Talend raises $8m. Cisco leaves a TIP. Exit strategies. And more.

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# Talend raised $8m Series D from existing investors Balderton Capital, AGF Private Equity and Galileo Partners.

# Cisco promised to open source Telepresence Interoperability Protocol.

# Alfresco Community 3.3 included CMIS 1.0, Google Docs and IBM Lotus integration.

# Exit strategies – secrets of success for open source companies, from the Open Source Think Tank.

# …

In the last post choosing about the right type; there is a case about quoting the tuple values; that I forgot to mention which is pretty much a common mistake when string data types are used for storing int or float/double representation (well sometimes you need to use string due to length or to avoid [...]

Here's another interesting session from the South by Southwest Interactive conference a few weeks ago... Dharmesh Shah, co-author of the Inbound Marketing book, gave a concise, high-speed presentation on some of the best practices in social media marketing.  Here are a couple of video clips from his session:

A lot of the startups I work with, both open source companies and SaaS, are now taking Inbound Marketing more seriously as a way to grow their business, whether it's an open source business, cloud, SaaS or some combination.  The reality is it's just not good enough to have a killer product.  You need to have a dialog with prospects and make sure …

"Sir, we advise you to not board this aircraft". The plane was ready for departure but the empty gate seemed to underline what the ground staff just said. All other flights to Europe were cancelled. And there are certainly worse places to be stranded than San Francisco in spring. After speaking at the MySQL Users Conference my already re-scheduled via Frankfurt in two days was likely to be cancelled again. I had to try something to avoid being stuck in US for days if not weeks.
7 hours later cold air streaming in through the front door welcomed me to Reykjavik. At departure time in US no onward flights were scheduled from there. Eyjafjallajökull (see picture) was still erupting sending its ashes to Europe. Rather than being stuck in US I could be easily stuck on Iceland. But I wanted to see my family. And I wanted to see the volcano.
By the time of my arrival on Iceland individual transfers to Northern Europe opened, I got a seat to Oslo …

We’re sticking with databases for our current round of webinars. Up next is an overview of Oracle high availability clustering on Linux.

In this 45-minute presentation, we will show you how to quickly and easily configure an Oracle database with an associated TNS Listener in a failover configuration, how to monitor both your database and your listener for failures, and how to have Pacemaker automatically intervene and recover from outages.

Brought to you in association with our friends over at Novell, we’ll showcase Oracle in combination with SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension.

This webinar is scheduled for April 28, 2010 at 1500 UTC.

As all of our webinars, this one requires registration — but we’ve made things easier for you. …

Last week I was surprised to see this paper bubble back up on Planet MySQL. It describes the pros and cons of thread and event based programming for high concurrency applications (like a web server), arguing that thread-based programming is superior if you use an appropriate lightweight threading implementation. I don't entirely disagree with this, but the problem is such a library does not exist that is standard, portable, and useful for all types of applications. We have POSIX threads in the portable Linux/Unix/BSD world, so we need to work with this. Other experimental libraries based on lightweight threads or "fibers" are really interesting as they can maintain your stack without all the normal overhead, but it is hard to get the scheduling correct for all application …

Last week I was surprised to see this paper bubble back up on Planet MySQL. It describes the pros and cons of thread and event based programming for high concurrency applications (like a web server), arguing that thread-based programming is superior if you use an appropriate lightweight threading implementation. I don’t entirely disagree with this, but the problem is such a library does not exist that is standard, portable, and useful for all types of applications. We have POSIX threads in the portable Linux/Unix/BSD world, so we need to work with this. Other experimental libraries based on lightweight threads or “fibers” are really interesting as they can maintain your stack without all the normal overhead, but it is hard to get the scheduling correct for all …

--edit
Continuent says that Tungsten replication can indeed read from binary logs, including RBR logs. I need to investigate this further.
--end edit

MySQL versions prior to 5.1 lack a relatively easy way to capture the row-change information from a MySQL database. Oracle and DB2 both provide convenient interfaces for reading log data and producing a set of changes. Oracle calls this 'log miner' and I don't honestly remember the name of the tool that has similar functionality on DB2.

Prior to MySQL 5.1, the capturing of row change information could be done only through triggers. This method of change-data-capture (CDC) has some serious drawbacks, including the inability to detect transaction commit order due to the nature of two-phase locking. This means that trigger based implementations of CDC often have to on a central lock table to serialize activity and generate transaction ids. Trigger based CDC …

Today evening one of my friend asked me in the IM to look into one of his production server where a query was taking ~11 seconds to run on 20 million row table, even though the query is using the right index and the plan as shown below:

mysql> explain SELECT channel, COUNT(channel) AS visitors FROM [...]

There’s a good number of videos appearing online from the MySQL Conference and Expo that was on last week.

Here’s a short list of interesting things to look at if you weren’t able to make the sessions. Obviously, this is from my view as a Drizzle developer. There were other interesting things, but this list is more focused towards where my Drizzle brain is stimulated.

• State of Drizzle (Brian Aker)
• MySQL at Facebook (Mark Callaghan)
• High Concurrency MySQL ( …