that only shows who explicitly has read permissions on that database; it does not include those who have global read permissions. The full query would be:
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Last week Giuseppe Maxia announced the Call for Papers for the 2009 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, and also announced that there would be an unconference, MySQL Camp, organized by me.

It’s true! Currently MySQL Camp is set to happen, though I am still working out details with Colin Charles and Giuseppe Maxia. We had originally talked about having MySQL Camp on Tuesday and Wednesday, but I would like to add Monday so that folks attending the conference who are not attending a tutorial have a choice on Monday. I am also looking into lunch options, since the conference venue does not have many options within walking distance.

There will be plenty of collaborative effort, of course, which will appear later on. If you have input, you can always e-mail me, or leave a comment here. Whether there is a topic you really want to see, or some logistical detail you always see that’s missed, I would like to hear about it.

(yes, I said I wanted you to give me your opinions!)

ValleyWag reports that MySQL’s Monty Widenius is no longer “MySQL’s”. Some folks have known that Monty has not been happy in his current position; this leads me to believe the rumor is true (though of course an official announcement is the only confirmation).

So what does this mean for MySQL? Well, honestly, if a product falls apart because one out of 300 employees leaves, it was probably doomed anyway. There are plenty of capable employees left, and being owned by Sun means that there are many more resources they can tap as well.

What will the official company announcement be? My prediction is (more…)

I confess — I have not always been an exclusive MySQL user. I have fooled around with other DBMSs. I was young, inexperienced, and I needed the money, I swear!

This comes about because I was doing some electronic de-crufting….From a file last modified on 10:50 am on 2005-06-30:

> more addcatalog.sh
#!/bin/sh

 db2 catalog tcpip node $1 remote $2 server 50000
 db2 terminate
 db2 catalog database sample as $2 at node $1
 db2 terminate

# [db2inst1@midgard db2inst1]$ db2sql92 -a db2inst3/password -d coworkername

And from the same time-frame there’s also:

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Though the event is still happening in Charlottesville, VA Nov. 14-16th (Fri night through Sunday), the new web page for OpenSQL Camp is http://www.opensqlcamp.org. The content has been ported over to MediaWiki, and a captcha has been put in place that is activated on any page change that adds an external URL.

Whether you are into MySQL, PostgreSQL, Drizzle, or some other open source SQL database, go forth and register for OpenSQL Camp, without having to login! (Disclosure: if you do not create a login, your IP is tracked.)

As part of a project of Technocation, Inc I took a whole bunch of videos at OSCon 2008. The conference was about a month ago, and about 2 weeks ago I’d finished processing and uploading all the videos, but it was only today where I had the 5-6 hours I needed to finish posting all the video, and making this matrix of video.

The video may not be the quality that the O’Reilly folks took and put up on blip tv’s OSCon site, but all the videos here are freely downloadable or playable in your browser.

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I have not said much about Drizzle here; that is because there is not much to say. It is premature, really, to say anything about it at this point. Some have said they will support Drizzle; as Pythian supports several database systems, it is very likely that we will support Drizzle as well. Particularly since there is in-house Drizzle expertise already. But I digress; my point is that it is premature to really say much about Drizzle.

My involvement in Drizzle goes back to around the end of April/beginning of May 2008. Given my early involvement, (more…)