Tag: Opinions

Proper SQL table alias use conventions

MySQL

After seeing quite some SQL statements over the years, something is bugging me: there is no consistent convention as for how to write an SQL query.

I’m going to leave formatting, upper/lower-case issues aside, and discuss a small part of the SQL syntax: table aliases. Looking at three different queries, I will describe what I find to be problematic table alias use.

Using the sakila database, take a look at the following queries: Continue reading » “Proper SQL table alias use conventions”

What I look forward to hear on “State of the Dolphin”, 2010

MySQL

Though most probably I won’t be there in person, here’s what I expect to hear from Edward Screven, Oracle, on the State of the Dolphin keynote, coming MySQL Conference & Expo.

I’m under the assumption that no shocking news are delivered. That is, that for the near future, it’s business as usual for MySQL.

Last year’s great message, delivered by Karen Padir, was “more community”. More community participation, more community patches. Looking back, I’m not sure I saw that coming true. The 5.4 version was announced at that same conference, and was criticized for being community-oriented yet community-hidden. The latest 5.5 milestones announcement took everyone by surprise again. Ideas from Google patches were incorporated into 5.5M2. but, to the best of my understanding, no community patch was delievered.

I have both congratulated and expressed my desire that community took greater part in this.

So what am I looking forward to hear?

  1. Like everyone else, the general plans Oracle holds for MySQL. Again, I’m not expecting shocking news here.
  2. The expected roadmap for MySQL, technically speaking. I don’t actually know if there is a roadmap right now.
  3. The intended role for the MySQL community. Frankly, it would be just fine with me if Oracle were to say: “we will not accept community patches”, and that would be the end of it. That’s fine, because it’s their right, and it would be an honest announcement. Naturally, I’ll be much happier to hear “we will incorporate the best 20 community patches withing the next three days”. Somewhere in between, I’ll be really satisfied with a clear explanation of how Oracle sees the community, and how it would like to cooperate with it. Will it share the development plan with the community? Will it allow the community to have a say about what goes in or not?

Continue reading » “What I look forward to hear on “State of the Dolphin”, 2010″

In favour of a milestone based release model

MySQL

I like milestone based release models.

The advantages I find in this model are in particular beneficial for MySQL. What I find good about this model are:

  • Things are unstable for shorter periods. Even if some feature is not full stable in some milestone, the model encourages that such a feature is fixed on higher priority.
  • It is easy to create a priority ranking for new features. Moreover, priorities are expressed more by chronological time of development, less by “how many people are working on it”.
  • The model pushes towards rapid development, since you can’t release M5 before M4 is complete.

The last versions of MySQL took long time to complete. Take 5.1, for example: partitioning and event scheduling were long considered GA before row-based replication was half stable. Consider the so small but useful sub-second slow logs; the variables made dynamic in 5.1 (slow log again, for example); the new INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables.

Continue reading » “In favour of a milestone based release model”

MySQL Conference: what’s in a name?

MySQL

This is just something that I realized this morning. There were some talks about how the “MySQL Users Conference & Expo” was renamed to “MySQL Conference & Expo” – thereby omitting the “Users” part. The talk was something like “So where are we, the users, in this story?”

But what I’ve just recalled was a discussion (was it previous year, or the one before that?) comparing the “PostgreSQL Conference” and the “MySQL Users Conference”, as it was named back then. In that discussion, the PostgreSQL people were bashing MySQL, saying that the “PostgreSQL Conference” was all about the database and whatever was around it, whilst the “MySQL Users Conference” clearly stated that the attendees were “just users”, not like real participants or members.

Continue reading » “MySQL Conference: what’s in a name?”