planet.grep.be today has a lot of active open source users and contributors.
The weird thing is that we never meet apart from Fosdem.
Yes, we occasionally run into eachother at other events but there's not enough beer involved.

I've had different people ask me what and where are the Open Source gatherings in Belgium, and we must admit that apart
from Fosdem there isn't that much in our little country.

There were a couple of MySQL User Group events, some Drupal ones, some LUG had meetings altough I have the idea most of them have dried out :(

So I have this crazy idea of inviting you all to grab a beer, maybe even free beer :) on december 29 some in a pub in Antwerp

I`m open for suggestions on good locations.

Oh and everybody is welcome, both readers and writers :)

PS. Yes I know that some of you will be drinking in Berlin at …

Amazon SimpleDB now has support for a SQL-like language for queries. Modified to support multi-valued attributes....the following query returns all the items which have the values 'Book' and 'Hardcover' in keyword:

select * from my domain where every(keyword) in ('Book', 'Paperback')

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/12/simpledb---now-with-select.html

Image via Wikipedia

Recently I have seen several articles about Solid State Drives (SSD) and some articles are picking 2009 to be the year of the SSD.  While I agree SSD’s will bring some great benefits in the years to come, I wanted to clarify the current state of SSD’s in relation to usage in the database field.  A primary misconception is that because SSD’s are a type of “memory chip” storage that they are super fast, like system RAM and using them to house a database will make the database super fast.  SSD’s are very different from system RAM because of course their data must be persisted and this requirement carries a major performance impact. 

…

You may or may not know that you can edit result sets executed from a SQL editor in NetBeans.

Now available in the nightly builds, when editing a date field, just click on the drop-down arrow and you get a nice date picker. This is so much nicer than trying to enter in the date by hand.

All this cool data entry functionality is coming from Ahimanikya Satapathy's team in Bangalore. They are a completely separate team here at Sun - they don't even have the same VP as we do. His team is part of the group that delivers Sun's Java CAPS (Composite Application Platform Suite). This suite provides SOA and data integration services for Sun customers. It's been great working with them, a …

Open source the way it ought to be. Today, Percona announced a replacement for InnoDB that improves performance and fixes bugs. The new engine is called XtraDB.

According to Vadim at Percona:

It's 100% backwards-compatible with standard InnoDB, so you can use it as a drop-in replacement in your current environment. It is designed to scale better on modern hardware, and includes a variety of other features useful in high performance environments.

The release is pure GPL (v2) and commercial support is available from Percona. If percona keeps this up, they just might become the new MySQL.

The source is available from Launchpad and from …

In a way, it's embarassing we didn't always do this, but now you can see all the schemas in your database from your connection. Your default schema is in bold. Available in the nightly builds.

This isn't quite working yet for MySQL, but should be fixed in the next few days... We'll also be fixing the dialog for creating a new connection so you don't have to specify the schema any more, we'll just use the default given by the database. If you want to switch your default, just right-click on a schema and say "Set As Default" That'll be nice...

The Perfect Server - OpenSUSE 11.1

This is a detailed description about how to set up an OpenSUSE 11.1 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of OpenSUSE 11.1, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.

Vadim announced Percona's XtraDB a couple of days ago, and then followed up with some really fun benchmarks. Of course, the first thought I had was "I need another cup of coffee," which was shortly followed by "I should merge that in to Drizzle!"

First step was merging it in to a branch of the innodb-plugin-upstream branch, making an

lp:~mordred/drizzle/xtradb-upstream

Merged it up to drizzle trunk, and now we have:

lp:~mordred/drizzle/xtradb

But what I really want is for our changes to InnoDB/XtraDB to get merged in. So I also make a branch of XtraDB and applied our stuff to it:

lp:~mordred/percona-xtradb/drizzle

My goal …

The MySQL 5.1 DBA exam is in alpha-test right now and some of the reviewers have had questions about upgrade exams. The new exams are no longer multiple choice. They are based on a candidates performance with a real database on a virtual server.
In the past I have stated that there was not going to be an upgrade exam. This was due to the change in exam format and the history of previous upgrades not being popular. Less than forty folks took the Core to Dev upgrade exam (about 5% with that certification) and the numbers are worse for the Pro to DBA upgrade. Why spend time on something that is not going to be cost justifiable?

But my reviewers are trying to convince me to have an upgrade. It would not be that much more work to offer a hands that could be taken over the Internet. You …

Vadim announced Percona's XtraDB a couple of days ago, and then followed up with some really fun benchmarks. Of course, the first thought I had was "I need another cup of coffee," which was shortly followed by "I should merge that in to Drizzle!"

First step was merging it in to a branch of the innodb-plugin-upstream branch, making an

lp:~mordred/drizzle/xtradb-upstream

Merged it up to drizzle trunk, and now we have:

lp:~mordred/drizzle/xtradb

But what I really want is for our changes to InnoDB/XtraDB to get merged in. So I also make a branch of XtraDB and applied our stuff to it:

lp:~mordred/percona-xtradb/drizzle

My goal …