I finally finished my first data warehouse! and it only took me 3 days!

Well, to be fair, the data warehouse design was already planned and it wasn't really that big anyway, but I am still happy about it.

I was asked on Monday to do a data warehouse for my company's head quarters in Germany. I work in Beijing, so its like.... very slow to connect to there. They gave me the database design, some SQL statements to generate a few dimensions and "rough" business rules for the data.

Now, I haven't done anything like this before, but I really wanted to try. So I did it my way.

My way is to use a lot of Views with long SQL statements instead of cursors or stored procedures. I like it this way, because I feel like I can see the data and catch problems instead of programming blindly to …

“Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL” screamed the headline on Slashdot last night. The headline is not entirely accurate (although slightly more accurate than the bizarre statement that “Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything”).

So what is going on at MySQL? To get to the bottom of that you have to weave together a number of posts and comments from a number of sources. First the article behind the Slashdot headline:

“Just announced: MySQL to launch new features only in MySQL Enterprise,” states Jeremy Cole, which is a much more accurate description of the state of affairs. “MySQL …

64-bit -> 'unlimited' addressable memory.

CPU -> MySQL - dual dual core vs. dual quad core don't matter. Because MySQL is not CPU intensive anyway.

Memory -> Semi-ideal situation: RAM size > Database Size. If db size is 30 GB, then get a 32 GB RAM.

Shared storage -> SAN / NAS -> dedicated to MySQL db and not shared with other systems.
-> I/O latency higher compared to RAID
-> RAID -> stored in local server

Vendor -> Dell - cheapest price compared to other brands
-> can go cheaper if you have good relationship with sales rep (~25% discount)

I had to move... Getting bored.

For the first time, MySQL includes Dtrace probes in the 6.0 release. On platforms that support Dtrace you can still find out a lot about what's happening, both in the Operating System kernel and in user processes, even without probes in the application. But carefully placed Dtrace probes inserted into the application code can give you a lot more information about what's going on, because they can be mapped to the application functionality. So far only a few probes have been included, but expect more to be added soon.

I decided to take the new probes for a spin. Oh, and rather than do it on a Solaris system, I figured I'd give it a shot on my Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, since MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) supports Dtrace.

To begin with I pulled down and built MySQL 6.0.5 from Bit Keeper, thanks to some help from Brian Aker. …

The first persons I met at the UC this year were David Minor and his daughter. David told me he was interested in the Certification Exams and bravely took the plunge on his first exam Tuesday morning. I am very happy to announce he has earned his Associate, Developer and DBA Certifications. Congratulations to David and all the others who took exams.

Thursday is the last day for conference attendees to take their exams for only $25. We will open the exam room at 8:30a and let people take exams until 3:00p. So save $175 or wait until the 2009 Users Conference.

Today we still had problems for those who had not set up their account with Pearson VUE BEFORE taking their exams. Since we hang the certification exams off the data from those accounts. The results below do not include the thirty plus exams waiting for this data.

…

After many years where it’s been under debate, Monty now really says he knows what MySQL is named after, and it is after My.

MySQL has placed itself in the middle of a rising furor over its allegedly diminished commitment to open source. To be fair, it has only itself to blame.

It all started with a disgruntled ex-MySQL employee, Jeremy Cole. Cole declared that MySQL's sky was falling because it was to be releasing certain parts of the next version of its database as closed-source software. Marten Mickos responded that he had misunderstood (when, in fact, he had understood very well), it went to Slashdot (where it was of course misconstrued even further), and we're left with a …

Since the recovery from my recent outage, I’ve noticed that none of the normal feed sites where my posts normally show up caught the last post, so this is a test post to see what’s going on, if it was a temporary glitch, or what.

If you didn’t see the post linked above, please read it if you’re happy with your web host. I’m looking for a new one :-/

Hopefully you can’t get enough of the UC08 videos (and thanks to Sheeri for the link with the full Jonathan keynote video), so Zack has managed to get some most posted.

This morning, we learned what it meant to be a pirate in terms of patents, copyright and now politics with the Pirate Party. Don’t let the scary name put you off - these guys are about making all of us consumers (of software, video, audio, books, etc.) more in control of information. Please support these guys by visiting Piratpartiet.se.

Next we had the Scalability Panel with representatives from Facebook, Fotolog, Sun, YouTube, …