If you don’t use the mysql root account very often and change passwords reasonably frequently you may (like me) find that you no longer know the mysql root password on a dev box.

The mysql site has a reasonable guide here https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/resetting-permissions.html#resetting-permissions-unix

But there always seems to be something additional, this time for me it was apparmor preventing mysql from reading my reset file

I just found out the painful way that if you manually update a column which is normally calculated automatically as an auto_increment it seems to work at first ..

but MySQL doesn’t update the auto_increment value for the table - so subsequent inserts can fail.

Most of the time I can get what I want out of SQL using the standard aggregate functions, but today I needed to find the latest timestamp from any one of three columns.

I achieved this using the GREATEST() function, it’s not part of the SQL standard but is commonly available.

I’ve written a patch for Drupal 7 to enable date and time data types to be defined for the schema API.

http://drupal.org/node/200953

Update : it got removed

For most of 2008 I’ve been working on a large Drupal installation (around 10 developers,  something like 100 custom modules, 17 languages, split over 2 sites).

This all adds up to a lot of updates, and schema changes.

It seems there is a bug in MySQL which is causing restores to run very slowly (hours instead of minutes)

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=33057

The bug is fixed in http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/releasenotes-cs-5-0-67.html

But Ubuntu hasn’t updated yet….

Comments in code are widely used and generally (but not universally) accepted as a good thing.

Databases can also accommodate comments - but these seem to be very rarely used.

I’m of the opinion that database comments are very useful.