Brian Aker's Drizzle post was the most interesting news to emerge during OSCON 2008. In case you have been on vacation, Drizzle is a stripped down version of MySQL for horizontally scaled web applications and Cloud Computing. Full-blown SQL databases are often overkill here, a point of view espoused by this blog among others.

It's easy to get excited about Drizzle. Brian, Monty, and others define the problem space very clearly and list some intriguing feature ideas on the Drizzle wiki. Just one example: sharding across multiple nodes, which is key to scaling massive reads and writes. From a technical perspective, it sounds cool.

Still, there's a dark side for …

I don't even remember how I ended up on the Akademy site this morning .. but luckily I did.

Akademy takes place in Sint-Katelijne-Waver , ages a go my grandparents lived there to, that's Belgium if you didn't notice yet.

Now the weird thing is that there seems almost no fuzz about it in the Belgian Foss Community , nobody talks about it.
Also on Upcoming.org the event can't be found. :(

Honestly this worries me, why isn't there more talk about a rather big FOSS event in Belgium, don't we care anymore ? Or do we just not care about KDE. (apart from the people organizing the event ?)
There's lots of Drupal, MySQL and Gnome activity going on in our little country but somehow less KDE. Hopefully Akademy changes that.

Sadly I have already a fully …

Microsoft, making the same mistake that Oracle made a few years ago with its low-end Oracle 10g Express Edition database, has decided that the best way to hold off open source nipping at its heels is to create a portfolio of low-end, cheap products.

It won't work. Microsoft provides ...

In my time at MySQL I've travelled to various cities around New Zealand, but there have not been many open MySQL training courses over the years. Open Query has DBA course days scheduled in Auckland, with the following topics:

• Mon 8 Sep: MySQL Installation, Security and User Management (AUD 475)
• Tue 9 Sep: MySQL Backup and Recovery (AUD 475)
• Wed 10 Sep: MySQL InnoDB Performance Tuning (AUD 575)

Book now for $25 discount (per training day, per person)

This post is SEO bait for people trying to scale MySQL’s write capacity by writing to both servers in master-master replication. The short answer: you can’t do it. It’s impossible.

I keep hearing this line of reasoning: “if I make a MySQL replication ‘cluster’ and move half the writes to machine A and half of them to machine B, I can increase my overall write capacity.” It’s a fallacy. All writes are repeated on both machines: the writes you do on machine A are repeated via replication on machine B, and vice versa. You don’t shield either machine from any of the load.

In addition, doing this introduces a very dangerous side effect: in case of a problem, neither machine has the authoritative data. Neither machine’s data can be trusted, but neither machine’s data can be discarded either. This is a very difficult situation to recover from. Save yourself grief, work, and money. Never write to both …

TOTD #39 explained how to create an Autocomplete widget (server-powered autocompleting of text fields, similar to Google Suggest) using Prototype/Script.aculo.us libraries with NetBeans, GlassFish and MySQL. This Tip Of The Day (TOTD) builds upon that project and shows how same functionality can be achieved using jQuery Library.

1. Use the NetBeans project created in TOTD #39. Right-clicking on the project, select "New", "JSP...", enter the name as "index2" …

I would’ve written sooner about Joomla! Day Malaysia 2008, but I spent most of Sunday cringed in between the bed and the toilet. Here are a bunch of quick notes I took at the event, with some thoughts tacked on to it.

Overall impressions? It was good for a Joomla! beginner. While I would consider myself a Joomla! beginner, I’ve seen many a CMS and maybe am a tad bit jaded. There is a great amount of interest in Joomla! - about 200 people registered for a paid for event (not cheap either - RM70 for a Joomla! forum member, and RM150 for regular visitors). So there’s definitely money to be made in Joomla! and CMSes in general.

Location? This is the first time I’ve been to the rather infamous Cititel hotel, tacked to MidValley. Held at the 5th floor, I noticed that people were allowed to smoke within the corridors. I consider this a …

Yesterday I had lunch with Sriram Rao, lead developer of the KFS project and compared notes about distributed databases.

KFS is basically a GFS-style clone developed at Kosmix and then released as open source.

Basically, a no-BS distributed filesystem implemented from the ground up in C++ to scale and actually get real work done. KFS is running on a 200 node cluster within Kosmix. I just found out that it’s deployed in a 700 node cluster at Quantcast.

What’s really cool is that he just left Kosmix (great and smart guys btw) to work on KFS full time at Quantcast extending KFS.

This is a win for both companies. The guy leaves Kosmix and can literally keep working on the same source code! OSS FTW!

Quantcast is obviously …

I have my first SQL Server project lined up. So I am just interested in hearing some stories from the trenches form people that have been there already. How does PHP and SQL Server 2005 work out together? How do they work out together with *nix or Linux specifically? How do they work together with a Mac (since all the developers on the projects use Macs)? What are the limitations?

I heard some issues with NCHAR's when going through FreeTDS. Since this is a swiss client, we will of course have to make the application localized in German, Italien and French. What extensions are you using? Is PDO_DBLIB worth a look or should one better stick to ext/mssql? I do not envision I am going to do ueberfancy things. Well looking through the requirements we will have to read a PDF from the server. We will also make extensive use of FULLTEXT …

I have my first SQL Server project lined up. So I am just interested in hearing some stories from the trenches form people that have been there already. How does PHP and SQL Server 2005 work out together? How do they work out together with *nix or Linux specifically? How do they work together with a Mac (since all the developers on the projects use Macs)? What are the limitations?

I heard some issues with NCHAR's when going through FreeTDS. Since this is a swiss client, we will of course have to make the application localized in German, Italien and French. What extensions are you using? Is PDO_DBLIB worth a look or should one better stick to ext/mssql? I do not envision I am going to do ueberfancy things. Well looking through the requirements we will have to read a PDF from the server. We will also make extensive use of FULLTEXT …