Last week, I uploaded the first screenshots for opentaps analytics to the opentaps documentation wiki. While this application is still in its early stages, I thought he screenshots should help you see what we've been working on.

What you're looking at is an application that takes operational data from the opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM system and transforms them into an analytical data warehouse using the Kettle ETL tool. Then, from this data warehouse, we have built dashboards, maps, drill downs, and reports.

The goal of opentaps analytics is to help you make better business decisions with your data by providing you with …

When a Forrester Research representative emailed with the following survey highlights, I was more than a little surprised: "Forrester released data today analyzing trend lines in enterprise open source usage in 2007. Among the key findings: Seventy percent of decision-makers responded that they don't have interest or have no plans to adopt open source software; Only 23 percent of respondents said expanding their use of open source software was a priority; Security is the main concern around adopting open source software. Eighty-eight percent of respondents said it was an important or very important concern." The data is from 1,017 decision... READ MORE

We recently moved some databases to different servers, and I altered our mySQL slave configuration files to take into account some of the databases we wanted to replicate (Replicate-do-db) and others that we wanted to ignore (Replicate-ignore-db) -- each of these server cases were mutually exclusive.All went well, until I found a peculiar error:Error 'Table 'db101.table101' doesn't exist' on

Did you notice that Steve Jobs called out SQLite in his announcement about the iPhone 2.0 software?

Now lets say in one year there are 6 million old iPhones plus another 6 or so million new iPhones all running the 2.0 software.

If you toss in all of the other gadgets running SQLite it seems like a pretty big number.

A hundred million installations?

I went and took at look at the SQLite website to see what they think their numbers are.

Looking through the SQLite team's reasoning I suspect they are low balling the number they are publishing

Lets shoot for a billion installations. Most likely anyone who is reading this already has several applications running on their computer using it.

Pretty good numbers for an open source database.

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• Continued with HTML testing report pages modifications, the new HTML pages report all the information collected by the current Skoll Client.
• Began integrating new data collection features into Skoll on the server side, most of these changes are made in our development database.
• Read research papers on reducing testing space.

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

• None

KEY CONCERNS

• Future progress of the project depends on having push-build tar balls.

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

• Finish the integration of new data collection features in Skoll on the server side.
• Modify Skoll's upload manager and data processor to handle the separate log files collected by the new Skoll Client. Ideally, Skoll can generate a report page for each step of the testing process (e.g. source download, …

I attended the Boston MySQL meetup today and it was wonderful.
(Thanks to Sheeri Cabral for the invite)
Food, beverages, and swag were provided for free and the presentation was great.
The talk went into great detail about database backups and was one of the most practical talks I have attended.

Coding is going well, just wish I had more time to do so.

I think I might actually submit a report on time today!

We know MySQL Backups using LVM are pretty cool (check out mylvmbackup) or MMM though it is quite typical LVM is not configurable properly to be usable for MySQL Backups.

Quite frequently I find LVM installed on the system but no free space left to be used as snapshot undo space, which means LVM is pretty much unusable for backups or required space is very small - created without good understanding on how much space do you need for undo.

LVM Snapshot works kind of like Multi Versioning in Innodb - when you write the new data the new version for the block is stored in undo space. When snapshot is being read if the block is being remapped it is read from the undo location.

The LVM Snapshots versioning is however different from database Multi Versioning because only one old version …

MySQL Sandbox has moved to a new home. It is now hosted at Launchpad, a friendly environment where developers can work together.

What's new with MySQL Sandbox? The matrioskas in the image are a clue. Version 1.21 introduces the concept of SANDBOX_HOME, which previously was only a path under which store the sandboxes. With time, when I was using more and more sandboxes, I realized that I wanted to take control of all the sandboxes at once, and issue global commands to all of them.
Starting with this version, the sandbox installer recognizes an environmental variable named $SANDBOX_HOME, and builds the sandboxes under that path.
In addition to grouping all the …

In the back of my mind for the last couple of weeks have been some musings on prepared statements.

So I walk into this customers office and they don't speak english.

I only speak a few words of their language.

It goes like this:

"Blah, blah, blah, Prepared Statements, blah, blah..."

I say "Turn them off, they are what is crashing your application."

The end customer is confused because the translator had not finished before I gave the answer.

So I explain the problem... the customer has a lot of connections to the database... a lot... and the database is running out of memory and crashing. Was this the customer's problem? Yes it was.

This is a practiced conversation for me. I could do a song and dance on "well you should be building your application like..." but the customer wants to build their application their way. They want …

Final versions of High Performance MySQL, Second Edition sample content are posted at the official website. You can download unrestricted PDFs of the foreword, table of contents, chapter 4 (Query Performance Optimization), and the index.

PDF, Sample Chapter