I received my pre-ordered copy yesterday of Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL. A huge congratulations and thank you to Roland Bouman and Jos van Dongen, two long time Pentaho community members who wrote the book.

I can' t tell you how excited I am to see this book! For many years, developers and project managers that I've worked with have felt that a book like this one is the missing link to helping customers achieve success with their warehouse and business intelligence strategies. Most books on business intelligence are either too abstract or offer guidance only on select pillars (for example, only reporting solutions), which leave the reader with unfulfilled requirements and no direction for filling in the gaps.

With Pentaho Solutions, the reader gets a concrete explanation and best-of-breed Pentaho implementation of ETL, reporting, analysis, dashboarding and data …

Vladimir will be giving a presentation on PBXT at the FrOSCon 2009 in St. Augustin, near Bonn in Germany tomorrow:

PBXT: Technology trends that affect your Database
Room: C120/OpenSQLCamp
Time: 22 Aug 2009, 18:15 - 18:45

The talks is packed with interesting information about how the design of PBXT handles the major technological challenges of the future, including multiple cores, lots of RAM and solid state drives.

If you are in the area, check it out! :)

I just discovered today in the MySQL 5.1 Reference Manual a handy set of additional indexes in the System Navigation section.

• Index
• Standard Index
• C Function Index
• Command Index
• Function Index
• INFORMATION_SCHEMA Index
• Transaction Isolation Level Index
• JOIN Types Index
• Operator Index
• Option Index
• Privileges Index
• SQL Modes Index
• Status Variable Index
• Statement/Syntax Index
• System Variable Index

Perhaps they have been around for some time and I’ve not noticed, but there are much better then searching when you know the content type as per the index list on what you are searching for.

Looking at twitter #songsincode (just search on #songsincode tag), it appears a large chunk of geeky/nerdy world has come to a halt while spending the day expression song titles in code. So far we’ve seen most programming languages as well as CSS and SQL come by. I think it’s a nice example of how “the collective” can become very creative. My favourite SQL ones so far (by @john_chr): SELECT * FROM walk WHERE gait LIKE '%EGYPTIAN%'

Update: a good friend of mine, Steve Thorne (@Jerub), wanted to set up a site for this, so we hacked one up: SongsInCodeDB.

Original, and very large, image:
krow.net/images/drizzle-mem-gear-developers.jpg

A Launchpad project, mysqlatfacebook, has been created to publish patches for MySQL from Facebook. The patches are based on MySQL 5.0.84. A few changes have been published and more are to come. The focus for many of our early changes is to add performance counters to InnoDB. We want to make InnoDB faster and these changes make it easier to understand where time is spent today. Some of the initial changes are derived from the Google patch. Changes include:

• A fix for bug 46459 to improve performance for concurrent autocommit statements.
• Options to disable readahead (prefetch) in InnoDB
• Options for InnoDB IO performance including:
  • innodb_io_capacity - sets the IO …

The program is very rich. There will be several tracks in the main event and in the associated conferences. If …

Dear Community,

The release 0.9 of the opensource backup tool for InnoDB and XtraDB is available for download.

Changelog:

• tar4ibd could not treat over 8GB file, now max 64GB
• prepare-speed-hack is added

Fixed bugs:

• Bug #386179: "InnoDB: Error: space id in fsp header 143088, but in the page header 0"
• Bug #394374: "Can't compile with MySQL 5.1"
• Bug #394781: "xtrabackup requires write permissions on original ibdata1"
• …

There is a detailed announcement that warns against using these binaries in production, but encourages everyone to test them. A companion tutorial explains how to use the snapshots to test the InnoDB plugin, which was released recently, and it is included in the latest MySQL …

I arrived yesterday in St. Augustin, near Bonn in Germany. After a good day of hitchhiking (weather is beautiful here) I stayed with my Pakistani Couchsurfing host and we had an extremely interesting evening talking about the gigantic cultural differences between western civilization and Pakistani civilization. It beats staying in a hotel by about a million points

This morning I headed to the FrOScon HQ at the fachhochschule to help out with whatever was needed. Turns out that was a bit premature (misunderstanding on my part), so I have had some time to catch up on mail and give some more attention to my talk on Saturday. I’ll be helping out throughout the and the whole day tomorrow with things though.

I’ll be talking about MySQL MMM, a project that I have invested …