Below are the slides from the presentation I gave yesterday on open source BI adoption. The talk is a brief overview of the rationale and benefits, some of the situations appropriate for use, and a few thoughts on internal barriers to use.

This is part of a webcast done jointly with Actuate on the Business Intelligence Network. You can listen to the archived presentation as well as seeing Actuate's presentation on BIRT by going to the webcast registration page.
Open Source Business Intelligence Adoption: Who, Why and HowView more presentations from Mark …

12ms?  Really, I mean come on…. what are we using 10baseT?

at least it appears somewhat consistent.  Consistently bad, but consistent… and if you can not survive the odd spike to 35ms, what good are you.

I increasingly enclose the API part of “Storage Engine API” in quotes as it does score a rather large number on the API Design Rusty levels (Coined by Rusty Russell). I give it a 15 (out of 18. lower is better) in this case “The obvious use is wrong”.

The ideas is that your handler gets called to write a row (the amazingly named handler::write_row()). It’s passed a buffer which is the row to be stored. An engine that uses the MySQL row format (lets say, ARCHIVE) will simply pack the row and write it out.

Unless there is a TIMESTAMP field with auto set on insert. Up until now (and still now in MySQL) the engine had to check if this was the case and make sure the timestamp field was updated.

To remove this particular bonghit is actually a really small patch, which …

It’s no secret that I love linux.conf.au. My first was linux.conf.au 2003, in Perth and I’ve been to every one since (there are at least two people who’ve been to every single one, including CALU as it was called in 1999).

I’ve been on the board of Linux Australia for some insane proportion of the years since then (joining in 2003). Linux Australia is the not-for-profit community organisation that puts on linux.conf.au. It’s all volunteers and amazingly enough we have more than one group of people wanting to put on linux.conf.au each year!

This year, we Marched South to Hobart.

Here I detail what I saw, what I wish I …

I don’t think I’ll be attending the MySQL Conference & Expo this year (I didn’t manage to get a session accepted), but I just learned from Twitter that Don MacAskill is delivering a keynote I would have liked to attend.

He’s planning to talk on MySQL and SSD-based storage. SmugMug is using Sun’s new 7000 series storage servers to great success and I am interested in seeing the benefits that from from SSD storage from someone who knows.

I’ll just have to bribe …

I keep reading that Ma.gnolia’s data is permanently lost because “a specialist had been unable to recover any data from the corrupted hard drive.” This is not in itself a reason to consider data completely lost.

It is not clear to me whether the hard drive itself is unusable, e.g. the spindle won’t spin and the head won’t read the ones and zeroes, or whether the filesystem is corrupted. It sounds to me, from reading Larry Hallf’s comments, like it’s a simple matter of filesystem corruption. And even if the disk is dead, there is apparently a backup made from the corrupted filesystem, so there should be more than one way to …

Did you know that by banging your head against the wall you burn about 150 calories per hour? However, there are more effective and less painful ways to exercise (no surprise there). Personally, I like an early morning walk and playing some Wii games around lunch time.

Most companies aim towards high(er) value offerings, sold at a higher price, so that their margin increases. Right?
But what they're actually doing is desperately trying to outrun their own high (and escalating) cost structure. I ask you this: why should a client have to pay for inefficiencies in a provider's organisation? Also, why says that a higher value offering needs to a) be priced higher and b) have a higher profit margin?

This is not the unavoidable way of things, but the reason it's the usual is that you can't just decide to change one aspect (such as a higher value offering), yet keep the way the company is run the same, and then still …

Ian Bullard asserts that you should never use the RAND() function. The Ayn Rand Google Ad is pretty funny. The new Zend Server is coming out as a web stack. Although it can be easier to install a Xampp style … Continue reading →

Luckily we are still in alpha for the MySQL Proxy which allows us to change the API from time to time.

One of these changes is now merged to trunk and will end up in 0.7.0 which will be packaged soon. Kay knows more.

As talked about in my previous article we exposed more information for the address objects:

• each socket now has a .src and a .dst address
• each address has a human readable .name (previously known as .address in the socket)

The main reason for exposing this information was a mail from a sjmudd:

I want to route all traffic through the proxy for analyzing but still want to be able to route the traffic to several backend servers. For each backend server I would set up a virtual address on the proxy-server and …

I have been talking more and more with colleagues about the Open Source community and licenses. Zak Greant recently wrote in Free Culture vs. Fear Culture vs. Fee Culture that, “People with bad intentions will do bad things . . . often regardless of the license on the work.”

And, unfortunately, he is right. If I release an article or presentation video with a Creative Commons license, it is still possible for my work to be plagiarized, and if it is, I will still feel violated.

Many of us who use Creative Commons or MySQL have an Open Source mentality. We often do not see value in pirating software—why would we use Microsoft Word (a legally licensed copy, or pirated) if we can use …