Dear Kettle friends,

As mentioned in my previous blog post, copies of our new book Pentaho Kettle Solutions are finally shipping.  Roland, Jos and myself worked really hard on it and, as you can probably imagine, we were really happy when we finally got the physical version of our book in our hands.

So let’s take a look at what’s in this book, what the concept behind it was and give you an overview of the content…

The concept

Given the fact that Maria’s book, called Pentaho Data Integration 3.2, …

Recent Tips and News on Java EE 6 & GlassFish:

According to a recent book about MySQL, this is the recipe to convert an IP address into an integer, with the purpose of using it as server-ID.

1. Take for example 10.0.159.22
2. Using a calculator (!!!), convert each of the four numbers to hexadecimal (you get 0a.00.9f.16)
3. Then glue the four hexadecimal numbers together, after removing the dots, and, again with the calculator, convert them to decimal (0a009f16HEX=167812886DEC)
4. Use this number (167812886) as your server ID in the options file.

Brilliant, eh?

Had the authors searched the MySQL manual for "IP address", they would have found the INET_ATON function, which can be used like this:

select inet_aton('10.0.159.22'); …

The kind folks at O'Reilly sent me a fantastic book about MongoDB. This was a great read since it’s suited for people who do Operations and Development and Performance tuning (me). I've been using Cassandra for quite some time now (months lol) and the thing that has irritated me about Cassandra is the documentation for it. Cassandra documentation sucks, its hard to speed up on the internals. This MongoDB book is written by the most active participants that are developing MongoDB and the knowledge shows. What I like is it starts out on how to quickly get it up, add/get/update data to the DB. Then progresses to more advance topics-that talk about GridFS and MongoDB drivers. Personally I would like to see more elaboration of this facet in terms of motivation of why do this, what the win is and how it fits into the "Fast by Default" mantra. Each step is organized perfectly, …

SQL Antipatterns, by Bill Karwin
I remember that when I finished reading The Lord Of The Rings, I felt a pang of disappointment. "What? Already finished? What am I going to read now? What can give me the same pleasure and sense of accomplishment that these wonderful pages have given me?"
That's how I felt when I came to the last page of SQL Antipatterns. And, no, Bill Karwin doesn't tell imaginary tales from a fictitious world. This book is full of very real and very practical advice, but all the material is presented with such grace and verve that I could not put it down until the very end. I read it cover to cover in just a few hours, and I savored every page.

What is this Antipatterns, anyway? The title may deceive a casual bookshop browser into believing that it's about some philosophical database theory. Digging further, you realize …

mysql > start review;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql > Being a MySQL DBA, not a developer, I was mostly interested in the MySQL sections but given I have a general interest in scripting I did go through some of the PHP sections. To be honest they were quite advanced for my php knowledge and experience.

The good thing about the book is that even though it assumes you have the basic knowledge, it still provides an introductory background on most of the two (PHP and MySQL) topics. This is not a “PHP and MySQL for dummies” so don’t expect to learn the very basics nor will you become an expert in either topic by just reading the book. Even if you read the book thoroughly, becoming an expert requires years of hard work and experience. Having said that, his book is a good guide to make it there.

If you are at least a basic developer, this book will help you increase your knowledge drastically and …

A few months ago, I reviewed MySQL Admin Cookbook. Today I am reviewing High Availability MySQL Cookbook from Packt Publishing by Alex Davies. Overall, I found the book to contain some good hidden Gems.

The book is a mixture of MySQL Cluster (NDB), Replication schemes, some performance tuning, some minor kernel tweaking, and some more exotic approaches to common High Availability problems. Overall, I found this book very informative and a good read.
Now the specifics, the book starts out on NDB and stays focused on this fact for about 60% of the book. The next 20% is on mySQL replication then about 10% of the book is on tweaking kernel, mysql, network settings to get the most out of …

Dear Kettle fans,

A few weeks ago, when I was stuck in the US after the MySQL User Conference, a new book was published by Packt Publishing.

That all by itself is something that is not too remarkable.  However, this time it’s a book about my brainchild Kettle. That makes this book very special to me. The full title is Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration : Beginner’s Guide (Amazon, Packt).  The title all by itself explains the purpose of this book: give the reader a quick-start when it comes to Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle).

The author María Carina Roldán ( …

I’ve recently been migrating my wiki/documentation for Kontrollbase to Trac. For those that are not aware, Trac is a web-based documentation/wiki/Subversion tool that is used by countless number of software projects. Subversion, of course, is a software collaboration and code management repository that manages branches/tags/trunk files with revision control. It’s one of the most heavily used open-source code repositories available. Given that I use SVN (subversion) for all of my software applications and am now using Trac, the book “Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion” by David J Murphy comes as a useful and great resource for integrating these two useful tools. …