Why Schoenberg Rocks...

Personally, I have had a taste for the music of Arnold Schoenberg for a long time. But now, I the wikipedia explains why:

Ten features of Schoenberg's mature twelve-tone practice are characteristic, interdependent, and interactive[1]:

1. Hexachordal inversional combinatoriality
2. Aggregates
3. Linear set presentation
4. Partitioning
5. Isomorphic partitioning
6. Invariants
7. Hexachordal levels
8. Harmony, "consistent with and derived from the properties of the referential set"
9. Metre, established through "pitch-relational characteristics"
10. Multidimensional set presentations

So, aggregates, partitioning, metrics and referential sets, play us another tune...

MySQL 5.1: Measuring #queries/sec. using information_schema.GLOBAL_STATUS

MySQL 5.1 offers new information tables such as GLOBAL_STATUS. This can be used to report certain performance metrics, such as the number of queries processed per second:

SELECT MAX(                                         -- use MAX to force aggregation
           IF(variable_name='Questions'             -- no. of queries sent to server
           ,   CAST(variable_value AS unsigned)     -- make integer value
           ,   0                                    -- ignore if not 'Questions'
           )
       )
/                                                   -- divide by
       MAX(                                         -- use MAX to force aggregation
           IF(variable_name='Uptime'                -- no. of seconds the server is up
           ,   CAST(variable_value AS unsigned)     -- make integer value
           ,   0                                    -- ignore if not 'Uptime'
           )
       ) AS queries_per_second
FROM   information_schema.GLOBAL_STATUS 
WHERE  variable_name in ('Questions', 'Uptime');

(This snippet is maintained on MySQL Forge)

This query could have been solved in a number of other ways involving subqueries, for example like this:

SELECT (SELECT CAST(variable_value AS unsigned)
        FROM   information_schema.GLOBAL_STATUS
        WHERE  variable_name = 'Questions') 
/      (SELECT CAST(variable_value AS unsigned)
        FROM   information_schema.GLOBAL_STATUS
        WHERE  variable_name = 'Uptime')  as queries_per_second

For now I'm sticking to my original snippet. The disadvantage to this approach is that it requires a hack to force aggregation of all rows from GLOBAL_STATUS to one single row (using MAX), as well as some conditional expressions.

The disadvantage of a using subqueries is that it would be slighly more verbose, and it would also require more scanning of information_schema.GLOBAL_STATUS, although I am unsure if that would really matter that much.

What do you think?