The Green Party of Canada has included Open Source Software in its election platform. How long until a major North American party follows suit? READ MORE

Listening to Joe Stump speak at NYC Web 2.0 Expo about scaling digg.

A few notes as Joe is talking.

When scaling needs go up, normalization becomes less likely. Data often needs to be denormalized to spread it around.

Keep cache entries forever and explicitly expire. You may have some things that get used all the time, others that are used less frequently but that should still be left around until they get purged for space reasons instead of time.

MemcachedDB replaced MySQL in their "Green" badges project. Needed 3,000+ writes per second starting with 5 terrabytes of data growing at 7GB per day.

They are building IDDB, which has elastic partitions, eventual consistency, and variable partition types. Will continue developing and then hopefully open source it in a year or so.

Hi all,
So you may have been thinking that maybe calling something "MyBS" was not such a great marketing idea. Even as a developer I have to admit that it isn't the best name abbreviation to have. So we decided to change it. We considered calling it the "BLOB Streaming Engine" but that resulted in the abbreviation "BSE" which also isn't so great. What we have finally settled on is the "PrimeBase Media Stream" engine or "PBMS" which I think is fairly safe.
We have also relocated the source for PBMS from sourceforge  onto LaunchPad where you can find it at: https://code.launchpad.net/pbms

We’re proud to announce that we’ve just uploaded the first Linux-Alpha build for upcoming MySQL Workbench 5.1 for everyone to try. But beware, it’s an early Alpha release! It includes basic functionality like loading/saving Models, import/export SQL files and a set of basic editors to model your data-structures. A couple of features are still missing and the UI from a lot of things is not done yet but its purpose is to give you a chance to experience how WB will look and feel on your Linux Desktop.

We’re releasing this as a source package and in binary form compiled on Ubuntu 8.04. There’s a build-instructions
page available for Ubuntu as well. For later releases we’ll be providing more intructions/binary packages
for several more distributions.

MySQL Workbench OSS 5.1 Alpha 1 - Linux

Source Tar Ball

…

We are looking at the MySQL University session list at the moment and would like to see some more topics and ideas for future sessions.

The original purpose of MySQL University sessions has been to cover some technical content on the internals of MySQL, but we’re looking into spreading out and looking in to more general areas.

For example, how about these for some ideas on potential sessions:

• How to start a local MySQL user group
• Using MySQL with different connectors
• Using MySQL in different applications (including programming and/or end-user applications)
• Making the best of MySQL on different platforms (our recent MySQL/Solaris session is an example)

These are just off the topic of my head, so don’t take these as hard list, I’m sure you can come up with some better ideas than …

Are you a user of Microsoft Windows? Are you a user of a non-licensed copy of Microsoft Windows? Does it happen to be Windows XP Professional? Have you seen “blackouts“?

Apparently, from about the end of last month (August 27 2008, to be precise), users of pirated copies of Microsoft Windows XP Professional that also happen to be connected to the Internet will see their screens go black, and have no icons visible.

The esteemed folk at Microsoft Malaysia seem to think that there are 8.6 million users of Windows XP Professional in Malaysia (seems like a huge number, considering the population), and about three million will suffer from these “blackouts”. Only 35% of Windows XP Professional users are pirates?

Its a most interesting tactic. Annoy the user by allowing them to change their …

Sorry for the slight delay in publishing the slide decks from my tutorial and session at ZendCon this past Monday and Tuesday. A short flight to Ríga, Latvia, got in the way.

Below are the Open Office Impress and PDF versions of the slide decks for Legend of Drunken Query Master and Join-fu for ZendCon. Enjoy.

Legend of Drunken Query Master: The Apprentice's Journey   Open Office Impress slides
  PDF slides

Join-fu: The Art of SQL - ZendCon 2008    …

It’s getting there. The tree should now pretty much always compile, and (at least mostly) doesn’t break anything on other platforms. It even works on win32… at least basic functionality. There will be monsters (bugs.. but scarier, becuase it’s win32).

First, the announcement. On September 21st at 11:30am our VP of engineering Paddy Sreenivasan will talk at OpenSolaris Storage Summit in Santa Clara about Open Source backup software Amanda for OpenSolaris.

Now the news. Sun just published Sun Fire x4540 as Backup Server for Amanda Enterprise backup software quick-start guide on BigAdmin system administration portal. The guide provides an introduction to configuring the Sun Fire X4540 server as a backup server for backup to disk. The specific examples for configuring the zpool and ZFS file systems on the Solaris 10 illustrate how easy it is to provision high-capacity storage for backup to disk. The Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL quick-start …