MapR and Funambol raise funding. VMware virtually supports PostgreSQL. And more.

# MapR raised $20m series B for its Hadoop distribution from Redpoint Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and NEA.

# Funambol raised $3m in funding from previous investors HIG Ventures, Pacven Walden Ventures and Nexit Infocom.

# VMware launched vFabric Postgres as part of vFabric Data Director database-as-a-service launch.

# Citrix released a new edition of CloudStack, …

Hanging out in #mysql on freenode the other day, I overheard someone saying that the reason to use connection pools with MySQL is because JDBC connections are expensive to create. That is true out of the box, but mostly because the out of the box behavior of MySQL's JDBC driver is to be standards-compliant. If you know that your DBA and your developers aren't doing crazy things with the database (changing configurations without letting the developers know, going around the "standard" API calls to start/end transactions, etc), then you can get to the point where connection setup is no slower than any other API. Does this mean you shouldn't use a connection pool? NO! (more on this next week).

Here's an iterative overview of the changes made in configuration, and how they affect what queries the driver does on initialization.

First, asking the driver to connect with default configuration results in the following statements being …

Couchbase raises $14m. AppFog raises $8m. Much ado about Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. And more.

# Couchbase raised $14m in series C funding for its NoSQL database.

# AppFog raised $8m series B funding for its PHP-based platform-as-a-service.

# Percona announced its plans to host a Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo on April 10-12, effectively replacing the O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo.

# The announcement sparked some rumblings of discomfort around the MySQL community with Giuseppe Maxia and …

XKCD (as usual) makes a very good point – this time about password strength, and I reckon it’s something app developers need to consider urgently. Geeks can debate the exact amount of entropy, but that’s not really the issue: insisting on mixed upper/lower and/or non-alpha and/or numerical components to a user password does not really improve security, and definitely makes life more difficult for users.

So basically, the functions that do a “is this a strong password” should seriously reconsider their approach, particularly if they’re used to have the app decide whether to accept the password as “good enough” at all.

Update: Jeff Preshing has written an xkcd password generator. Users probably should choose their own four …

About Jelastic:

Jelastic is the next generation of Java Platforms as a Service.

Unlike previous cloud platforms, Jelastic:

• Can run any Java application and so does not require developers to change their code or get locked-into the platform,
• Can scale any application up and down by automatically adding or removing memory and CPU units depending on the application load,
• Takes all configuration and management worries away: developers simply specify the application stack and database options they need and Jelastic creates, configures, and maintains the environment for them
• Supports a wide range of application server stacks including Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty, and GlassFish
• Out of the box, allows users to get a preconfigured instance of MariaDB up and running and available to the application.

A beta version …

A busy week at Casa Turner, as the infamous Home Renovations of Doom wrap up, I finish the final chapters of "Developing Enterprise iOS Applications" (buy a copy for all your friends, it's a real page turner!), pack for two weeks of vacation with the family in California (Palm Springs in August, 120 degrees, woohoo!), and celebrate both a birthday and an anniversary.

But never fear, WIR fans, I'll continue to supply the news, even as my MacBook melts in the sun and the buzzards start to circle overhead.

The law of unintended consequences

If you decide to install Lion Server, you may notice something missing from the included software: MySQL. Previous releases of OS X server offered pre-installed MySQL command line and GUI tools, but they are …

fisl12 is likely the largest free and open source software event in Latin America. This year, it takes place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from June 29th to July 2nd. Oracle is a gold sponsor of the event and I will attend it as a speaker. I feel honoured and excited to be there – for me it will be the first visit to the South American continent.

They already have over 3000 registered attendees, so this definitely is going to be a great conference. There is quite a number of well-known names on the speaker roster and I look forward to meeting a lot of familar faces there.

The agenda is still under development but quite impressive already – …

The Problem And The Solution While using a MySQL connection pool in Java, I received a MySQL Communications link failure Exception (see below). In order to solve communication link failure exception: I have removed JDBC property autoReconnect=true and put only the JDBC property autoReconnectForPools=true I have added the connection properties: testOnBorrow testWhileIdle timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis minEvictableIdleTimeMillis See […]

The Problem While using a MySQL connection pool in Java, I received a MySQL Connection Closed Exception (see below). The problem was that the JDBC driver was not compatible to the MySQL server version. I have used version 5.05a for both JDBC and MySQL and it solved the problem The problem is that the connection […]

Linuxtag is likely one of the oldest and largest Linux/OSS events in Germany. I remember having been there to represent SuSE Linux while it still took place at the University of Kaiserslautern, using tables and chairs from the lecture rooms as exhibition stands (this must have been around 1998 or 1999). This year it will take place in Berlin again, and the session schedule looks very promising. I'll be there from Wednesday till Friday and I feel that I will have a hard time deciding which presentations I should attend...

I'll be speaking about What's new in MySQL 5.5 on Friday, 13th of May, at 15:00. If you haven't updated to MySQL 5.5 yet, stop by to hear what new …