bubblehouse

As my DBA skills have progressed over the years, I'm always impressed and upset to see the extent to which MySQL has allowed me to use terrible syntax generally not accepted by standards-compliant SQL servers.

A recent one really blew me away, because it exposed a lack of understanding on my part about how to understand the syntax of JOIN commands.

This is how I always built nested JOIN queries. The premise is that semantically you are always selecting from a single table; the use of the INNER JOIN statement is treated like a function that returns a compound table.

I was attempting to install DBD::mysql today, and I ran into a fiendishly difficult problem.

I've installed the mysql drivers for Perl countless times, but this time for some reason, I was getting the following error:

ool-4577f347:~/.cpan/build/DBD-mysql-4.004 root# make
cc -c -I/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/auto/DBI -I/usr/local/mysql/include -Os -arch ppc64 -fno-common -DDBD_MYSQL_INSERT_ID_IS_GOOD -g -g -pipe -fno-common -DPERL_DARWIN -no-cpp-precomp -fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include -Os -DVERSION=\"4.004\" -DXS_VERSION=\"4.004\" "-I/System/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE" dbdimp.c
dbdimp.c: In function 'mysql_dr_connect':
dbdimp.c:1565: error: 'ulong' undeclared (first use in this function)
dbdimp.c:1565: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
dbdimp.c:1565: error: for each function it appears in.)
dbdimp.c:1565: error: parse error before numeric constant
dbdimp.c:1567: error: parse error before numeric constant
dbdimp.c:1681: error: parse error before numeric constant
make: *** [dbdimp.o] Error 1