Jay Gaulard Blog

latin1_bin VS. latin1_general_ci - MySQL Database Collation - Case Sensitive

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

As you may already know, for the past few weeks or months, I have been in the process of migrating all my websites over to a new hosting company. All the sites are now over and running smoothly. Among others, I have five websites that are almost identical…only the content and look is different. The database tables, structure and files are the same. I moved three of those sites over to the first server and migrated the other two over to the second server.

The first three websites were up and running very quickly and have had no issues. Strangely enough, when I went to import the backed up databases for the last two websites on the second server, I got an error reading something like, “Key length is too long on line 26.” The support guy at the hosting company was kind enough to change the database collation to “latin1_bin,” from “UTF8,” which allowed for the database import with no problem. Well, until a few days went by…

I began getting emails from my sister, Stephanie (who does all the customer support for those websites) about people complaining that they couldn’t login or properly search the websites anymore. For instance, if they tried to search, “Jay Gaulard,” about 5 results would return. If they tried to search, “jay gaulard,” about thirty results would return. In other words, the websites had become case sensitive.

I called the hosting company who was at a loss. Then, I submitted a support ticket to the developer of the software. The developers returned the ticket and informed me that the hosting company had changed the database collation to “latin1_bin,” which was binary and thus case sensitive. They told me to change the collation to a non-binary collation to fix the issue. Neither of us knew if this would really fix anything after the fact.

Now, one thing to remember is that you can easily change the collation of your MySQL database when it’s empty. You can even change it when it’s full. The problem is that you will only be changing any new tables that are put into that database. Any existing tables would need to be changed manually, along with all the table columns. So, that’s what I did yesterday…for about six hours. I changed both databases to “latin1_general_ci” (which stands for case insensitive). I also changed all 268 tables and over 1000 columns in those databases. This was not fun. Actually, it sucked.

The outcome is that both websites are now functioning properly, which is a nice thing.

Open Source, Ubuntu, Windows Vista and Gmail

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

The Flexibility of Open Source

One of the things that has been a strong point of Open Source Software (OSS) for years, even if it hasn’t been held at the forefront of the battle, is the flexibility that OSS offers.

The Economist: Ubuntu is the source of Linux’s rise

The Economist makes three technology predictions for 2008, two of which concern web surfing and the third of which concerns everyone, whether they surf the web or not. The Economist’s third prediction is that the technology world will open up:

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 RC1 vs. Shipping Vista

Microsoft just rolled out the first publicly available release candidate for SP1 of Windows Vista, and we snapped it up, eager to see if it’s faster than the currently shipping version of Vista. To test its speed, we ran a series of benchmarks on exactly the same machine, first with the original version of Vista, and then with the RC of SP1

2007 In Numbers: More People Using Yahoo Mail Than Gmail

Suprising but True …. at least according to this research….

Top 20 Linux Apps for 2007

It seems like every blog on the internet has one of these, so here’s my picks for the top 20 Linux applications. I’ll be covering programs from all different categories that I think stand out and shine as true wonders of Linux and will be presented in no particular order.

Monetizing, Apple, Firefox and Open Formats

Friday, December 21st, 2007

101 Ways to Monetize Your Blog (Without Irritating Readers)

Blogging is big business these days, with some bloggers reporting six-figure or even million-dollar incomes. There are a number of ways that these bloggers earn such large paychecks, and the best know how to do it in a way that won’t scare off readers. Check out 101 ways that you can earn money from your blog.

Apple has sold 5 million iPhones

Apple has sold 5 million iPhones, according to 9 to 5 Mac, an Apple rumor site. At the iPhone’s launch, Steve Jobs set a public goal of selling 10 million iPhones — next year. With the iPhone only on sale for six months, that means Apple’s already selling its sleek smartphones at 2008 speed.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 Is A Win For Linux

Mozilla has released the latest beta of Firefox 3 today, and the Linux efforts behind it are starting to show even more. This release, being a beta, is surprisingly stable. Here’s the killer that makes this beta release amazing: true GTK support.

Norway mandates use of open formats: HTML, ODF and PDF

Government, state and regional agencies, authorities and services may also publish in other formats, but they must always publish in one of these formats. The decree is retroactive, and by 2014 all documents published prior to this decree must have been converted and made available in one of the three formats.

10 great Web site designs/redesigns of 2007

We pick 10 of our favorite site designs and redesigns of 2007.

8 Bold Predictions on Google’s Next Moves

There’s little doubt that Google Inc. is indeed king of online media. In August 2007 alone, Google captured 57% of worldwide market share among search engines, with more than 37 billion search inquiries. Not surprisingly, this dominance has led to endless rumors about where Google is headed next?

Firefox, Lithium Ion, Google Docs and Linux

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

Official Firefox 3 Beta 2

Firefox 3 Beta 2 has been officially released over at Mozilla. [Improved in Beta 2!] Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes approximately 900 improvements over the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements.

Researchers Extend Lithium Ion Battery Life 10X

Yes…I mean that if your laptop currently gets 2 hours of unplugged life, these would get 20 hours. Holy Schmoley!

73% of Americans have never heard of Google Docs

“…94 percent of US computer users have never tried a web based productivity suite. More than 20 percent say they’ve at least heard of Google Docs or other suites, but have still never tried them. And only 0.5 percent of users say they’ve replaced Microsoft Office with an online office suite.”

Switching to Linux: Desktop environments vs. Window managers

Tonight is the night you install Linux for the first time. Pretty easy until you are blindsided by the question: Which default desktop environment would you like to install? Do you know? Do you care? What in the blazes is a desktop environment, anyway? How is that different from a window manager?

For 2008 expect more Linux applications

The big technology trend of the current day is the merging of markets — mobile, desktop, server, online — into one big all-you-can-eat application buffet. Nothing serves that buffet, at every level, as well as Linux.