Wikimedia's Wikipedia.org is one of the most visited websites approaching 250 million unique visitors per month.  New content is pushed in by the over 100,000 volunteers who edit the articles.  This announcement "Wikimedia Selects Sun Microsystems to Enhance Multimedia Experience..." describes how users can now upload large video files using the servers and open storage environment provided by Sun and other open source organizations.

The solution is built up in an open source paradise:  MySQL, Apache, Sun's Open Storage infrastructure all on Sun's X4500 and X4150 Servers connected to Sun StorageTek arrays.

An article by …

Dear MySQL fans, 

we have done many webinars in these months with good attendance. While thanking everyone for participating, it's my pleasure to announce that now everything has been published and available on demand. You can download a webinar and watch it offline in case you have missed it or you like to view it again. Have a look at http://www-it.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/

See you soon! 

Today there was a question on the Freenode MySQL channel about a classical problem: Rows holding group-wise maximum of a column. This is a problem that I keep encountering every so often, so I thought I would write up something about it.

A good example of the problem is a table like the following holding versioned objects:

CREATE TABLE object_versions (
  object_id INT NOT NULL,
  version INT NOT NULL,
  data VARCHAR(1000),
  PRIMARY KEY(object_id, version)
) ENGINE=InnoDB

Now it is easy to get the latest version for an object:

SELECT data FROM object_versions WHERE object_id = ? ORDER BY version DESC LIMIT 1

The query will even be very fast as it can use the index to directly fetch the right row:

mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT data FROM object_versions
WHERE object_id = 42 ORDER BY version DESC …

If you are a Drupal user and have been wanting to develop Facebook Applications using Facebook APIs or Facebook Connect, there is Good News. Dave Cohen just released a Drupal for Facebook  add-on module for Drupal which allows Drupal sites to integrate with Facebook, and cutting-edge Facebook Applications to be built on top of Drupal. I attended a Drupal meetup yesterday where Dave walked us through how to build Drupal Apps for Facebook and it was very clear that Dave has put in tremdous amount of work and due diligence to make it easy for rest of the community to easily plug into Facebook. Try it out!

Sun is offering Drupal/Open …

I write emails, blog pages, Wiki pages. I create spreadsheets, presentations and web pages. I even do some detailed formatting of photo books and I layout text in detail with graphic programs or publishing tools.

But what I find myself doing more and more seldom is writing standalone documents.

I know the world is full of .docs, and I was just reminded of that, when talking to Marino Marcich, the head of the ODF Alliance, in Ankara, Turkey. I fully symphatise with the usage of an open document format, where there is true openness, true choice and true competition between software suppliers — and not a monopoly based on format changes at the whim of individual companies.

However, my thinking is that the use of classical “Word processing” is a shrinking use case. I may …

I’ve been using Google Reader since it was created. I really love the *idea* of Google Reader. I like that scrolling through the posts marks them as read. I like that you can toggle between list and expanded views of the posts. I like that you can search within a feed or across all feeds (though selecting multiple specific feeds would be great).

All of that said, I’d like to explore other avenues, because I don’t like that there’s, like, zero flexibility in how the Google Reader interface is configured. My problem starts with large fonts…

I use relatively large fonts. If you increase the font twice up from the default size in firefox on a mac (using the cmd-+ keystroke, twice), and you have more than just a couple of feeds, you wind up with this really horrible side pane with the bottom half of it requiring a scroll bar, and the text wraps, and it just looks terrible. What makes this really REALLY REALLY …

There have been plenty of blog entries and writings about the MySQL Query Analyzer, for what I think are good reasons. Labeling it a potential Killer App, causing many MySQL users to become paying Sun customers, may be a daring thing. However, the Query Analyzer might very well have what it takes. The key benefit of it is that it identifies the source of performance bottlenecks. In that sense, one could perhaps instead call it a profiler, as it analyses the set of all queries going on, as opposed to an individual one. One person to whom I described it said “ah, so …

This is the 124th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome.

Here’s what the Oracle blogosphere had to offer. On Oracle and more, Amardeep Sidhu announces the birth of the North India Oracle Users Group. Not too far away, on the AskDba.org Weblog gets the word out about a seminar by Tom Kyte on 18th December in Bangalore, arranged by the All India Oracle User Group.

Vivek Sharma examined …

Brian, Monty, Stewart, Lee and myself sat down yesterday and fleshed out the blueprint tasks that we are targeting for the Cirrus milestone. This marks the first time we've made a concerted effort to really determine the tasks which are of essential importance in moving towards Drizzle's first release. Before I detail some of the major tasks, I'd like to make a quick recognition of our contributor community.

Although the MySQL server does have community contributions in some of the releases, the Cirrus milestone marks something of a new day in …

Sun updates MySQL Enterprise. The Microsoft/Novell deal is two years old. Nuxeo and Boxee get funding. Red Hat’s CEO on open source in a downturn. Steve Ballmer as a glove puppet. And more.

Press releases
Sun Enhances MySQL Enterprise With New Query Analyzer Tool to Boost Database Application Performance Sun Microsystems

Microsoft and Novell Mark Two Years of Interoperability Progress Microsoft

Nuxeo secures 2 million Euros and strengthens its board of directors and corporate governance Nuxeo

…