Department expands its biometrics-based border database, which requires all 10 fingerprints, a digital photograph, home address, and other information that privacy advocates have criticized as too intrusive.

In the 19th Jolt Product Excellence Awards, our High Performance MySQL book is listed under the Technical Books category. That is so cool!

How I found out: I don't think O'Reilly or any of the authors were notified of this, but I got a Google alert because someone else referred to it (interesting that the Jolt Awards site itself didn't trigger an alert).

I have to admit that I'm actually "caffeine free" at the moment, but I hope Jolt will forgive me for that ;-)

Peter noted that MySQL itself is not one of the database category finalists. It doesn't have to be, but "traditionally" MySQL tends to always be a strong contender in these things. So I agree that its absence is somewhat noteworthy (in as far as the absence of something can be regarded as news).

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. 

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