This weekend I attended Drupal Camp PDX and listened to a session titled “Drupal in the Cloud”. The presenter, Josh Koenig from Chapter Three, gave a great introduction of what moving to “the cloud” really means, especially in the context of a typical web application like Drupal. The problem, which is of course no fault of Josh’s, is that the best high availability database practices are harder to deploy because you’re working within a different set of constraints in the cloud. Sure, you can setup MySQL replication, but without the ability to insert a hardware load balancer or better control over floating IPs, reliable single-master solutions are difficult at best.

I spoke with Josh for a bit after and discussed how …

As Lee announced, we have the Random Query Generator added to Drizzle Automation. It always amazed me that we were lacking such a fundamental testing tool for MySQL for all that time. I always found the similar (NDB API) tools for MySQL Cluster (NDB) to be really, really useful when wanting to make sure your code changes, well, worked.

I’m really looking forward into this being developed further as a cross-database testing tool and framework.

Also, upstream maintainers++ Good example of how even small FOSS projects should work.

I wrote a while ago about how mext works – it runs “mysqladmin extended-status” and formats it nicely. But what if you want to use it to format saved output that you’ve put into a file? It’s actually very easy. You can tell it what command-line to run to generate its input. By default you are probably going to tell it to run “mysqladmin ext -ri10″ or something like that, but you can just as easily make it run “cat my-saved-output”.

Repost from our corporate blog

Last monday some Inuits quickly crossed the channel for a day of speeches and talks regarding Open Source and its Adoption, the event organised at BT brought together a mixture of techies, legal persons and management to listen to and discuss about the current state of Enterprise Open Source adoption

The short introduction was done by JP of Confused In Calcutta , who mainly introduced Mark "I`m from outer space" Shuttleworth. Mark keynoted about Ubuntu .. he talked about Aubergine being the new Brown ... ranted (as everybody) about the Cloud , talked about a stronger focus to services rather than product building , talked about the ecosystem of "people close to you" for supporting solutions .

Steve Bouch, of the Synapse Project at BT …

EnterpriseDB seems to have figured out that its competition is Oracle in the enterprise, not MySQL in the clouds. This is a good start.

This Thursday (October 15th, 13:00 UTC), Giuseppe Maxia will present the Spider Storage Engine. Here's from the abstract: Everybody needs sharding. Which is not easy to maintain. Being tied to the application layer, sharding is hard to export and to interact with. The Spider storage engine, a plugin for MySQL 5.1 and later, solves the problem in a transparent way. It is an extension of partitioning. Using this engine, the user can deal transparently with multiple backends in the server layer. This means that the data is accessible from any application without code changes. This lecture will briefly introduce MySQL partitioning, and then show how to create and use the Spider engine, with some practical …

Welcome to this second post in this series on UNICODE, Character sets and what have you not. In the first of these posts, I went through some of the history of character set support, and some anomalies, and finished around the mid-1990's, when we had a bunch of reasonably well stanardized 8-bit character set. And then something happens...

Jacques Chirac becomes president of France. Now wait, that wasn't it. No, what happened was the Internet, and suddenly the time of IT as isolated islands, where we could determine ourselves how we wanted our computers to operate and what character set to use. came to an end. Suddenly, a user in France could view a webpage created in Japan. And now the issue woith Character sets becomes a real problem. Luckily, stuff has been going on since the late 1980's, more specifically …

Amy Hoy has written a blog post about why forums are crap. And she is right. Forum software does not always do a good job of helping people communicate. I have worked with Amy. She did a great analysis of dealnews.com that led to our new design. So, she is not to be ignored.

However, as a software developer (Phorum), I see a lot of problems and no answers.  And it is not all on the software.  Web site owners use forums to solve problems that they really, really suck at.  Ideally, every web site would be very unique for their audience.  They would use a custom solution that fits a number of patterns that best solves their problem.  However, most web site owners don't want to take the time to do such things.  They want a one stop, …

Sometimes terms like scaling are – as the brits like to say – bandied about, without everyone agreeing on what they mean.  That’s because scaling is an insiders term, a technical term thought to carry great weight, but nevertheless often misunderstood.So I wanted to write an article about this interesting and important topic, while sticking to terms that everyone *can* agree on.  This is the first in a two part series where I discuss various ways to make your database scale.  But I talk in terms of faster, stronger, bigger and better because I think we can all agree that’s what we’re really trying to achieve! Database Journal:  Faster & Stronger MySQL