I've been thinking about this statement from Sun/MySQL's Marten Mickos: "There's a difference between organizations that have more time than money and organizations that have more money than time." I coming to realize that OSS users split into three, not two, categories: A] An organization that has more time than money B] An organization that has more money than time but is used to getting what they need for free and is comfortable enough with OSS to rely on their own skills C] An organization that has more money than time While Marten has grouped categories "B" and "C", I... READ MORE

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Who Am I?

My name is Luca Olivari, I'm a technology enthusiast living in Italy. I was born in 1979 and I've created this blog having in mind a nice place to share thoughts about Marketing, Communication, Advertising and other interestingness.


I'm currently working in Sun Microsystems as a Systems Engineer in MySQL Global Software practice (but that's my job) and in my spare time I read, take pictures, travel, run and surf web2.0 sites. I'm interested in technology, science, marketing, communication, advertising, picture, classic books and many other things.

If you are in sync with my interests or you simply like to share something this is the right place.
Feel free to add comment to this post if you like to contribute in any other way to this blog.

I'm glad to meet you all!

If you want to look at some information about my work let's have a look at …

At the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, Mårten Mickos handed out the 2008 awards for Application, Partner and Community Members of the year See all the blog posts others have written about the tutorial from the Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008TuesdayNotes#State_of_MySQL.

Yes, I know. JavaOne is about Duke, the friendly mascot of Java technology. Created and maintained by James Gosling and all.

But MySQL also introduces Sakila to the JavaOne attendees. Sakila is also friendly, and the mascot of MySQL technology. The dolphin was chosen by MySQL founders Michael “Monty” Widenius and David Axmark, as was its name Sakila (which came from a naming contest in the early days).

Together with Giuseppe (in the picture above) and the rest of the MySQL Community Team, I will be handing out incarnations of Sakila (also seen above in the pic) at CommunityOne and JavaOne as follows:

• Monday 5 May 2008 09:30-10:45: CommunityOne General Session: Ian Murdock, Sun Microsystems; Panel: Matt Asay, Alfresco CNET, Mårten Mickos, MySQL, Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation, Ted Leung, Python, Stormy Peters, …

At the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, Mårten Mickos delivered the "State of the Dolphin Keynote". See all the blog posts others have written about the tutorial from the Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008TuesdayNotes#State_of_MySQL.

At the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, Lars Thalmann and Mats Kindahl gave a tutorial on replication. Download the slides and see blog posts others have written about the tutorial from the Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008MondayNotes#MySQL_Replication_Tutorial.

If you'd like to download the WMV video file in parts, here's a link to:
Part 1, 175.27 Mb
and

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At the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, Brian Aker (MySQL) and Allan Kasindorf (SixApart) gave a presentation on Memcached and MySQL. Download the slides and see blog posts others have written about the tutorial from the Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008MondayNotes#Memcached_and_MySQL.

If you'd like to download the WMV video file in parts, here's a link to:
Part 1, 112.09 Mb

read more

In a little app where users can create tabs and portlets in those tabs I ran into some issues with my ordered list implementation. It turns out I just misplaced a filtering expression in the WHERE clause instead of the JOIN condition. The basic idea was that I wanted to add new portlets in the left hand column at the top. The positions from the portlets actually start at 0, but what I am doing is to insert them at 1 below the current minimum or -1 if the table is empty. Then in a second query I push everything up by one. Seemed like the most efficient way to deal with concurrency. I guess in theory I could even skip pushing things up by one, but oh well.

Here is the original query (note that I am using PDO which supports Oracle style named placeholders for all drivers including MySQL):

INSERT INTO user_tab_portlets (tab_id, portlet_id, pos, col, is_open, config)
            (SELECT :tab_id, :portlet_id, COALESCE(MIN(utp.pos)-1, …

…or I’m doing something stupid, in which case I hope someone would enlighten me.

We grab a number of data from two different MySQL servers, get them back as arrays ($ar1 and $ar2) and then we concatenate the two arrays. $ar1 consists of 30 to 200 elements, sometimes more. $ar2 typically contains 30 elements.

The PHP way of doing this is:

$ar1 = array_merge($ar1, $ar2);

and the home-grown version is

foreach($ar2 as $i) {

 $ar1[] = $i;
}

While I do realize that “the PHP way” involves creating a new copy of $ar1 along the way, my assumption before testing this was that, being an internal function with no further parsing or interpretation to be done, it would be much faster.

Doing some microtime() estimations while keeping $ar2 constant at 30 elements, I found:

• At 1-10 elements in $ar1, array_merge is about 33% faster.
• At 20-40 …