James Kobelius writes in Network World how the need for scalable real-time business intelligence will create a convergence of technologies centered on database virtualization:
"Real-time is the most exciting new frontier in business intelligence, and virtualization will facilitate low-latency analytics more powerfully than traditional approaches. Database virtualization will enable real-time business intelligence through a policy-driven, latency-agile, distributed-caching memory grid that permeates an infrastructure at all levels.

As this new approach takes hold, it will provide a convergence architecture for diverse approaches to real-time business intelligence, such as trickle-feed extract transform load (ETL), changed-data capture (CDC), event-stream processing and data federation. Traditionally deployed as stovepipe …

I was trying to check out the new Zabbix beta's when I ran into a couple of problems. Mostly missing dependencies but also some bugs.

The big troubles start when trying to install the frontent.
It seems like php code shipped in the last release might well work when you are upgrading but it fails when you are doing a fresh install. As I never got a Setup Wizard.

The clue is to get the most recent code from their SVN repo svn co svn://svn.zabbix.com/trunk , that actually allows you to run the setup wizard.

If you are installing the latest RPM's they are also not really requiring all the dependencies you need to run the frontend.

yum/apt-get install php-bcmath php-pear

Will get you a step further.

Another thing is the new password policy.. it seems the Admin/blank is gone.
I have no clue what the new password is but you are encouraged to set it yourselve in the mysql database

Having a status column is very common in databases today. It can be used to denote a user status: CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `user` ( `user_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment, `email` varchar(32) NOT NULL, `pw_hash` char(40) NOT NULL COLLATE latin1_general_cs, `status` enum('PENDING', 'ACTIVE', 'DISABLED') default 'PENDING', `date_created` timestamp NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, PRIMARY KEY (`user_id`), UNIQUE KEY `idx_email` (`email`) ); or user-uploaded [...]

A lot of people have been waiting for this a long time - so I am very happy to announce that we will publish the first Alpha that runs natively on Linux end of September. We will release generic binaries and the 5.1 source tarball including everything that is needed to build yourself.

This will not be a feature-complete beta release yet, but we are trying to get the basic functionality working so everybody can start modeling right away. We spent most of the last few months working on updating the Back-End implementation to use the GRTv4 and to prepare our platform-independent mForms. I expect the actual Front-End port to make good progress.

Let me share two screenshots I just made on Ubuntu, our Linux distro of choice. The first one shows the MySQL Model page. The Sakila demo model has been loaded.

The second …

GROUP_CONCAT() function is used to concatenate column values into a single string. It is very useful if you would otherwise perform a lookup of many row and then concatenate them on the client end.

For example if you query:

mysql> SELECT Language FROM CountryLanguage WHERE CountryCode = 'THA';

It outputs:

To concatenate the values into a single string, you query:

mysql> SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(Language) As Languages FROM CountryLanguage WHERE CountryCode = 'THA';

Then the output will be:

Although the awareness of open source appears low, the lack of Internet-based apps poses an opportunity to bolster open source penetration READ MORE

I was trying to check out the new Zabbix beta's when I ran into a couple of problems. Mostly missing dependencies but also some bugs.

The big troubles start when trying to install the frontent.
It seems like php code shipped in the last release might well work when you are upgrading but it fails when you are doing a fresh install. As I never got a Setup Wizard.

The clue is to get the most recent code from their SVN repo svn co svn://svn.zabbix.com/trunk , that actually allows you to run the setup wizard.

If you are installing the latest RPM's they are also not really requiring all the dependencies you need to run the frontend.

yum/apt-get install php-bcmath php-pear

Will get you a step further.

Another thing is the new password policy.. it seems the Admin/blank is gone.
I have no clue what the new password is but you are encouraged to set it yourselve in the mysql database

Short Version: You can find a fantastic video here about bundling customized AMIs and registering them with Amazon so that you can launch as many instances of your new AMI as you want. The video is so good that I don’t bother writing out the steps to do the bundling (it would be pretty darn long). These are some notes about launching an AMI, customizing it, and mounting an EBS volume to it (the video linked above doesn’t cover EBS). Also, check out the ElasticFox tool which is a very good GUI for doing simple EC2 operations. Nice if you’re just getting started or doing some simple tests.

There are two ways you can go about creating a custom machine image (AMI) for use with Amazon EC2: You can create an image locally by dd’ing to a file, mounting it with “-o loop” creating a filesystem on it, …

I was surprised to find yesterday when using MySQL 5.1.26-rc with a client I’m recommending 5.1 to, some information not seen in the EXPLAIN plan before while reviewing SQL Statements.

Using join buffer

+----+-------------+-------+--------+---------------+--------------+---------+------------------------+-------+----------------------------------------------+
| id | select_type | table | type   | possible_keys | key          | key_len | ref                    | rows  | Extra                                        |
+----+-------------+-------+--------+---------------+--------------+---------+------------------------+-------+----------------------------------------------+
|  1 | SIMPLE      | lr    | ALL    | NULL          | NULL         | NULL    | NULL                   |  1084 | Using where; Using temporary; Using filesort |
|  1 | SIMPLE      | ca    | ref    | update_check  | update_check | 4       | XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX      |     4 | Using …

I came across the OStatic Free hosting service that provide Solaris + Glassfish (Java Container) + MySQL.

They offer “Now you can get free Web hosting on Cloud Computing environment free of charge for up to 12 months. ”

The catch “accumulate 400 Points for participating on the site“.

A rather novel approach, you get 100 points for registering, but then only 5-15 points per task. The equates to approximately at least 30 tasks you need to perform, such as answering a question, or reviewing somebodies application. That seems like a lot of work?

In this case, Free has definitely a cost and time factor to consider.