Welcome to the 128th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Let’s begin with some PostgreSQL blogs. Jignesh Shah shares his recipe for making a PostgreSQL 8.3 appliance based on OpenSolaris using VirtualBox. While we’re on appliances, Dave Page shows off PostgreSQL management on the iPhone with an application he himself wrote. Stealth DBA for the bus-rise home.

On Database Soup, Josh …

Last week I got a question about sharding using our Spockproxy.  The question was how can I create a query for the proxy so it effectively runs:

/*in shard 1*/
SELECT * FROM table_a WHERE f_key IN (a, b, c);

UNION

/*in shard 2*/
SELECT * FROM table_a WHERE f_key IN (d, e, f);

By design our proxy will not do this.  The whole point is to hide the sharding from the application.  Given a query it will either send the same query to all the shards and combine the results or only send that query to one shard when it can figure out that the results(s) can only come from one shard (because you specified the shard key in the where clause).

I did figure out a way it could be done using views but would this ever be desirable?  

Like “Hard Coding” where values are built into the code of your application I’ll call this technique “Hard …

I visit a large number of organizations every year to deliver training, short term consulting as well as business and technology seminars in the area of database servers, security, software development and middle-tier technology. So I thought I would share some of the trends I have seen in 2008 that I believe will continue in 2009.I'm always being asked the following questions; "How do I stay

I've been working on our Freiwild Shop website today making it compatible with Django 1.0.2 (final(ly)!). Basically, what I've done is try to run it and fix where it errors following the direction documented in the manual. I think that the next days I'll see how I can optimize the MySQL usage a bit.

The shop I've build has little models and doesn't use to much fancy tricks. Among the changes:

• Templates: extends should be on the first line
  
• Models: should not contain anything Admin-related. This is actually very nice, seperating models.py and admin.py.
  
• Model Fields: maxlength changed to max_length, oldforms/newforms options disappeared, small stuff like this.
  
…

Red Hat increases its service levels. Linux Foundation appoints Ted Ts’o CTO. Sun delivers VirtualBox update. Novell cancels BrainShare. BBC enables iPlayer for Linux. And more.

Note: This is the last 451 CAOS Links post of 2008. We’ll be back with a bumper holiday special on January 2. Happy holidays!

Official announcements
Red Hat Increases Service Levels and Reduces Costs for Customers with Extended Update Support Red Hat

Linux Foundation Appoints Ted Ts’o to Position of Chief Technology Officer Linux Foundation

…

I recently learned that my talk has been accepted for the 2009 MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, California. It is currently scheduled for Tuesday the 21st and titled MySQL and Search at Craigslist.

Here's the abstract (which I've promised to expand upon soon):

Millions of people search for things every day on craigslist: tickets, cars, garage sales, jobs, events, and so on.

This talk will look at the recent evolution of database and search architecture at Craigslist, including performance, caching, partitioning, and other tweaks. We'll pay special attention to the unique challenges of doing this for a large data set that has an especially high churn rate (new …

Topics covered include GlassFish v3, Java EE 6, Jersey, OpenSSO, Grizzly Comet, OpenMQ, OpenDS, JavaFX, OpenESB/Fuji, MySQL, partners XWiki, Valtech, Nuxeo and IzPack's despot Julien Ponge. Some are in French but the majority of the slides are in English.

Alternatively, …

MySQL Connector/C++ 1.0.2 alpha is available for download at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/cpp/1.0.html, please see also the official announcement. Only three weeks after the first alpha, we decided to release a X-Mas edition. Not only the winter evenings in the northern hemisphere have become quite long also the Change History got quite long. Long enough for a bug fix release which brings some minor feature additions and includes our JDBC compliance test suite for the first time. MySQL Connector/C++ 1.0.2 alpha is a source code only release, meaning that you will have to compile it yourself. …

MySQL Connector/C++ 1.0.2 alpha is available for download at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/cpp/1.0.html, please see also the official announcement. Only three weeks after the first alpha, we decided to release a X-Mas edition. Not only the winter evenings in the northern hemisphere have become quite long also the Change History got quite long. Long enough for a bug fix release which brings some minor feature additions and includes our JDBC compliance test suite for the first time. MySQL Connector/C++ 1.0.2 alpha is a source code only release, meaning that you will have to compile it yourself. Please …