I’ve been doing a little reporting project, and I’ve been searching around for quite some time for a good graphing and charting solution for general-purpose use. I had come across ReportLab before, but it just looked so huge and convoluted to me, given the simplicity of what I wanted at the time, that I moved on. This time was different.

This time I needed a lot of the capabilities of ReportLab. I needed to generate PDFs (this is not a web-based project), I needed to generate charts, and I wanted the reports I was generating to contain various types of text objects in addition to the charts and such.

I took the cliff-dive into the depths of the ReportLab documentation. I discovered three things:

1. There is quite a lot of documentation
2. ReportLab is quite a capable library
3. The documentation actually defies the simplicity of the library.

It’s a decent bit easier than it …

I spoke yesterday with Mike Olson and Amr Awadallah about their new startup, and the appliance and BI markets. Mike is the former CEO of Sleepycat, and Amr was until recently a VP of engineering at Yahoo focused on BI for search. They’re joined by Christophe Bisciglia from Google and Jeff Hammerbacher, previously manager of Facebook's data team where Hive was developed.

They and several other founders created Cloudera to provide commercial support for Hadoop, an open source implementation of map-reduce (used for programatically processing large volumes of data on a compute cluster).

They said there are enough instances of companies using Hadoop in a commercial context that they believe there’s a market for commercial support on both internal installations and on Amazon’s …

I was reading Savio Rodrigues’ post, The economy and open source, in which he responds to Andrew Keen’s thoughts that a bad economy will see fewer open source contributions.

Now, Keen feels that people will contribute less during bad financial times:

The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

I know several volunteer open source developers — I consider this to be a “role” that someone plays. A person may be *employed* as an open source developer (say, working at Sun on …

How will today's tough economy impact open source software contributions by third-party developers? READ MORE

What is the future of Drizzle? What sort of assumptions are you making?

Hardware

On the hardware front I get a lot of distance saying "the future is 64bit, multi-core, and runs on SSD". This is a pretty shallow answer, and is pretty obvious to most everyone. It suits a sound bite but it is not really that revolutionary of a thought. To me the real question is "how do we use them".

64bit means you have to change the way you code. Memory is now flat for the foreseeable future. Never focus on how to map around 32bit issues and always assume you have a large, flat, memory space available. Spend zero time thinking about 32bit.

If you are thinking "multi-core" then think about it massively. Right now adoption is at the 16 core point, which means that if you are developing software today, you need to be thinking about multiples of 16. I …

Hey, all. Petr Pisl, the technical lead for PHP support in NetBeans, and I will be giving a MySQL University webinar tomorrow entitled "Working With PHP and MySQL in NetBeans." We'll be demonstrating the PHP and database tooling features available in NetBeans.

The webinar is live, and you can ask questions via a chat-based interface. It's at 9:00 am San Francisco time, you can see what that is in your local time here.

The webinar is limited to 20 people, so it will be first come, first serve. Apologies about the small "classroom" size -- MySQL University just started using …

On a large data migration project that I am currently spearheading, we have a large installed userbase of over 2 million users running on a social networking engine. The schema has been redesigned from scratch, and code is being written to match the new schema, using the all-powerful MySQL database as the system to manage all that data.

Since this social network is global, we need good and reliable location information. The current location model is flawed and full of holes, so we have chosen AssemblySys‘ data to replace it.

We are not using AssemblySys’ schema, as we’ve rolled our own. I’ve designed our new schema to be hierarchial in nature, treating all locations on the planet as ‘nodes’ with a tree relationship, with “Earth” being the parent of all nodes. This model allows us to account for all countries and their idiosyncratic …

I'm pleased to announce the release of DBD::mysql 4.009! A couple fixes are included with this release:

* Fix to re-enable TAKE_IMP_DATA_VERSION. Still have to ensure DBI version 1.607 or higher in the test suite (Daniel Frett, myself)
* Fix to escaped single quotes throwing off bind param detection. Patch from Zhurs (zhurs@yandex.ru -- Spasibo!), new test modified to use Test::More (myself)

Thanks/Spasibo for the help from Daniel Frett and Zhurs as well as all those who report bugs!

The file:

The uploaded file

DBD-mysql-4.009.tar.gz

has entered CPAN as

file: $CPAN/authors/id/C/CA/CAPTTOFU/DBD-mysql-4.009.tar.gz
size: 125168 bytes
md5: 1115dcc2560191bfaed09baf6aa7e183

Found at:

…

Today, the site was officially launched!

Soon, we will make the beta version of Jet Profiler for MySQL available to selected users! Contact us if you are interested.


Comments

Just finished up O’Reilly’s Backup & Recovery by W. Curtis Preston.  The title is wide-reaching, covering backups at the operating system as well as on all the popular database platforms, including Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, Sybase, SQL Server and DB2.  Preston has an amazing grasp of a spectrum of technologies and platforms, and as an Oracle & MySQL DBA myself, I’d use this as my backup reference text any day.

I’ve posted my review of Backup and Recovery over at Amazon.