Note that I’m talking about using these tools in some kind of professional way, and more specifically, I’m talking about using Excel as a database, and using VPS hosting to host “professional” web sites. By “professional”, I mean something other than your personal blog, picture gallery, or other relatively inconsequential site.

Excel is not a database

Here’s the thing: Excel isn’t a database. Most people who don’t work in IT don’t seem to understand this, and they’re deathly afraid to actually communicate with anyone in IT, so they take matters into their own hands, and create problems so big that IT is forced to get involved, because at some point this spreadsheet becomes “critical” to some business function. Then IT gets even more bitter toward the non-IT folk, validating some of the reasons the non-IT folk went that route in the first place, and virtually guaranteeing that they won’t come to the IT …

There are a few small changes in MySQL 5.1.29.
SHOW PROFILESIt was already in a preview, but now SHOW PROFILES is available in 5.1 binaries. As you may recall, it is not active …

Today I bought Intel X25-M, to test its performance and consider if we could replace a HDD used in our slave database of Pathtraq with a solid state disk. Connecting the drive to a test server, I have just run a synthetic benchmark to check its performance for 16KB random access with O_DIRECT flag set, which is pretty similar to the access pattern we see in our daily InnoDB use.

You may know that I created a SQL Reserved Keywords Checker a few years ago. I was just noticing today that a lot of people are searching for the same keywords. Here's a list of the top 10 keywords people searched for using the tool in the past year:.

No more apple logo on my laptop

Originally uploaded by Elliot Murphy

Actuate and Black Duck report on third quarter performance. Red Hat welcomes Microsoft to AMQP. Canonial launches Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition. How to pronounce my surname. And more.

Press releases
Actuate Reports Third Quarter 2008 Financial Results
Actuate

Black Duck Software Continues Phenomenal Growth in Q3 Black Duck

Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition enables mobile, flexible computing for a changing digital world Canonical

Microsoft Joins Working Group for Open Standards Messaging Software Microsoft

…

The InnoDB plugin is now merged into the Drizzle mainline. There is still one weird outstanding bug that I know of. Why is this exciting? The main things found in the plugin that I’m excited about are:

• New compressed table format.
• Adding or dropping indexes can now bypass the table copy
• Information Schema plugins with InnoDB internals data

Not to mention, something tells me that the plugin will be getting more dev attention, and should be easier to track moving forward.

I’ve been doing my best to make the changes in such a way that they could be potentially merged back into the plugin upstream, should Oracle care to. (which I hope they will)

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or timebound ? or don't you have any load on your DB at all ?

I personally don't see many reasons to virtualize your database, apart from the , we plan to start small and scale out, or the we need it now and we don't have the hardware yet , putting your database on a virtual platform where you have to share resources with other virtual machines doesn't really sound like a tempting proposition to me. Small, almost idle databases , maybe. But enterprise production level databases no thnx.

Sheeri Cabral also mentions the above reasons .. and there also .. Enterprise Production use isn't listed.

Databases typically require a good amount of memory , and steady disk access.
So if you are in a production environment with a fairly loaded database, would you want a 4Gb machine with full direct memory access, Or 3.5Gb of virtual …

Recipe for conference talks: add a buzzword like "sharding" and show how mysqlnd helps you with asynchronous queries. Only two PHP database extensions give you asynchronous queries: mysqlnd and Postgres. Slides (OpenOffice) from the International PHP Conference 2008 have the details about the asynchronous query API in ext/mysqli (using mysqlnd).

Mysqlnd Async Ipc2008

View SlideShare …

OmniSQL (a command line tool for DBAs needing to issue ad-hoc queries against sharded data) version 0.0.7 is officially released. Instead of logging in separately to multiple databases to issue the same query, groups of databases can be specified in a configuration file and queries will be automatically issued against all targeted MySQL instances. Let me know [...]