The history and accomplishments attributed to VistA, the Veterans
Administration's core administrative software, mark it as one of the
most impressive software projects in history. Still, lots of smart
people in the health care field deprecate VistA and cast doubt that it
could ever be widely adopted. Having spent some time with people on
both sides, I'll look at their arguments in this blog, and then
summarize other talks I heard today at the href="http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010">Open Source Convention
health care track.

Yesterday, as href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/07/day-one-of-the-health-care-it.html">I
described in my previous blog, we heard an overview of trends in
health care and its open source side in particular. Two open source
free software projects offering electronic health records were
presented, …

Sometimes I find Google annoying. Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of the many Google haters out there. They have done amazing things and especially since they have released WebM as Open Source and royalty free video format, they have earned a bonus in my attitude towards them. And even though Google Chrome is not my personal favorite, I have to admit that Chrome has brought a great momentum into the development of web browsers (and therefor the WWW as a whole) which users of any browser benefit from. Last but not least, I use a lot of Google’s services and they do their job quite well. So all in all, Google’s record from my point of view is pretty good.

But one thing really sucks. I use an English operating system. I use an English Firefox (locale en-US). All the language preferences in the Google profiles of my …

MySQL Workbench is a great tool for developers to map out and visualise databases. What many people know is that it’s also a great way to make upgrading and writing upgrade scripts for your components really painless too.

Let’s say you created a small component that became popular over night. Tens of thousands of downloads from on the Joomla Extensions Directory. So you get inspired and put some more work into improving and bugfixing this component even more, and while doing that you change and add on to the database schema.

Now you need to create and distribute an update script with the next version of your component, and MySQL Workbench makes creating this update script really easy. Here is what you need to do:

Install MySQL Workbench

I’ll not help you with this. Just go to the MySQL Workbench homepage and follow the instructions from there. …

A new release of the PrimeBase Media Streaming daemon is now available for download at
http://www.blobstreaming.org .

This release doesn't contain any major new features just some bug fixes and a lot of house keeping changes.

If you look at the download section on http://www.blobstreaming.org you will see that there are now more packages that can be downloaded. I have separated out different client side components from the PBMS project and created separate launchPad projects for each one. You can see them listed in the "Related Links" side panel to the right of this post.

• The "PBMS Client Library" facilitates communication with the PBMS daemon. This library is independent of the PBMS daemon's host server and can be used to communicate with a PBMS daemon hosted by …

If you have not looked at my recent presentation that I presented at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010, then feel free to join me on Tuesday, July 27, 2010 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM EDT tomorrow at 5pm EDT when I will giving a webinar on this talk. You can register online at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/730452824

openSUSE 11.3 Running MySQL Cluster

With the release of openSUSE 11.3 they announced the inclusion of MySQL Cluster. What does this mean as you could already install and run MySQL Cluster on openSUSE (and any other LINUX platform for that matter)? The change is that you can now use their tool (zypper) to install the MySQL Cluster RPMs and most importantly replace the ‘regular’ MySQL Server with the one that should be used with MySQL Cluster.

Personally I prefer installing MySQL Cluster from the tar ball as it gives me more control (for example, openSUSE is using MySQL Cluster 7.0 but I prefer to use 7.1 as that’s …

Crash Safety is a big deal in the database league. Lack of durability can lead to all sorts of terrible things upon a catastrophic event. Many projects, especially in the so called NoSQL world compromises crash safety in return for higher QPS. The argument there is that the availability of the overall system should be accomplished by replication since a database server can’t be rescued if the physical disk breaks. I happen to agree with this philosophy but I am also aware that this isn’t a correct answer for everyone. So, what will I do with BlitzDB?

Several relational database hackers have pointed out that BlitzDB isn’t any safer than MyISAM since it doesn’t guarantee crash safety. This is currently true but I plan on making BlitzDB much safer than MyISAM by providing following features.

1. Auto Recovery Routine (startup option)
2. Tokyo Cabinet’s Transaction API (table-specific option)

The …

I came up with Idea of this article, when I tried to create replication setup between MS SQL 2008 and MySQL. I was unable to do it since MS SQL provides only two non SQL Subscriptions/Publishers options.

However I created the linked server through which I can access and query the MySQL databases and tables.

A linked server (a virtual server) may be considered a more flexible way of achieving remote access, with the added benefits of remote table access and distributed queries. Microsoft manages the link mechanism via OLE DB technology. Specifically, an OLE DB data source points to the specific database that can be accessed using OLEDB.

Let’s try and create MySQL linked Server on MS SQL Server 2008 and query a database.

Step 1: Create ODBC DSN for MySQL

To create ODBC DSN you need to …

I came up with Idea of this article, when I tried to create replication setup between MS SQL 2008 and MySQL. I was unable to do it since MS SQL provides only two non SQL Subscriptions/Publishers options.

However I created the linked server through which I can access and query the MySQL databases and tables.

A linked server (a virtual server) may be considered a more flexible way of achieving remote access, with the added benefits of remote table access and distributed queries. Microsoft manages the link mechanism via OLE DB technology. Specifically, an OLE DB data source points to the specific database that can be accessed using OLEDB.

Let’s try and create MySQL linked Server on MS SQL Server 2008 and query a database.

Step 1: Create ODBC DSN for MySQL

To create ODBC DSN you need to …

When originally looking around to find out how to connect to a IPv6 network there seem to be quite a few different options and providers.

I originally requested an allocation with Hurricane Electric but had trouble setting up the tunnel. Their web page said they could not ping my public IP address (my router) and this prevented them allowing the tunnel to be created. My ADSL router does not have any ICMP filters configured and as the public IP address is forwarded to my Linux PC I knew that did not either. I also remember when setting up my ADSL connection with Jazztel that I had some configuration issues, and this turned out to be related to the fact (from what I remember) that Jazztel block ICMP traffic to the customer’s IP address.  So with this problem I looked to see if I could find another tunnel broker.

I’m currently using …