Now that the snow is melting and spring is in the air, the SkySQL Team is hitting the road and making the rounds of key industry events, trade shows, and meetups around the globe.  Come meet the team, pick-up a few tips and tricks for using the MySQL database, network with your peers, and learn more about SkySQL’s products and services.  Here are some the events we’ll be at this spring:

BIG Data, A New Horizon for Data Analysis
March 20 - 21, 2012
Cité Internationale Univeritaire de Paris, Paris, France

POSSCON 2012
March 28-29, 2012
Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center, Columbia, South Carolina

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The new dashboard from the CloudStack 3.0 beta.

Over the last year I have been working on the CloudStack Open Source Cloud Computing project. This month we are getting ready to launch CloudStack 3.0 which really raises the bar for cloud computing platforms.  So what is CloudStack ? short It is an infrastructure-as-a-service(IaaS) platform that orchestrates virtualized servers into an elastic compute environment. The project was originally developed by Cloud.com and is now sponsored by Citrix since they acquired Cloud.com in July of 2011.

CloudStack provides multiple methods for interacting with the …

In my day job at SkySQL I work with Drupal as our content management system.  One thing we often need to do is provide a way for people to sign up for events and the like.  One such event is the upcoming SkySQL and MariaDB: Solutions Day for the MySQL® Database and unlike other events we needed to take into account the dietary requirements of those wishing to attend.

For events registration we use the Signup module and use a theme template function to provide a set of standard fields.  The code looks something like this:

function ourtheme_signup_user_form($node) {
  $form = array();
  // If this function is providing any extra fields at all, the following
  // line is …

Dear Kettle fans,

Today I’m really excited to be able to announce a few really important changes to the Pentaho Data Integration landscape. To me, the changes that are being announced today compare favorably to reaching Kettle version 1.0 some 9 years ago, or reaching version 2.0 with plugin support or even open sourcing Kettle itself…

First of all…

Pentaho is again open sourcing an important piece of software.  Today we’re bringing all big data related software to you as open source software.  This includes all currently available capabilities to access HDFS, MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase, the specific VFS drivers we created as well as the ability to execute work inside of Hadoop (MapReduce), Amazon EMR, Pig and so on.

This …

Linux.conf.au this year kicks off next week in Ballarat, just down the road from me.  I'll be there and even have a speaking gig, not in the main conference but in the HA and Distributed Storage mini-conf before the main event.

I'll be talking about MySQL®, the companies that now exist to support it, and the third party products that are starting to proliferate in what appears to be a community effort to address perceived shortcomings in the Oracle offerings.  Many of these offerings are in the HA space, and there have been some pretty amazing developments recently.

So if you want to find some history of Oracle's effect on MySQL's …

SCaLE 10X is the premier Open Source show in Southern California. This year it will feature a MySQL day with top speakers from the MySQL Community. Volunteers run SCaLE and do such an amazing job that they charge only $60 for a full pass. If you are anywhere near Southern California January 20th to the 22nd, you need to be at SCaLE.

SCaLE MySQL Day (Friday) Presentations MySQL Replication (Keith Larson) The MySQL Storage Engines Landscape (Colin Charles) A Closer Look at MySQL Cluster: An Architectural Overview (Max Mether) Playing in the Same Sandbox: MySQL and Oracle (Lynn Ferrante) Care and Feeding of a MySQL Database for Linux Administrators (Dave Stokes) MySQL Update (Dave Stokes)

Solomon Chang is going to present a four hour MySQl Replication Tutorial (but I am unsure of the date) …

A year ago I posted a blog on The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating. (Also Giuseppe wrote about the topic at that time, and Peter Zaitsev covers it in his conference keynotes.) So I've been wondering if it would be good to write an update on the topic now, and in that case what to write.

read more

for some reason, nobody has ever exposed the different rounding methods via mysql’s built-in ROUND() function, so if you want something different, you need to add it via a stored function. the function below is based on the T-SQL version here.

CREATE FUNCTION ROUND_TO_EVEN(val DECIMAL(32,16), places INT)
RETURNS DECIMAL(32,16)
BEGIN
  RETURN IF(ABS(val - TRUNCATE(val, places)) * POWER(10, places + 1) = 5 
            AND NOT CONVERT(TRUNCATE(ABS(val) * POWER(10, places), 0),
                            UNSIGNED) % 2 = 1,
            TRUNCATE(val, places), ROUND(val, places));
END;

use at your own risk. there may be edge conditions where this fails. but this matches up with the python and postgres based system i was crunching data from, except in cases where …

When participating recently in a sprint held at Google to document four free software projects, I thought about what might have prompted Google to invest in this effort. Their willingness to provide a hotel, work space, and food for some thirty participants, along with staff support all week long, demonstrates their commitment to nurturing open source.

Google is one of several companies for which I'll coin the term "closed core." The code on which they build their business and make their money is secret. (And given the enormous infrastructure it takes to provide a search service, opening the source code wouldn't do much to stimulate competition, as I point out in a posting on O'Reilly's radar blog). But they depend on a huge range of free software, ranging from Linux …

Are you a MySQL DBA? Checkout the common_schema project by Oracle Ace Shlomi Noach.

The common_schema is an open source MySQL schema that packs a number of utility views, functions and stored procedures. You can use these utilities to simplify MySQL database administration and development. Shlomi just released revision 178, and I'm happy and proud to be working together with Shlomi on this project.

Among the many cool features created by Shlomi, such as foreach, repeat_exec and exec_file, there are a few %_dependencies procedures I contributed:

• 
  
• …