Since well before I joined MySQL in 2001, I have had contact with now-members of the four-headed management team of Germany’s top-notch PHP experts and solution providers Mayflower GmbH.

Mayflowers and MySQLers frequently pop into each other at PHP conferences and other Open Source events, and meet informally under various circumstances ranging from Christmas parties to Biergarten discussions. It’s always interesting to exchange thoughts on virtual companies, Open Source, business models, IRC, scrum, and finding developers (some of which have worked for both MySQL and Mayflower, incidentally). And by sheer coincidence, Mayflower’s Munich headquarters is now about 150 metres from where I live, in the same street that I look out at from my home office (Mannhardtstr.). This time, they copied us, though — I …

Next Thursday 6 March 2008 at 17:00-18:00 CET, there will be a panel on “The Commercialisation of Open Source” at the Future Talk Booth in Hall 9 (Stand A30) of the CeBIT fair in Hannover, Germany. One of the purposes of the panel is to publish the Open Source Yearbook 2008, the fifth in a series of yearbooks produced by a team around Professor Lutterbeck of the Technical University of Berlin.

I’ll be one of the panelists, representing MySQL AB. Other panelists are from OpenOffice.org, Citrix, the Zope user group, and the Free Software Foundation.

For the book, I wrote a chapter called “ …

Today we were doing some basic scaling exercises on some code, which resulted in several million extra rows in one of our tables in one of the development environments. Rather than refresh the data, we decided just to prune those new records and reset the auto-increment value. Imagine my surprise when executing the following code hadn’t [...]

The World Tour starts on IRC next week!

The schedule is as follows:

• Wed 5 March 2008: Ian Murdock, 7am PT/16 CET. Ian is the ian of Debian and Chief OS Platform Strategist at Sun Microsystems. Wikipedia puts it like this:
  

  Since joining Sun, he has led Project Indiana, which he describes as “taking the lesson that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing that for Solaris,” making a full OpenSolaris distribution with GNOME and userland tools from GNU plus a network-based package management system.

• Thu 6 March 2008: Simon Phipps 6am PT/15CET. Simon is Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems. …

A question pops out quite often on Devshed forums, "How do I keep table x of my local database in sync with a remote copy?"Usually replication is the suggested answer, but it might be a little overkill, think of those who just want to push the new product catalogue from a local server to their hosted site? No permanent connection and so on ...In this case the right tool might be a mix of the

CPU evolution has been about getting faster.

Toss in new instructions that do the work of four old instructions, into one.

Gamble on the outcome, branch prediction.

More layers of caching.

When I cook I take the ingredients out of the fridge and place them on the counter where I will do the prep. From there they move to the flat area next to the stove.

I am caching so I can make food more quickly.

In computing we do a lot of caching today.

This came out of the specs from a user who I have been talking to:

"80 nodes, 640 cores... with 21 nodes in our Lustre cluster serving 65T... which we can sustain ~2.5GB/s to"

Problem was?

It was not fast enough for their needs. The system worked well enough for "containing the data", but for executing on the data it could not keep up.

…

Christine sent me this video today "A Vision of Students Today".

I had seen it before, but it stuck in my brain this time.

The comments that I found most striking were on how much time in a day is spent on projects, and what the total time required to finish a project was.

We humans multitask, we have to today.

Years ago I started commenting on "Buffy Features" or "Airplane Projects".

A "Buffy Feature" is a feature I worked on while watching TV. An Airplane Project happens when I am flying.

Buffy work tends to be code maintenance. I add small features, or I refactor projects.

Airplane work tends to be new efforts. libmemcached and mod_mp3 are like that. The thread work I did on mysqlimport in MySQL 5.1 was done on a Boston to Seattle flight.

An executive …

My e-mail was broken this morning: Thunderbird is choking with the number of e-mails I get. So, as an experiment, I tried to set up Gmail as my e-mail client. This turned out to be surprisingly easy:
* I used the the Mail Fetcher to configure Gmail to pull my e-mails via POP3.
* In Gmail's Settings > Accounts screen, I added my e-mail address as a "send e-mail as" e-mail.

With just these two settings, I am now receiving and sending e-mails as sichen AT opensourcestrategies DOT com with Gmail through its web interface. This is much better than having a desktop e-mail client for me, though I found the Gmail user interface to be a bit strange.

How Gmail Works

All the e-mail client I've ever used, including Eudora, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail, have the concept of a "folder." …

Of-course there are the crazies, but usually we have a good time over on ##pentaho IRC.

Yesterday we had our very first community event when Doug “Spanky” Moran hosted a dial-in to talk about what was up in the community.

Today, I learned about regular andresF his blog.

Internet Relay Chat is old technology that has existed for quite a while now, but to me it doesn’t lose it’s appeal. Over at FOSDEM I learned that there are companies like MySQL that have private channels to communicate “non-intrusively” with colleagues. “Maybe some developer can help me with this stupid problem. I’ll just drop a question on the channel.” It’s a good idea, we should consider it for Pentaho too.

Until next time,

Matt

Setting up master-master replication in MySQL is very similar to how we set up master/slave replication. You can read up about how to setup master/slave replication in my previous post: How to set up master/slave replication in MySQL. There is obviously pros and cons about using master/master replication. But this is not [...] …