Thunderbird 3: awful search

The new search feature in Thunderbird 3 is horrible! It is hard to get an overview on this new layout, which can only contain a very limited amount of results. The idea of caching messages in a local database for faster search is good, but quite late... I would have prefered the classic search result view (which is what you expect from a mail program), but with the new cached backend.

Update: just noticed that it is possible to click the little magnifying glass in the input field and choose "Subject, From, or Recipient filter" to get the old style search back!

Update again: looks like the the horrible search has been dropped in version 3.1 :-)

Raising / throwing custom exceptions in MySQL

I failed to find an official way to explicitly raise or throw exceptions in stored procedures in MySQL.

My workaround works by calling an undefined function with a meaningful name for an error.

For example:

DROP TRIGGER IF EXISTS users_before_insert;
DROP TRIGGER IF EXISTS users_before_update;
DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS validate_password;

delimiter $$
CREATE PROCEDURE validate_password (IN passwd VARCHAR(64))
BEGIN
 IF LENGTH(passwd) < 5 THEN
  CALL TRIGGER_DUMMY_INVALID_PASSWORD;
 END IF;
END$$

CREATE TRIGGER users_before_insert BEFORE INSERT ON users
 FOR EACH ROW
 BEGIN
  CALL validate_password(NEW.password_cleartext);
 END$$

CREATE TRIGGER users_before_update BEFORE UPDATE ON users
 FOR EACH ROW
 BEGIN
  CALL validate_password(NEW.password_cleartext);
 END$$
delimiter ;

Most of the code in the specific example above was actually written by my colleague Per Fuglsang Møller.