There are two search engines that have promise that made themselves public in 2010: DuckDuckGo and Blekko. DuckDuckGo has active search spam removal, you can access it via secure HTTP (HTTPS), and is a search engine that also relies on crowd sourced data.

Web of Trust has reputation ratings of over millions of websites, and has an active community of about 15 million users now. Best of all, there’s no bots doing these ratings, but community members (trust metrics are crowd sourced).

DuckDuckGo and Web of Trust have a partnership now, so you can simply change the settings to display WoT ratings instead of the favicons when …

Over the last few months I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of people using open source builds of Tungsten.  My company, Continuent, has therefore started to offer support for open source users and will likely expand these services to meet demand.

There have also been a number of requests to add specific features to open source builds, especially for replication. We have added a few already but are now considering pushing even more features into open source if we can find sponsors.  These add to a number of great features already in open source like global transaction IDs, MySQL 5.0/5.1, basic drizzle replication, transaction filtering, and many others. 

Do you have special replication or clustering features you would like to see added to Tungsten? Specialized MySQL to PostgreSQL replication?  Management and monitoring commands?  Cool parallel replication problems?  …

In browsing the BZR tree for lp:mysql-server, I noticed some rather exciting code had been merged into the Innobase code.

You may be aware that InnoDB will do some index dives when opening a table to get some statistics about the indexes that can help the optimiser make good query plans.

The problem being that this is many disk seeks. It means that on server restart, you have to spend a whole bunch of time seeking around the disk reading index pages.

Not any more.

There is now code merged in to store the calculated statistics in a table inside InnoDB so that these index dives don’t have to happen on startup.

Originally, this looked like it was going to make it into InnoDB+. The good news is that it’s now in a public …

Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly news update of happenings in the database world.

A big shout out to Pythian team members Andrey, Gwen, Fahd, and Don for their submissions. We have lots of news and recommended reading this week so let’s get going with Log Buffer #209.

Andrey Goryunov’s top picks:

Dion Cho, the Oracle Performance Storyteller, provides an explanation of parallel DML execution plan.

Christian …

In case you haven’t heard yet, I’ve merged in the latest InnoDB from MySQL 5.5.7 into Drizzle. The innobase plugin is now based on InnoDB 1.1.3.

This gets a lot of bug fixes and improvements from 1.1.2 (and on 1.1.1). Enjoy!

One month ago I set up a new MySQL 5.5 db4free.net server instance, after the old instance started to keep crashing. Since then, the former user database server has run on port 3307 to give people a chance to rescue their data, while the new MySQL 5.5 instance started completely from scratch.

However, most of the time, the 3307 server was down and I doubt that many people had a chance to get a copy/backup of their data. Now I updated that server to MySQL 5.5 as well. It’s too early to tell whether or not that will increase people’s chances, but it may be worth to give it a new try.

I will present on "Testing LAMP Applications" at the O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011:

Proper interaction with relational databases is incredibly important in most pieces of software. The importance of this interaction is underscored by the fact that many software architectures have at least one entire layer or system devoted to data persistence and data loading. When dealing with critical data in enterprise level applications it becomes even more important to make sure your data is being stored and retrieved correctly.

As responsible developers, one of our goals should be to test database interaction and test it well. To help achieve …

Let me know what’s your favorite database!

Enter the poll!

I’m back in the blogosphere!

This blog will focus on Smalltalk (mostly Pharo, Squeak, Dolphin, VAST and VW), databases (usually MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, DB2, InterBase and Firebird), algorithms and open source tools.  I’ll throw in some literature, music and mathematics occasionally.

Requirements to enjoy this blog : an interest in problem solving, a database and a Smalltalk environment!

Too far? Well it's a bit true really :) Over the past several weeks, Andrew and the Drizzle team have been working on squashing quite a few bugs with drizzzledump, Drizzle's own advanced version of mysqldump. Patrick was kind enough to give me a shoutout for all the bug filing I had been doing - thanks for that! Though I am glad to see drizzledump, and Drizzle as a whole, approach a period of real usefulness - that's the part I, and I am sure quite a few folks, are excited about. It's on my todo list to convert my blog over to Drizzle as well, now that drizzledump seems to be working against my schema. The reason it has not been done yet is really due to the job change and the season among other things; though it is still very much on my list.

I think Drizzle is a a step in the right direction and am glad to see the march toward stability and extensibility. That last bit makes me …