Often I think about challenges that organizations face with “Big Data”.  While Big Data is a generic and over used term, what I am really referring to is an organizations ability to disseminate, understand and ultimately benefit from increasing volumes of data.  It is almost without question that in the future customers will be won/lost, competitive advantage will be gained/forfeited and businesses will succeed/fail based on their ability to leverage their data assets.

It may be surprising what I think are the near term challenges.  Largely I don’t think these are purely technical.  There are enough wheels in motion now to almost guarantee that data accessibility will continue to improve at pace in-line with the increase in data volume.  Sure, there will continue to be lots of interesting innovation with technology, but when organizations like …

As Giuseppe Maxia recently posted we released Tungsten Replicator 2.0.4 this week.  It has a raft of bug fixes and new features of which one-line installations are the single biggest improvement.  I set up replicators dozens of times a day and having a single command for standard cluster topologies is a huge step forward.  Kudos to Jeff Mace for getting this nailed down.

So what's next?  You can get see what we are up to in general by looking at our issues list.  We cannot do everything at once, but here are the current priorities for Tungsten Replicator 2.0.5.

• Parallel replication speed and robustness. …

I’d like to focus this blog on using MySQL in the Enterprise and kickoff with a series of posts on “Enterprise Backup” building on the new features in both MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB) and MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM).  The new features in MEB 3.6 provide the capabilities to stream backups directly to another server, interface with backup media management software, and take advantage of tape encryption.  MEM 2.3.5 now has a Backup Advisor that helps monitor your backups.  In this and a subsequent  blog post, I’ll go through a progression of backups building up on a fairly straightforward vanilla single file backup with MEB as follows:

• Backing up to a Single File
• Add streaming to your Single File backup
• Stream your Single File Backup to a Media Management System
• Encrypt your Backup Tapes using your Media Management System
• Monitoring your Backup with MySQL …

If you are interested or concerned about MySQL Security you may want to check out OurSQL episode 55 where I discuss transparent encryption with Sheeri Cabral and Sarah Novotny and how it can help to secure mysql data and other linux apps (apache, nosqls, drizzle) plus protection for config files, code ….. and more –

Sheeri and Sarah dive deep with many of the technical questions you might have yourself.

This should be valuable for you whether your concerns are directly mysql related or more general as related to encrypting data or further securing your linux ecosystems.

OurSQL Episode 55: MySQL Data Encryption

http://bit.ly/oursql055

When you set-up the same software several times (for you or for your customers), you want that software to install quickly and reliably, and you are generally happy when everything works as expected.
In this context, a failing installation is when the installation process exits unexpectedly, and you are left with an error message and the prospect of looking at the manual to find out what was it.

A failing installation is unpleasant, you'd say, and I concur. But do you know what's more unpleasant than a failing installation? It's an installation that succeeds, only to fail silently the first time you try using the application.

Looking at this enhanced definition, it is no surprise that I assert to find happiness in failure. And I have practical reasons for my claim. When I first tried Tungsten Replicator installation, it succeeded. And to my …

Continuent today announced the availability of the Tungsten Enterprise 1.3.3. The latest Tungsten Enterprise edition is designed to simplify the management of, and to ensure the availability and scalability of mission critical applications and services. Tungsten Enterprise Summer '11 Edition, released in June, provides enhancements to error detection, cluster throughput and replication, including

Intent Media

Issue addressed: Ad hoc analytics on clickstream data arriving too fast for InnoDB or NoSQL to handle.

TokuDB powers an online advertising application

The Company: Headquartered in New York, Intent Media is a fast-growing online advertising startup. The company helps some of the largest online retailers monetize their traffic more efficiently at scale by showing highly relevant and targeted advertising to the 97+% of e-commerce visitors who do not transact.

The Challenge: The Intent Media platform processes hundreds of millions of events a day generated by media placements across leading e-commerce sites — a textbook “Big Data” challenge. Intent Media’s data is used to optimize media placements, drive segmentation models, and …

Well, our baby is born!  Some time ago we analyzed the feedback from users and customers and determined that far too many of our server installs were failing.  We have the best open-source database on the planet but no one can see that if we can’t get it properly installed.  Clearly something had to be done.

So, the new MySQL Installer is born.  It’s a Windows application that comes delivered in a bundle along with a version of the database server, applications like Workbench, connectors, samples, and documentation.  It includes some customized configuration screens that help with setting up the proper configuration files.

One of the great benefits of using the new MySQL Installer is that it comes with all the products very tightly integrated such as automatically creating connection entries in Workbench for the freshly installed server.  Our goal with MySQL is to have you up and running in 15 …

In an earlier post (Scripting Backups of MySQL with Perl via mysqldump), I showed you how to use Perl to script a mysqldump backup of selected databases. Reminder – using mysqldump to backup your databases is not as safe or effective as using MySQL Enterprise Backup.

A blog reader sent me an email asking me how they could automate sending the backup files via FTP to another server (preferably one that is off-site). This was easily accomplished by adding a series of FTP commands to the original script.

As in the first post, we use a text file that contains a list of the databases that we want to backup. See …

Summary: In this article we have a short look at a simple MySQL example program written in Vala.

Recently a customer pointed me to a programming language called Vala. Vala is a C-style programming language generating C code which afterwards can be compiled and linked with the normal gcc.

This I found pretty useful to not mess around with pointers and all this stuff in C and to be capable anyway to write C programs for some projects I had in mind in my head since long.

Vala is mostly used around the Gnome Project.

Vala

Vala declares itself as:

Vala is a new programming language that allows modern programming techniques to be …