My company Continuent sponsors Continuent.org, an open source site that contains some of the coolest scale-out projects around. You may have heard of Sequoia, which implements middleware clustering of any database that has a JDBC driver. However, Sequoia is really just the beginning.

We have several other projects that offer interesting scale-out technologies. Myosotis implements fast SQL proxying, Hedera provides wrappers for group communications, and Bristlecone has tools for performance testing of scale-out architectures. This summer we will add projects for database neutral master/slave replication as well as cluster management. …

Horay! Thank goodness, and about time too!

On the latter, I do appreciate that any such switch is a serious change for a development team, I was involved with this while at MySQL so I'm well aware of the issues ;-)
Nevertheless, it was high time as it once again allows the rest of the world (outside of Sun/MySQL) to grab a repo and peruse the history properly. Long time ago (before bitkeeper turned fully evil) this was possible also. See MySQL is using Bazaar and Launchpad for their source code.

We had a distributed revision control talk in Bris a few weeks ago, by Ian Clatworthy of Canonical. We managed to do a video, but it's not yet online. Various attendants including Damian Hickey (of the Freeway ecommerce project) now want to move to either …

The big news in MySQL world is that MySQL has moved off BK and onto BZR.

Why is this news? I predicted the switch off of BK within minutes of the Sun announcement, in this post.

I didn't use any "insider knowledge" in that observation either, just the knowledge that Sun uses and contributes to HG, which makes using BK a non-starter, and that Sun would likely be unwilling to stop all HG work, and pay for a 30,000 seat BK site license, just to maintain access to one product.

The book, that is. My dog is already studying it. You should buy a few copies for yourself, your family, and all your pets.

Even though we had been preparing the migration to Bazaar for a while now, today's announcement kind of caught me by surprise. But I am very happy about this move!

While BitKeeper is an excellent tool and served us well the past eight (!) years, I was quite annoyed when BitMover decided to remove the fully functional free BitKeeper client, which effectively put our development back into a Cathedral: even though our source trees remained accessible via bkbits.net, the crippled bk client was only capable of cloning and pulling new revisions from there - it was not possible for an …

I’ve been doing some research and evaluation of more cloud computing. Specifically my focus has been on data store, and considering how to augment an existing operation using a popular database such as MySQL.

I’ve been looking first at Google App Engine and now I have my SimpleDB Beta today will be looking here next.

Some observations I’ve struggled with are:

• No Native CLI, say for basic data setup. You can do some programmatic input for SELECT statements in a Query object in a SQL like syntax called GQL, but you can’t do DML
• No simple data viewer. In production you would not do this, but I’m in evaluation and …

Below are the Open Office Impress and PDF versions of the slide decks I will be giving tonight. Utah PLUG readers, these are those intermediate slides that have taken so long for me to clean up!

Join-fu: The Art of SQL - Part I   Open Office Impress slides
  PDF slides

Topics include:

• Schema optimization and vertical partitioning
• SQL Coding style guidelines
• Set-wise problem solving in SQL (and why it kicks for-loop-fu's ass.)
  • Rewriting correlated subqueries into joins
  • Using derived tables or subqueries in the FROM clause
• Working with N:M or "mapping" tables
  • Dealing with OR conditions
  …

There is some very big news going around that internet thing today: MySQL has switched from Bitkeeper to Bazaar. I wrote up a quick post on the Canonical blog about the same thing, and Giussepe Maxia has a nice technical post about how to get started working with the new system.

Here’s an excerpt from a mail I just sent to an internal Canonical list:

Bazaar and Launchpad are truly tools that matter, from a historical and social perspective. MySQL and other open source software run a huge percentage of the internet, and these tools preserve and enrich the body of knowledge that is in the public commons, knowledge that will be there for our …

I previously wrote about Clipperz because I really think Marco and the team at Clipperz have a great idea. To summarize, Clipperz has technology for "zero-knowledge web applications" which they have applied to an online password manager as a proof of concept. Marco writes: "We simply meant that Clipperz knows nothing about its users and their data! ... As a consequence of the "learn nothing" mantra, every zero-knowledge application should be completely anonymous, or at least it should make it impossible to relate the real name or email of a user to his data" It seems that Richard Stallman agrees... READ MORE