Laurel Ruma (@laurelatoreilly) just did a quick census of the number of O'Reilly employees on twitter. She came up with 74 twitter accounts out of about 300 employees worldwide, plus five people who were controlling departmental or project-based O'Reilly twitter accounts like the following:

Official O'Reilly account:
@oreillymedia: The top level O'Reilly Media site.


@oreilly_verlag: O'Reilly Germany

Number of O'Reilly products or divisions on Twitter: 8


@make: Make: Magazine and makezine blog

@craft: Craft: Magazine and craftzine blog
…

(This is a purely technical or at least semi-technical post about a database and Web20 architecural issue.)

I just noticed about 5-10 status updates from my friends on Facebook are duplicated. Reading from the top I get to "17 hours ago" and then it restarts with duplicate status update messages from "5 hours ago".

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Every hour, we saw the diskspace on our root partition go up from 45 %  to 90 % and come back to 45 %. Initially thought mysql was processing some temp tables and in the next hour we kept watching the temp location. In terms of files / diskspace usage using “du / ls” nothing changed. But lsof provided an interesting output.

Output 1 :

mysqld    31719   mysql    6u   REG                8,1          0   149240 /var/tmp/ibOLLuRa (deleted)
mysqld    31719   mysql    7u   REG                8,1        102   149243 /var/tmp/ibNuSvI9 (deleted)
mysqld    …

Lots of blogs list a bunch of stuff that happened in the year just past, and I have done a year-in-review post before, but in looking back at posts on this blog and elsewhere, what strikes me most is not the big achievements that took place in technology in 2008, but rather the questions that remain unanswered. So much got started in 2008 — I’m really excited to see what happens with it all in 2009!

Cloud Computing

Technically, the various utility or ‘cloud’ computing initiatives started prior to 2008, but in my observation, they gained more traction in 2008 than at any other time. At the beginning of 2008, I was using Amazon’s S3, and testing to expand into more wide use of EC2 during my time as Technology Director for AddThis.com (pre-buyout). I was also investigating tons of other technologies that take different approaches to the higher-level problem these things all try to solve: owning, and housing (and …

2008 is nearly over, and it's time to take a look at what happened over the year, as well as to take a peek at the the coming 2009. A year ago I made a guess that social networking services would open up and start sharing their profiles – well, practically everyone but Facebook are doing some of that, and Facebook is trying to get everyone to depend on them – not that “create dependency” isn't a part of Google's and MySpace's plan, too. Unfortunately, we haven't yet found a meaningful way for Habbo to participate in this festival, due to differences in demographies, interest areas, and the priority of running a profitable business, instead. Still looking for that solution, though.

So it’s that time of year again when everyone puts out their predictions for the year ahead.  I think predictions are a bit of a waste of time because to be interesting predictions have to be big, but a year really isn’t all that long so actual changes over the course of 2009 are likely to be just small progressions.  So instead I have been thinking about the top issues that we face heading into 2009 and here is my Top 10 list for issues in Data Management.  In this post I avoid offering solutions to these issues, while I have several ideas on solutions these can be the subject of subsequent posts.

10 - Limits on Scalability

While scalability is on my list it is at number 10 because against popular belief, scalability is only an issue for a very small number of data based applications.  Almost all data based applications in use today can be scaled without major issue by increasing the underlying …

« Post 1 | This is the 2nd post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series. | Post 3 »

“When a job went wrong, you went back to the beginning. And this is where we got the job. So it’s the beginning, and I’m staying till Vizzini comes.” — Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride Screenplay by William Goldman

Being a part of Mozilla over the last three years has been a humbling experience.

When I started with the project, I imagined great personal success. Like a happy little worker bee flitting from Free Software flower to Free Software flower, I would cross-pollinate Mozilla with PHP’s community savvy and pragmatism, MySQL’s  disruptive …

What's new, in a nutshell: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-nutshell.html.

Release notes: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/news-5-1-x.html (In the video, it's the page entitled "Changes in release 5.1.x").

And yes, very early on (at about 2 minutes in) I talk about my take on Monty's controversial post at http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2008/11/oops-we-did-it-again-mysql-51-released.html

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I'm a Sales Engineer, I admit it. This blog is mostly about technical stuff, but I felt I should write a not-so-technical post for once. For a techie like myself, and to someone else out there, even the Sales Engineer title may look weird. Frankly Sun doesn't have Sales Engineers, they have System Engineers, which is the same thing. Not. Not at all, it is something different. But I insist on being a Sales Engineer.

I have been an SE (as in Sales Engineer) on and off (mostly on) for a good 20+ years now, more or less always in the database industry (a short term with security software is the exception). I learnt the SE trade at another RDBMS company in the 1980's. I had joined them as Support Engineer, having previously been a developer. I learnt SQL the hard way, by using it. I learnt to use indexes by having not used indexes, realising things were slow, looked at the syntax and found the word INDEX which sounded like something that …

I’ve always been more of a GNOME guy, and when running Linux, I use Rhythmbox to play my music. However, Amarok 2.0 might just change that.

They’ve chosen their database - it is none other than MySQL. The release notes state:

Some features, such as the player window or support for databases other than MySQL, have been removed because either they posed insurmountable programming problems, or they didn’t fit our design decisions about how to distinguish Amarok in a saturated market of music players.

If you want to know why the decision was made, read MySQL in Amarok 2 - The Reality. It has a lot to do with the fact that MySQL can be embedded, and performs well. Its a generally useful read to see …