Everyone and their mother are throwing out their predictions for 2009 nowadays, itâ€s a new fad. Itâ€s like youâ€re not cool anymore if you donâ€t have twitter, a Mac, and a set of random predictions for the next 12 joyous months.

So I decided to throw in a few ideas of my own to be part of the cool crowd again (how much cooler can I be already, you might think, and I wouldnâ€t blame you).

Disclaimer (read it, tough guy)

What this post is:

• about the future of technology and the Internet, 2009 and beyond.
• my ideas on what is going to happen or should happen. If they happen to match someone elseâ€s ideas – it doesnâ€t mean I ripped them off, it just means we share the same opinions and theyâ€re more likely to come true.
• awesome.

What this post is not:

…

Percona has been building and contributing to open-source software since the company was founded, and individually we've been doing the same thing for many years.  We think it's a huge value for our customers and the community.

We're involved in a dozen or so open-source projects, but our three core efforts at the moment are the following:

• Percona patches, which are included in our own MySQL builds and then in OurDelta builds and perhaps others as well
• XtraDB, which is our new high-performance transactional storage engine
• Maatkit, which is a toolkit that provides advanced functionality for MySQL.

We have a team of dedicated MySQL developers working on the server …

We just shipped and installed the Kickfire appliance in the data center of our first web 2.0 customer this week. We’re very excited about this new customer. With already over a million active members, this company continues to grow in spite of a challenging economic environment because it has a clearly defined audience and a business model which adds value to its members while adding money to its coffers. Part of the value add to their member base comes from well-targeted discount and coupon offers. In order to achieve this, the company runs complex analytics to understand members’ behaviors and responses and uses this data to help its advertising customers better target their offers.

As with many web 2.0 companies, this customer has built its application on MySQL. MySQL has helped them scale their web application well but was presenting performance and scalability challenges for their analytics. With their fact table in the …

This post is about a PL/SQL feature that doesn't get enough respect, "invoker's rights".First off, what's its real name? Depending on the source, you'll see the feature name spelled "invoker's rights", "invokers' rights", or "invoker rights". That makes a difference -- you'll get different results in Google depending on what combination of singular, plural, and possessive you use. And to be

There's one thing which I believe I never mentioned so far, though it is certainly worth to be mentioned. db4free.net runs on a dedicated server at easyspeedy.com from Denmark, who use servers from Sun Microsystems and are a Certified Sun Partner.

I got reminded of this fact when I received an email from easyspeedy, wishing me a good new year, telling me about plans for 2009 and including the uptime statistics of 2008, which were as follows:

10 months of 100% uptime
1 month of 99.98% uptime
1 month of 99.97% uptime

Sure, uptime on db4free.net was a bit lower since these statistics only show how much the server has been up (and down) on their side.

Anyway, it's one more example where …

I'm not trying to push Sun hardware here, I'm not even paid for doing so, I'm just reading up on what is available. In my experience, the probably most common MySQL box is the DL380 from the guys that also make a nice steak-sause (I'm not sure I can mention names here). This is a nice steady workhorse of box that's been around since the Lincoln administration or something like that. A good old box anyway, with ample space for disks and stuff and there is also the smaller brother, the DL360.

Now Sun has, since last summer or so, an entry level x86 box in it's offering. I haven't tested it, but am curious of any real world experiences with this machine, which is competitively priced, it seems, the Sun …

The Pythian Group added another feather to its cap today. Our Nicklas Westerlund passed his MySQL Cluster DBA Certification exam, making him part of an elite group of 57 MySQL Cluster Certified DBAs worldwide, and now two here at Pythian, the other being Augusto Bott. We have a wealth of hands-on experience setting up and maintaining the MySQL Cluster. Nick’s and Augusto’s certified creds make them our go-to guys for MySQL Clustering.

Congratulations, Nick!

Welcome to the 130th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Oracle Blogs

Tanel Poder began a new series on Oracle memory troubleshooting with an introduction to his heapdump analyzer script.

Richard Foote asked, is it possible to shrink a newly created index? His answer? Just.

On the Oracle DBA and Apps DBA blog, Sabdar Syed also has a …

Yesterday we announced the new release of the Gearman server, library, and UDFs, and now I’d like to provide a more useful example. This example assumes you’ve taken the steps to install the C server and MySQL UDFs as explained in that post, and now we’ll be using those pieces and the Perl API to show how to do URL processing. This could be used by a number of applications - anything where you have a URL, need to fetch it, possibly do some processing, and then store it somewhere (RSS feed cache, pulling links out of a HTML page, image conversion, …). In this example, MySQL is being used as the repository and “trigger point”, helping track the requests and results. Since we’ll be using Perl for our worker code, the first thing to do is install the Perl API from CPAN:

> perl -MCPAN -eshell
cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.9205)
cpan[1]> …