Business intelligence has been talked about for quite a while. Even today, while companies are looking to make budget cuts, some experts are saying that BI can be used to beat the recession.

When I hear about BI systems, the first thing that comes to my mind is a huge and expensive system that has very powerful servers, that sucks data from many sources and runs some intensive and even more expensive reporting suite. Since I had been involved in projects to set those systems up, I know that it can probably take around a year to complete.

So everyone is in fact thinking about saving money yet still being …

After a few years off, I've been doing some writing for Linux Magazine (which is on-line only) again recently. First off, my just published feature article is Drizzle: Rethinking the MySQL Database Kernel. As you might have guessed, it looks at Drizzle and some of the reasoning behind forking and re-working MySQL.

I'm also writing a weekly column that we've been calling "Bottom of the Stack" (RSS) which started a few weeks ago. Recent articles are:

• Sphinx: Search Outside the Box
• …

Open source and SMBs. New funding for Lucid Imagination. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

On open source and SMBs
Savio Rodrigues contrasted Dell’s plans to target SMBs with bundles of hardware and open source with research from Forrester that indicated that SMBs are still wary of open source, while Matt Asay noted that there are significant opportunities for open source vendors if they can work out how to crack the SMB market and suggested that the way to make software easier for SMBs and to monetize it might actually be cloud-based computing.

OStatic noted that the issue may well be one of lack of awareness and that Dell’s initiative, as well as the …

The July meeting of the Boston MySQL User Group will feature Eric Day, a prominent Drizzle developer, talking about Drizzle and Gearman:

In this talk we will discuss two growing technologies: Drizzle and Gearman.

We will explain what the Drizzle project is, what we aim to accomplish, and an overview of where we are at. We will also be introducing the fundamentals of how to leverage Gearman, an open-source, distributed job queuing system. Gearman’s generic design allows it to be used as a building block for almost any use - from speeding up your website to building your own Map/Reduce cluster. We will tie Drizzle and Gearman together and demonstrate how they work in a custom Search Engine application.

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Here is the URL for MIT’s Map with the location of this building:
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The first "barbecue" of the PHP BBQ tour has been held in Munich. A little more than 30 attendees came to the Hirschgarten restaurant. Unfortunately we could not have a BBQ due to bad weather. Nonetheless the event has been a success: for some it has been the first PHP community event. And, of course, you always meet and greet "countless" well known PHP hackers. Let me name only two of them: Johannes Schlueter, who helped to organize the event and Pierre Joye (and Jana and Spooky), my host. Credits also go to Johann-Peter Hartmann from Mayflower, Nils Hitze and …

The first "barbecue" of the PHP BBQ tour has been held in Munich. A little more than 30 attendees came to the Hirschgarten restaurant. Unfortunately we could not have a BBQ due to bad weather. Nonetheless the event has been a success: for some it has been the first PHP community event. And, of course, you always meet and greet "countless" well known PHP hackers. Let me name only two of them: Johannes Schlueter, who helped to organize the event and Pierre Joye (and Jana and Spooky), my host. Credits also go to Johann-Peter Hartmann from Mayflower, Nils Hitze and …

During one of these activities, I will give away one copy of the MySQL Administrator’s Bible. If you are a MySQL enthusiast and you are in Madrid, that's an extra reason to attend the forum. For the ones who still don't know how …

Something I’ve added to BlitzDB recently that was pretty high on my todo list is support for variable width tables. So what is a variable width table? it is a table that contains columns that can vary in size, namely BLOB and TEXT types.

Going back to the basics, when a new row is to be written, a storage engine is given a pointer to the row data in MySQL format that it must somehow store for later lookup/retrieval. By meaning “somehow”, the storage engine is given the freedom to do whatever it likes with the row.

Writing a row for a fixed length table (a table with columns that are always the same size) is deadly easy. A storage engine can choose to not temper with the row and simply write or copy the data to it’s storage mechanism. This is because the storage engine is given a row that contains all the data. Rows for variable width tables …

Yesterday we held our PHP BBQ event at Munich, well it was no BBQ as the weather forecasts predicted rain,which came in the evening, but a nice evening in a beer garden.

We had more than 30 people there, some leaving early, sme arriving late, covering quite different kinds of participants: PHP core developers, professional PHP users, people doing PHP stuff as hobby, friends and PHP community veterans like Till Gerken. Many people didn't know each other or didn't see each other or some time so we had lot's of discussions, and most of them even weren't about PHP and even many non-IT things were covered, which I find always great. If you want an impression check Ulf's photos. I really hope this makes a good foundation for more regular PHP meetups.

There will be a few more events of this kind this week in Germany, so go there if you can, don't be …

I uploaded all of my past presentations to Slideshare recently, and realized that I hadn’t actually posted some of these on my blog in the past as well.

So I’ve created a new Presentations Page that has all of these together now.

It’s kind of funny to see the “MySQL for Oracle DBAs” presentation again - a lot has changed since 2006!

In any case, enjoy if you haven’t seen them - give them a look over if interested, and feel free to post comments or questions on the page!