Some of you have noticed Kickfire, a new sponsor at this year’s MySQL Conference and Expo. Like Keith Murphy, I have been involved with them for a while now. This article explains the basics of how their technology is different from the current state of the art in complex queries on large amounts of data.

Kickfire is developing a MySQL appliance that combines a pluggable storage engine (for MySQL 5.1) with a new kind of chip. On the surface, the storage engine is not that revolutionary: it is a column-store engine with data compression and some other techniques to reduce disk I/O, which is kind of par for the course in data warehousing today. The chip is the really exciting part of the technology.

The simplest description of their chip is that it …

Another great event happening in New York on April 14th is the monthly meeting of the New York Software Industry Association. This month's topic is "Running a Tech Business in NY: Challenges and Payoffs." There is no cost to attend but you must pre-register.

I traveled with Kaj from Paris to Milan, and we went directly to the Sun offices, where we were received with great friendship and keen interest.
Franco Roman, Director of Marketing, explained to us how Sun invests on community activities, from big customers to university, to open source events.
Then we were joined by the directors of the other departments, who engaged us in lively exchanges of ideas, where we saw that our community models are different but easily complement each other.
There is much to do, but with such is the enthusiasm that is shown towards MySQL that I have little doubt we will succeed.
In the afternoon there was the meetup itself. Unlike Paris, it was held in a conference room, with a wide screen, microphones, video cameras (it will be published online. Stay tuned). Again, the participation from Sun employees and managers was really notable.
Kaj delivered his speech in Italian. The day before …

The Paris meetup was a very charming event. As announced, it was held in a pub, where beer was the first priority, and the audience of our (short) speeches were holding glasses and looking relaxed.
The ensuing conversations were definitely friendly and inspiring. We met mostly MySQL community, but also Sun employees and Java developers in search of cross links. Every exchange was lively, some with a touchy angle. The technical questions led to wine choices philosophy, university projects, security policies, and again to the pro and con of living in Paris as an expat. We had a merry time indeed.
Thanks to Michael, Max, Serge, and especially to Veronique, for organizing on such a short notice.

A

A

Read this comment:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2001/9/18/74

The funny? Tonight I got an incoming bug fix from a user who had caught that libmemcached had the old code in it, which of course... I had copied out of the header code in the Linux kernel.

Even funnier?

Go look in my_global.h in the MySQL include/ directory.

Guess what?

Same bloody mistake!

Copy and Paste bugs.... got to love them!

(FWIW, I checked, neither Postgres or Apache have the hack, so they are free of this). The post I reference from lkml is quite old... I should read up on this and see what the history of this is. There is probably more here then meets the eye.

Too funny.

I was complaining in an earlier post that I have problems with linux style installation.
I found a company that can help me solve that!
BitRock makes open source software easier to use by providing a complete automated solution for Open Source Application Deployment.
Its quite cool and they have a LAMP stack installer here.


Now I am suggesting that someone at Erlang does it too. They have a Lyme stack which is Linux + Yaws + Mnesia + Erlang. (a …

Finally!

Buildbot access for libmemcached:

http://build.tangent.org:8010/

This has taken way too much time. I have been dinking with it every so often to see if I can get it to work but have made almost no traction on it.

No luck, until now!

What does this mean? It means I can now get regression tests from different platforms on each push. AKA less broken pushes, more testing (for those in the internal MySQL world, think "open source poll based pushbuild").

I've got some hardware to run this, but I could use more slaves to do testing. Leave me a message or drop me a piece of email if you want to add a host for testing. I lack specifically Windows, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Solaris (any …

I like this item on the MySQL Conference program: Falcon for InnoDB Users. What I find of specific interest is the abstract:Falcon is MySQL?s new transactional storage engine, currently in beta. Falcon, however, is not InnoDB and was not designed as a drop in replacement.

The talk will discuss the architectural and philosophical differences between Falcon and InnoDB; some of the operational differences, where users can expect to see significant performance differences; and the problems that may be encountered when switching between InnoDB and Falcon.That's the plain truth, and it's very significant. Falcon is indeed not a [drop-in] replacement for InnoDB. Earlier on it was kind-of presented that way by MySQL Marketing, basically responding to the Oracle acquisition of InnoDB. Strategically, yes Falcon is fully owned by MySQL, so that was …