I’ve joined Pythian and thought I would present myself and give my initial opinions on Pythian as employer.

First off, I should mention that although I’ve been working with MySQL for a long time, I’ve never actively gotten into the blogging in the past, but all of that is about to change. I’ll be posting about research and problems I encounter, much like everyone else, and I hope I’ll be able to shed some light on issues that other people run into.

I just transferred to Pythian Europe from my old employer in the US, because I was tired of the American life and wanted to move back to Europe for personal reasons, and during that process I came in contact with Pythian and realized that this company is everything I wanted in an employer, plus I get to work in the services sector, which is something I really enjoy. Either way, I decided to come on board, and now I’m on my way to the corporate head office in Ottawa for initial …

I was writing a utility in Python (using boto) to test/play with Amazon’s SQS service. As boto isn’t particularly well documented where SQS specifically is concerned, I also plan to post some examples (either here or on Linuxlaboratory.org, or both). When I had some trouble getting a message that was sent to a queue, I went to the Amazon documentation, and found this little gem in the Amazon Web Services FAQ

I am sure that my queue has messages, but a call to ReceiveMessage returned none. What could be the problem?

Due to the distributed nature of the queue, a weighted random set of machines is sampled on a ReceiveMessage call. That means only the messages on the sampled machines are returned. If the number of messages in the queue is small (less than 1000), it is …

The second half of last week I attended the Red Hat Summit and FUDCon which Sun and MySQL were silver sponsors of.  The events were co-located at the Hynes convention center in Boston. 

Although both events featured an impressive list of topics and tracks, other than the keynotes I spent the majority of my time meeting and talking to people.   One of my goals was to figure out how Sun can better work with Fedora to get more of our software into their distro. 

A few key Fedorans: Max Spevak, Dennis Gilmore, Tom "Spot" Callaway, Jeremy Katz, Paul Frields, Jesse Keating. 

President and CEO Jim Whitehurst chats with Fedora board member, Karsten Wade, …

The second half of last week I attended the Red Hat Summit and FUDCon which Sun and MySQL were silver sponsors of.  The events were co-located at the Hynes convention center in Boston. 

Although both events featured an impressive list of topics and tracks, other than the keynotes I spent the majority of my time meeting and talking to people.   One of my goals was to figure out how Sun can better work with Fedora to get more of our software into their distro. 

A few key Fedorans: Max Spevak, Dennis Gilmore, Tom "Spot" Callaway, Jeremy Katz, Paul Frields, Jesse Keating. 

President and CEO Jim Whitehurst chats with Fedora board member, Karsten Wade, …

If you are attending Usenix 2008 at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Boston, you can meet me and ask your burning MySQL questions at my “The Guru is In” session. On Friday, June 27th, 2008 from 2 - 3:30 pm in Constitution B, I will be helping folks out by optimizing queries and schemas, teaching general principles of working with MySQL databases, and answering (to the best of my ability) any other question they may throw at me.

The event details are at:
http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix08/tech/#fri

Hope to see you there!

Matt Asay is excited about Red Hat’s Spacewalk project to release the code behind its Red Hat Network Satellite product under an open source license (as he should be, he’s been waiting over a year for it). As well as anticipation, Matt’s excitement can also be attributed to the potential for Spacewalk to become the default management platform for open source software.

As he writes:

“What is the first thing that MySQL and JBoss did to add value to their support subscriptions? Build networks. What, presumably, will be the first things that other open-source companies do? Build networks.

What is the result? A swamp of incompatible service-delivery networks.

…

While we're on the topic of Bazaar - this week I got informed by the organizers of the FrOSCon 2008 conference that they accepted two of my talk proposals: one session will be an introduction to this source code management system (what a coincidence), the other one will be an introduction to OpenSolaris for Linux users, explaining some of the underlying technologies and how they differ from what a seasoned Linux user may be accustomed to.

And no, I have not given up on using Linux - quite the contrary! I have been very impressed by the latest OpenSUSE 11.0 release and already run it for since quite some time on several of my work systems. In fact, I already convinced several colleagues of mine to …

Are you deploying your JRuby-on-Rails applications on Solaris (or any variety of Unix) and not able to connect to the database ?

I experienced it last week so thought of sharing the tip here. Luckily it's really simple.

Here is the default generated "config/database.yml"

The only required change is to add "host: 127.0.01" for the required database configuration. The updated fragment is shown below (with change highlighted):
…

Why one may wonder, it's just Swedish beer (State of Doplhin, MySQL UC 2006).
One week ago Jim Starkey sent message http://www.firebirdnews.org/?p=1742 so he will not work for MySQL anymore and starting new project. While that's fully Jim Starkey's personal decision, I expected some comments about Falcon future development from MySQL / Sun side. Jim was not just ordinary developer, but lead of project and main architect of Falcon and his leaving may change a lot. For now MySQL's calm seems stunned or indifferent to Falcon's destiny.
Falcon has being developed for about 2.5 years, and despite it named "beta" stage, it sill crashes in our quite simple benchmarks, so it's very optimistic "beta". That's why I wonder if this project will be ever finished, especially when main architect left it. …