First public version online – 50 conference already listed

By on 30. Juli 2011
This entry is filed under Allgemein, mé'kono.

Me’kono is finally online! And we are already listing 50 conferences and research events with facts to location, organisors and deadlines. Milestone #50 was set by the SAANZ Annual Conference entitled „Looking Forward: Trends, Horizons and Utopias“ organised by the School of Social and Cultural Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

At the moment me’kono is just a conference database with an ever increasing number of entries. But we have more comming. And all conference submitters will profit from these new services. So, submit your conference or research event and start promoting it using me’kono pages.

get the least / greatest from multiple columns in mysql 5.x

By on 11. Juni 2011
This entry is filed under developer, mysql. | 3 Comments

Looking for the lowest or biggest value in multiple columns in a mysql table? There are two handy function in mysql, namely LEAST and GREATEST, which return the lowest / biggest value from the given list of parameters. Therefore, if you like to get the absolute minimum or maximum in the whole table over multiple rows, you could combine these two functions with MIN or MAX and use the following SQL statement:

SELECT MIN(LEAST(column1, column2, column3, column...)) FROM table1

But LEAST and GREATEST have some limitations concerning their handling of NULL values:

  • GREATEST returns NULL if any of the values is NULL
  • LEAST returns NULL if all values are NULL

The problem in my case was, that some columns in my table were not required and had to stay NULL and my statement – especially for retrieving the absolute maximum – failed to deviler the proper values. Searching for a solution was quite tedious, so I thought to share it, since it turns out to be pretty simple – just turn it around:

SELECT LEAST(MIN(column1), MIN(column2), MIN(column3), ...)) FROM table1

Permalink Aside

It is time to announce our existence. mé’kono is in development and has reached private beta status. Friends and foes of us are testing the upcoming first release of the mé’kono conference platform and we hope to deliver it to the general public soon.

So stay tuned!

Greetings from sunny Vienna,

Kjell

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