Project: MySQL Forge RSS/Atom feeds

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

* None, apart from reinstalling my development PC.

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

* Integrate the RSS/Atom feeds on the website
* Commit changes to main branch

KEY CONCERNS
* Getting my development PC up and running stable.

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

* Finishing the RSS/Atom feeds
* Discussing next task with my mentor (Extending PHP Unit tests or adding some fancy AJAX stuff to the Forge)

Thanks to my friend Dustin, and his EC2 demo using Elasticfox Firefox Extension for Amazon EC2 I got an EC2 image setup. With other references Link 1,Link 2,Link 3 I was also able to create my own AMI.

Some notes specific for my configuration.

Pre-config ElasticFox key for launching directly from ElasticFox SSH connections.

mkdir ~/ec2-keys
mv ~/Downloads/elasticfox.pem ~/ec2-keys/id_elasticfox
chmod 600 ~/ec2-keys/id_elasticfox
chmod 700 …

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
  …