While user bug reports are the most important ones, there is a category of external reporters which I historically have a special interest in and great expectations for: entry-level testers. I was one, trained some, interviewed many, had a few hired, and have always wanted someone to wake them up and get going before it’s too late.

There is no secret that quality control is not as glamourous as other IT specialities, and there are no famous (or maybe any) student programs for testers. Usually people come into testing because it is deceptively open for newbies, planning to obtain a few points for a CV and switch either to development or to project management as soon as they can. Most do, a few stay.

It creates a vicious cycle. Since this is a well-known pattern, employers hire testers without experience not to teach …

“Many tools now exist to run database software without installing software. From vagrant boxes, to one click cloud install, to a cloud service that doesn’t require any installation, developer ease of use has always been a path to storage platform success.”–Brian Bulkowski.

The fifth interview in the “Big Data: three questions to “ series of interviews, is with Brian Bulkowski, Aerospike co-founder and CTO.

RVZ

Q1. What is your current product offering?

Brian Bulkowski: Aerospike is the first in-memory NoSQL database optimized for flash or solid state drives (SSDs).
In-memory for speed and NoSQL for scale. Our approach to memory is unique – we have built our own file system to access …

Time-series databases are of particular interest to me these days. Not only is VividCortex working with large-scale time-series data, but it’s a growing trend in the technology world in general. What’s perhaps most surprising is the dearth of native time-series databases, either commercial or opensource.

The World is Time-Series

The data we gather is increasingly timestamped and dealt with in time-series ways. For the last 10 years, I’ve worked with “roll-up” or “summary” tables almost constantly. I built, and saw others build, the same types of solutions over and over. For example, I probably consulted with over a dozen companies who do search-engine marketing and advertising. Cost tables are a given, and there’s usually cost-per-ad-per-day and half a dozen other summary tables. In my case I saw these things in the MySQL context, but you can pick your technology …

Time-series databases are of particular interest to me these days. Not only is VividCortex working with large-scale time-series data, but it’s a growing trend in the technology world in general. What’s perhaps most surprising is the dearth of native time-series databases, either commercial or opensource.

The World is Time-Series

The data we gather is increasingly timestamped and dealt with in time-series ways. For the last 10 years, I’ve worked with “roll-up” or “summary” tables almost constantly. I built, and saw others build, the same types of solutions over and over. For example, I probably consulted with over a dozen companies who do search-engine marketing and advertising. Cost tables are a given, and there’s usually cost-per-ad-per-day and half a dozen other summary tables. In my case I saw these things in the MySQL context, but you can pick your technology …

We had a great webinar on Thursday about replicating from MySQL to Hadoop (watch the whole thing). It was great, but one of the questions at the end was ‘is there an easy way to test’.

Sadly we can’t go giving out convenient ready-to-run downloads of these things because of licensing and and other complexities, so I want to try and make it as simple and straightforward as possible by giving you the directions to complete. I’m going to be point to the Continuent Documentation every now and then so this is not too crowded, but we should get through it pretty easily.

Major Decisions

For this to work: 

• We’ll setup two VMs, one the master (running MySQL), the other the slave (Running Cloudera) …

Under Parallel Network Query, servers are numbered according to the table join
order of query (forming server pipeline) and each server processes its own
tables.  Query result is generated by concatenating processed tables of each
server along the server pipeline.

Parallel Network Query may also be used to speed up slow server by distributing
tables of the query to multiple servers for processing which effectively
aggregates server resources (such as disk I/O bandwidth and CPU/cores).

See Technology and Benchmarks page.

Few weeks ago I asked my friends who speak both English and Russian if it is worth translating slides about Performance Schema which I prepared for a seminar at Devconf 2013. They said it is. Today I finished translation and uploaded slides to SlideShare.

Strictly speaking simple translation of slides is not enough, because they were created for the seminar where I was going to explain what they mean. I think I need to repeat same seminar, this time in English language. But if you have rough imagination about what Performance Schema is and need hints for practical use you will find such suggestions in the slides. You will also find ready-to-use queries which you can use to troubleshoot most frequent performance issues.

Enjoy!

Madrid MySQL Users Group will have its next meeting on 20th March. Details can be found on the group’s Meetup page.

I will be giving a presentation on MySQL replication hopefully aimed at all levels, but covering some details relevant to larger setups. The meeting will be in Spanish.

Look forward to seeing you there.

La próxima reunión de Madrid MySQL Users Group tendrá lugar el jueves 20 de marzo. Se puede encontrar más detalles en la página del grupo.  Ofreceré una presentación sobre replicación de MySQL dirigido a gente de todos los niveles, pero incluirá información relevante a entornos más grandes.  La presentación será en español.

Espero veros allí.

MySQL software developers are under pressure to do more in less time and create applications that adapt to ever-changing requirements. And it’s true that some of a developer’s time is wasted when his or her method of optimizing involves trying every combination of code and index definition.

There is a better way. And next Wednesday at 10 a.m. Pacific time, I’ll show you how. In my webinar, “How to Avoid Common (but Deadly) MySQL Development Mistakes,” you’ll lean:

• How to find out which indexes are the best fit for your MySQL application
• How to protect yourself from the number one MySQL database security vulnerability on the web
• How to decide when …

We are pleased to announce that MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.0.7 is now available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) web site. It will also be available via the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud in about 1 week. This is a maintenance release that includes a few new features and fixes a number of bugs. You can find more information on the contents of this release in the change log.

You will find binaries for the new release on My Oracle Support. Choose the "Patches & Updates" tab, and then choose the "Product or Family (Advanced Search)" side tab in the "Patch Search" portlet.

You will also find the binaries on the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud in approximately 1 week. Choose "MySQL Database" as the Product Pack and …