From 7:30 - 8:30 pm tonight, Wed. June 25th, in the Berkeley room of the Sheraton Boston, I will be hosting a Birds of a Feather conversation entitled “Pros and Cons of Managed Services”. This will go beyond MySQL and even beyond remote database management, and just deal with the overall pros and cons.

Come, share your good and bad experiences, and discuss why managed services may or may not be appropriate for your situation. I will try to take notes at the BoF.

(Note: I have no idea if they check badges for Birds of a Feather sessions or not)

This post is a follow-up to my talk at JavaDeus 2008 where I showed how you can make use of Lucene inside of MySQL using an experimental branch and some triggers and stored procedures.

Since the process is not entirely obvious and the branch is very experimental, I thought it would be a nice thing to put it online. It’s pretty amazing with how little code (in Java and otherwise) you can implement a working full-text search engine that simply doesn’t get into your way :)

Note: Be advised that the MySQL server we will build is likely to crash at times. Do not use it in production! And of course, always have a safe backup of important data.

This first part will cover the basics on how the get the necessary foundation in place, configuring the server and …

I was working on a problem today and I asked myself a question that I keep find myself coming back to.

For the web, we will keep this in context, do we really need to concern ourselves about supporting anything other then UTF8?

For example here is a partial list of character sets MySQL supports:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-mysql.html

What do I find when I visit web shops?

The ones who either do not know anything about character sets, or do not care, just keep with whatever the default MySQL shipped with.

Otherwise? It is UTF8.

Unless of course they do not know, but it turned out it did matter. Those folks are typically sweating out a future where they know they will be altering all of their tables.

The question remains though, …

Baron Schwartz wrote a neat article on MySQL’s pager command yesterday. As a followup, I thought I would post what I use as my default PAGER environmental variable. It simply substitutes mk-visual-explain for MySQL’s EXPLAIN command and uses less if the output is taller than your current terminal window (note, this currently [...]

This post is a follow-up to my talk at JavaDeus 2008 where I showed how you can make use of Lucene inside of MySQL using an experimental branch and some triggers and stored procedures.

Since the process is not entirely obvious and the branch is very experimental, I thought it would be a nice thing to put it online. It’s pretty amazing with how little code (in Java and otherwise) you can implement a working full-text search engine that simply doesn’t get into your way :)

Note: Be advised that the MySQL server we will build is likely to crash at times. Do not use it in production! And of course, always have a safe backup of important data.

This first part will cover the basics on how the get the necessary foundation in place, configuring the server and …

This post is a follow-up to my talk at JavaDeus 2008 where I showed how you can make use of Lucene inside of MySQL using an experimental branch and some triggers and stored procedures.

Since the process is not entirely obvious and the branch is very experimental, I thought it would be a nice thing to put it online. It’s pretty amazing with how little code (in Java and otherwise) you can implement a working full-text search engine that simply doesn’t get into your way :)

Note: Be advised that the MySQL server we will build is likely to crash at times. Do not use it in production! And of course, always have a safe backup of important data.

This first part will cover the basics on how the get the necessary foundation in place, configuring the server and …

Alright! Thanks to my mentor Brian I now have a semi-clean build procedure in place.
I just type 'make' and it compiles both libmemcached and mysql together nicely.

The previous setup was rather hackish and involved some bash scripts I'm not proud of, but it worked. I suppose since Google sent me a book on how to write Beautiful Code, I should really be writing code accordingly.

Just two weeks until 'midterm review' ... *panics*
I feel like I am making good progress despite my lack of time.
I'd really like to have something functional in the next two weeks, bugs are inevitable.
My mentor said that it was important to find my "Hello World!" as he put it when working on this project. I'm not sure how to define that though, it compiles, it runs, it connects to memcached, but is that Hello World worthy enough or am I worrying too much?

I'm going to stick to my goal of trying to …

When you are using pyramid replication scheme – it could be useful to have n+1 intermediate servers. The idea is to have extra bandwidth in case one of those intermediate slaves fails. For example, if you have 3 intermediate slaves named A,B and C and you have 18 end slaves named 1-18: The idea would […]

One of the projects I am working on right now needs a manual, not just man pages, but an actual manual.

My goals:

Online All documentation should be online and editable online. Anyone should be able to edit it. Anyone should be able to extend it. We live in a Wiki world, and the day and age of collaborating via controlled copies is over. (And yes, this is something I very much dislike about the MySQL Manual)

Hosted Find a hosted solution that I do not have to maintain. Maintaining software takes valuable time from me. I only keep hosting mailing lists but Google Apps lacks this feature. For a Wiki? Someone else can do it. The solution needs to be non-onerous though.

Exportable. Sometimes you want a book in your hands, and for this reason I think books in the "it is a dead tree Jim" are good things. Skip a few years into the future and it is probably going to be an …

Below are a few more pictures from the Red Hat Summit and FUDCon last week.

Just to keep you comin' back for more, below is the list of podcasts from the events that I will be posting in upcoming days:

Podcasts to come/Posted

• Jim Whitehurst -- President and CEO of Red Hat -- …