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:

• 
  
• …

We are proud to share that OSSCube has now entered into a partnership with Cloudera, as the official training partner for Cloudera Developer Training for Apache Hadoop. The pride is, essentially, in the fact that we are the World’s First Cloudera / Hadoop Training Partner.

Cloudera provides enterprises a powerful new data platform built on the popular Apache Hadoop open source software package.  Hadoop is a powerful data management platform for consolidating your data, storing your information inexpensively and reliably and understanding large, heterogeneous data sets in order to better comprehend the data deluge.

OSSCube believes this partnership will deliver first-class Cloudera / Hadoop training to developers and IT professionals to help establish them as a trusted and valuable resource looking to work with Apache Hadoop, along with developing their professional skills.

Immediately after the …

We are proud to share that OSSCube has now entered into a partnership with Cloudera, as the official training partner for Cloudera Developer Training for Apache Hadoop. The pride is, essentially, in the fact that we are the World’s First Cloudera / Hadoop Training Partner.

Cloudera provides enterprises a powerful new data platform built on the popular Apache Hadoop open source software package.  Hadoop is a powerful data management platform for consolidating your data, storing your information inexpensively and reliably and understanding large, heterogeneous data sets in order to better comprehend the data deluge.

OSSCube believes this partnership will deliver first-class Cloudera / Hadoop training to developers and IT professionals to help establish them as a trusted and valuable resource looking to work with Apache Hadoop, along with developing their professional skills.

Immediately after the …

Working with replication, you come across many topologies, some of them sound and established, some of them less so, and some of them still in the realm of the hopeless wishes. I have been working with replication for almost 10 years now, and my wish list grew quite big during this time. In the last 12 months, though, while working at Continuent, some of the topologies that I wanted to work with have moved from the cloud of wishful thinking to the firm land of things that happen. My quest for star replication starts with the most common topology. One master, many slaves.

It looks like a star, with the rays extending from the master to the slaves. This is the basis of most of the replication going on mostly everywhere nowadays, and it has few surprises. Setting aside the …

Dear data integration fans,

I’m a big fan of “appropriate” data modeling prior to doing any data integration work.  For a number of folks out there that means the creation of an Enterprise Data Warehouse model in classical Bill Inmon style.  Others prefer to use modern modeling techniques like Data Vault, created by Dan Linstedt.  However, the largest group data warehouse architects use a technique called dimensional modeling championed by Ralph Kimball.

Using a modeling technique is very important since it brings structure to your data warehouse. …