An apology, and a good laugh

I just wanted to offer a quick apology to everyone that has sent me emails lately. Yes, I have received your messages, and I will get to them as soon as possible. I'm just a bit swamped right now, so please bear with me, and I'll get to them all as soon as possible.

In the meantime here's a fun exchange from the MySQL support pages:

1) From Person A: It's a bug that I can't write sql/ddl like this:

start_date date not null default now(),

2) Reply from a support person:

Thank you for writing us, but this is not a bug. Please double-check the documentation: "With one exception, the DEFAULT value must be a constant; it cannot be a function or an expression. This means that you cannot set the default for a date column to be the value of a function such as NOW() or CURRENT_DATE."

So, this is explicitly documented limitation.

3) Reply from a third person: Okay, so let's change the documentation so that it allows functions as defaults.

I love that last reply.