I am, for the most part, a do-it-yourself type of person. I fix my own car if I can; I even have four healthy tomato plants growing in pots outside as we speak — the plants will take that little extra CO2 out of the air and give me great tasting tomatoes (soon… i hope!)

But I digress.

Whether to use an ETL tool such as Kettle (aka Penatho Data Integration) for a project involving large data transfers is a typical “build vs. buy” type of decision, one that is fairly well understood and I don’t wish to repeat it all here — putting together some Perl scripts to do the job, you typically get great performance, development speed and accessibility. This would need to be balanced against the benefits of ETL tools and their potential drawbacks (development speed, license costs and performance …

You may never have heard of BitRock, the company that has traditionally competed with OpenLogic, SpikeSource, and SourceLabs in the "open-source stacks" business but has seen much more success with its excellent installers, which upwards of 60 percent of commercial open-source projects use including SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Ringside Networks, and more. The name may be unfamiliar to you, but not for long.

Why? Because BitRock is about to claim the center of the open-source world's attention, as Stephe Walli, an advisor to BitRock, pointed out two months ago following the Open Source Business Conference. It's called the Network, you're likely to be buying into one very soon, if you haven't already.

As open-source companies seek ways to monetize their code, a common theme has emerged: …

Again a week late, but hey, I only need to keep up with this stuff, not comment on it all the time. MySQL changed their minds and turns out the core server will continue to be open source, allowing customers to depend on being able to inspect it if required, extend on any bit as needed, and most importantly, get the benefits of a large community using and testing all features. Thanks for that. I just hope you're going to be consistent about this, for precisely the reason that as a MySQL Enterprise customer, I don't pay you to deliver bits that haven't received that community testing, but to rapidly fix problems if they exist despite that exposure.

It was interesting to hear Monty Widenius comment about it in this week's Open Tuesday event, and I also got to talk to him about attending a MySQL Users session in Helsinki next …

How can this happen?

mysql> DROP TABLE t;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> DROP TABLE t;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Well, just use a temporary table.

mysql> CREATE TABLE t (i INT);
Query OK, 0 rows affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)

mysql> CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE t (d DATE);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> DROP TABLE t;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> DROP TABLE t;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

I will add more such silly/hard/cool/whatever questions from time to time here.

Here's my presentation on Memcached and MySQL:

You can download the sample files here:

• memcached-demo.tar.gz [4MB]

Here's my presentation on Memcached and MySQL:

You can download the sample files here:

• memcached-demo.tar.gz [4MB]

Mike Olson is on the entrepreneurial prowl again. The co-founder of Sleepycat, who sold his company to Oracle and recently left Oracle for a brief stint as a relaxed person, is back in action.

I talked a day ago with a company that has talked to Mike about an executive ...

Three weeks ago Milking The GNU was  suggesting to SUN a few directions for MySQL. They were articulated around 4 messages:

1. Give the  business of dealing w/  large customers customers  to RedHat
2. Plug MySQL into the cloud so that to tackle with the long tail and beat up ORCL and MSFT
3. Keep MySQL community happy and growing
4. Start everything quickly so that to mitigate those bad Q3 numbers

Well, it took less than a month  for SUN to react. Here is a dramatized version of the answers implicitly given by Jonathan at the light of recent SUN's announcements:

1- I'm going to keep the RedHat business for myself, …

Sun advances GlassFish. Red Hat announces JBoss momentum. Mandriva releases Linux update. (and more)

Sun Microsystems Announces Technology Preview of Open Source Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server and New Sun GlassFish Communications Server, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Red Hat Continues Middleware Industry Momentum, Red Hat (Press Release)

Mandriva presents its latest distribution: Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring, Mandriva (Press Release)

Hyperic Announces MySQL …

Kickfire has announced (as of April 14th, 2008) record breaking results in the TPC-H(tm) Price/Performance category at 300GB and also in overall performance in the non-clustered category at 300GB.
You can find the official results here on the TPC(tm) (Transaction Processing Performance Council) website:
http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_price_perf_results.asp
http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_price_perf_results.asp?resulttype=noncluster

While the amazingly low price of the Kickfire Database Appliance 2400 will grab you (only about twice the price of a typical 4U MySQL database server) -- the amazing performance per watt is truly incredible. The 3RU Kickfire appliance used in the 300GB volume test consumes …