Winners of the Developer.com Product of the Year 2009 have been announced and you won’t be surprised to know..

NetBeans is certainly back with a bang ! We won FIVE awards out of TWELVE..

Here’s an excerpt from the announcement,

In the past due to close races, runner ups were also recognized. This year there were no close calls. Each winner won its category with a respectable margin.

In the case of Java Tools the winner had almost three times the votes of the others finalists in the category combined.

It is no surprise that the Development Tool category received the most votes. The second most popular category continues to be Open Source. Looking back …

There's a lot to be said that's positive about our declining economy. (Yeah, it's an odd beginning. But hang in there with me.) In the publishing industry, for example, we're having to be a lot more careful about what products we release. We're also having to be more efficient in our products; people want more for less.

As part of that, we've been doing a lot of thinking about non-book products. O'Reilly has offered books through Safari for a long time, and there's certainly the O'Reilly School of Technology. But what about folks that want traditional book topics, like JavaScript or PHP & MySQL, in a non-book form? These people don't necessarily want or need course credits, but they expect more than a PDF-style view of a book.

When you start to think about effective learning in an online medium, one the very first …

Working with localized data is one of the widespread problem our users encounter with. We try to cover the following questions in this article:

• How MySQL server works with textual data
• How to correctly set encoding when working with dbForge Studio for MySQL and dbForge Fusion for MySQL
• Widespread errors when working with textual data

Note: In the article examples, cp1251 is set as Windows code page*.

How MySQL server works with different character sets

Server has the following options for working with data with different character sets: character_set_client, character_set_connection, and character_set_results. They are set at the server side when installing MySQL server. Default settings are latin1. The set names command changes all the three options for your session. We will call this option set the connection character set or …

Microsoft released Windows 7 Beta 1 - the next major version of Vista, download here. There are tons of improvments mostly centered around making the content easily & intuitively accessible. But hey, Mac OSX already serves that purpose well for quite some time ;-)

But I still want to make sure that our Rails stack (NetBeans, GlassFish, and MySQL) work fine on it. And it very well do, without any issues, as you'll realize at the end of this blog :)

Lets first get started with installing Windows 7 Beta as a Virtual Box image. Few points to note here:

• Only IE can be used for downloading …

Now that the core of Gearman is rewritten in C, I’ve started working on a new module to provide persistent queues and queue replication. The current Gearman implementation is fine when the jobs can be unreliable, but there are many cases when we want to guarantee that jobs get run.

Because Gearman is such a flexible system, there are a couple of places where we can plug in a persistent queue and/or replication. Now, in most cases, these features are only going to be useful for background jobs since failed foreground jobs can be detected and restarted by a client. Many applications using Gearman want to just throw a job in the queue and go back to doing something else, not caring when it gets done. Enter persistent queues. It may also be the case that a job should be run multiple times, mot likely on a separate set of servers for backup and geographic redundancy. I’m currently …

Wheel of protocol, turn turn turn.
Tell us the lesson that we should learn. (with apologies to the original source)

Writing a book comes with many challenges. For me, writing a MySQL book for MySQL beginners, who may or may not be database beginners, has fed my compulsion to research and test bizarre interactions.

Today’s lesson is on what protocol is used when connecting to a local mysqld instance on a non-Windows machine. The TCP/IP protocol is used by default when connecting on a Windows machine, and connecting from any operating system to a non-local mysqld instance. I am assuming the connections are being made by a command line client such as mysql, mysqladmin or mysqldump. Connections made via …

#mysql isn’t too fair to include, as it’s really about users, not dev. #mysql-ndb is there because i heart ndb.

Oh, and linux.conf.au is there because it’s *awesome* and you should go.

Totally unscientific due to i’m only taking a sample once and whatever… but it kinda interests me…

Despite being standard Innodb feature forever Insert Buffers remains some kind of mysterious thing for a lot of people, so let me try to explain thing a little bit.

Innodb uses insert buffer to "cheat" and not to update index leaf pages when at once but "buffer" such updates so several updates to the same page can be performed with single sweep. Insert buffer only can work for non-unique keys because until the merge is performed it is impossible to check if the value is unique.

Insert buffer is allocated in the Innodb system table space. Even though it is called "buffer" similar to "doublewrite buffer" it is really the space in the tablepace. Though it can be cached in the buffer pool same as other pages. This property allows insert buffer to survive transaction commits and even MySQL restarts. Really it may take weeks before the given index page is merged, though usually it is much sooner than that.

There …

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

Screen Profiles

kirland announced that he uploaded a new version of the screen-profiles package to jaunty. Versions for hardy and intrepid are also available from his PPA. He stated that it was totally awesome now and posted a screenshot. He is looking for more testers.

ACTION: kirkland to write a blog post about screen-profile

SRU for ebox

sommer reported that all the bugs had been updated and submitted to the motu-sru team. zul uploaded relevant packages to intrepid-proposed which are waiting for the ACK from the motu-sru team.

…

...Beta-4 to be precise. Downloads are available on the Continuent Forge. You can get more information about Tungsten in general from our community pages.

The Beta-4 build has a number of nice improvements. The best new feature is a utility to look and manage at events in the transaction history log. It's our version of mysqlbinlog but without any funny options to look at row updates.

Speaking of row updates, we now support all standard datatypes used in MySQL 5.1 row events. Error handling now works on the "WALL-E model"--if there's a serious error the Replicator goes into a restartable state called OFFLINE:ERROR and waits for you to bring it back on-line. Recovering from …