Just listened to the Net@Night #79 netcast (during my morning walk); this episode has a very interesting interview with Don Tapscott who is the author of "Grown up Digital" (follow-up from "Growing up Digital") and many other insightful books about the online world and its humans. I was going to list some keywords of particular interest, but there's just too much - the whole interview is excellent, go and listen to it already!

My first exposure to Don Tapscott was years ago (must've been around 2003), and quite accidental. I was teaching a MySQL training course at the University of Queensland, and walked past the uni bookstore which had a crate outside with old textbooks and other assorted stuff. I grabbed some useful resources on accounting and marketing, as well as one of Don's books (Digital Capital).

Don has been writing about things since the late 70s. An …

So in playing with waffle using memcache non-blocking ( async ) sets I noticed a huge spike in get latency from previous runs on my local hardware, take a look:

Memcached set: Block: 0:112195 : Thread : 1091426640 time:14
Memcached set: Block: 0:58107 : Thread : 1091426640 time:26
Memcached set: Block: 0:58105 : Thread : 1091426640 time:25
Memcached set: Block: 0:58103 : Thread : 1091426640 time:29
Memcached set: Block: 0:58075 : Thread : 1091426640 time:25
Memcached set: Block: 0:58073 : Thread : 1091426640 time:28
Memcached set: Block: 0:58069 : Thread : 1091426640 time:38
Memcached get: Block: 0:112547 : Thread : 1082132816 time:4170
Memcached get: Block: 0:58119 : Thread : 1159866704 time:6065
Memcached get: Block: 0:158858 : Thread : 1084148048 time:6462
Memcached get: Block: 0:125743 : Thread : 1159666000 time:7107
Memcached get: Block: 0:219163 : Thread : …

Adam Myatt's uncovered some stuff from our team wiki and our mailing list that I wasn't prepared to talk about publicly (well, more publicly) yet because it hasn't been built yet. You know, I'll believe it when I see it.

But, yes, there is a new New Connection dialog planned with a Test Connection feature. It will also have a "Automatically Reconnect on NB Restart" checkbox that I know I will love to have.

Note that what he's showing is a wireframe/mockup and not the actual dialog. Point taken about the current dialog being too wide, we'll see what we can do about that.

And yes, we are looking at making a help plugin with full MySQL docs and also making MySQL documentation available in code completion for MySQL functions (to start, maybe keywords later), both in the PHP editor and the SQL editor. If we get this to work, it will be very cool

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 …