I recently came across an interesting blog post on RedMonk (not surprising, as I read most of their posts). It’s called It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like SQL and basically it talks about query language for NoSQL databases. It seems that as NoSQL becomes more popular, users want to do more with it – a good level of querying, for example, is needed.

Now of course, since NoSQL is a family of products that work in radically different ways, it’s not certain that this is possible (or even desirable – read Alex Popescu’s post on the subject).

But my question is – why do you even need a query language for NoSQL data stores? After all, running queries on distributed data might be complex to implement, and time consuming. The better …

Pythian’s Oracle ACE, Fahd Mirza appears in this month’s Community: Peer-to-Peer review “In With the New“, as published in the September/October 2011 issue of Oracle Magazine.

Fahd states that “Oracle Exadata Database Machine” has most changed his life – changing the game, and setting very high standards of performance, support, scalability, reliability and unification.

Shout out to Fahd from your peers at Pythian!

I guess there might be just a little truth to Pythian’s growing reputation as an “Oracle ACE Factory” ;), as recently mentioned by Justin Kestelyn in the May 11, 2011 OPN PartnerCast:

Please join me in congratulating Fahd by adding a …

Probably a more rarely used dialog for most users: Import > "Insert files into BLOB/TEXT fields". However, very useful in a few cases when you have file contents in database table, and you need to import files from your harddisk. Now even more powerful as it supports distinction between binary and text files and shows all columns in a better overview:

We make a lot of posts that give IT tips and advice, as well as recommendations on how to use Monitis, so here is a summary of the posts for this week in case you missed them.

Monitoring IIS With VBScript via Monitis; It’s so Easy!

This post demonstrates how to monitor an IIS using Monitis Custom Monitors and VBscript. You can use the Monitis API to monitor your own custom metrics. This is very powerful because it lets you monitor any IIS metrics you like, set thresholds and receive notifications.

Top 4 Software Based IIS Server Performance Tips

These 4 …

press release

SAN JOSÉ, CA., June 27, 2011 –  Any system administrator worth his or her salt knows that data is the oxygen of the modern age.

To keep the oxygen flowing Monitis Inc., the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one systems monitoring platform, announces that users can now monitor their MySQL-operated database servers on Monitis’s free monitoring service – Monitor.Us. The new hosted MySQL monitoring service is available immediately.

“Our new MySQL monitoring service ensures high availability of database servers and performs a host of tasks to ensure MySQL is running smoothly,” said Monitis Founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan. “And because MySQL is the most …

I'm very pleased to announce the first combined release of MariaDB + HeidiSQL: http://askmonty.org/blog/mariadb-5-2-7-released/ . Many thanks to Vladislav and Monty!

HeidiSQL is 100% compatible to MariaDB, and now even supports virtual columns in the table edior.

Virtual and persistent columns are a feature of MariaDB 5.2+, and HeidiSQL's table editor now fully supports them. Just update your HeidiSQL to the latest build to see this in action.



Also, if you are on a MariaDB server, a brown seal icon in the tree and in the status bar now indicates the right server vendor:

Welcome to the MySQL Enterprise Tools team's blog. 

Our team focuses on creating tools for monitoring and managing your MySQL environments. 

Here we will discuss various things relating to the MySQL Enterprise Monitor, MySQL Proxy, MySQL Connector Plugins, and any other things that generally interest us within the team. 

We will also give new release announcements here, and aggregate these within the MySQL Enterprise Monitor "What's New" feed.

Welcome to the MySQL Enterprise Tools team's blog. 

Our team focuses on creating tools for monitoring and managing your MySQL environments. 

Here we will discuss various things relating to the MySQL Enterprise Monitor, MySQL Proxy, MySQL Connector Plugins, and any other things that generally interest us within the team. 

We will also give new release announcements here, and aggregate these within the MySQL Enterprise Monitor "What's New" feed.

Up to recently, to create a CSV export of a grid view, you had several menu items and you had to find the right one for your needs:
- Copy selected rows as CSV
- Copy selected rows as HTML
- Copy ... XML, SQL, LaTeX, Wiki markup
- Export grid rows to file
Only the CSV output was configurable in the preferences dialog - which was not in sight at the time when you did the export.

Now, there is only one menu item left in the context menu of any result grid: "Export grid rows". The new dialog which comes up
- asks whether to copy to clipboard or write to a file
- let's you select the file encoding (ANSI seems important for Excel export)
- offers an easy way to create Excel compatible output, which requires specific control characters, depending on the output target
- displays the row number and the byte size of the rows you are going to export
- shows recently used …