Petabytes! Have you heard that before? Perhaps you have, during some theoretical IT class. But have you used anything that could be remotely close to petabytes?
A petabyte is one thousand Terabyte, or one million Gigabyte.
If you struggle with databases with a few dozen Gigabytes, and you have headaches when you think that you have to deal with Terabytes of data, you can't possibly imagine how to store petabytes of data, …

Let's see if you can solve this little puzzle...

Consider this stored procedure:

-- finds the first slash and exits
create procedure p_find_slash(p_text text)
begin
    declare v_index int default 1;
    declare v_length int default character_length(p_text);
    declare v_char char(1);
    
    _main_loop: while v_index <= v_length do                       -- loop over all characters
                
        set v_char := substring(p_text, v_index, 1);               -- grab the current character
        case v_char
            when v_char = '/' then                                 -- found a slash!                
                select concat('A slash at ', v_index) message;     -- report it
                leave _main_loop;                                  -- and then stop
            else …

Tuesday evening, Moscow was our next stop. Engineering, Support, Internal IT, Professional Services — as in Sweden, various MySQL departments were represented. Russia is a key personnel country for MySQL, and has been so for years. It’s my third time with MySQL in Moscow, and it feels good to start being able to find Count Dolgorukyi, Arbat, St. Basil’s Cathedral, Kremlin, the Red Square, and the Tverskaya Ulitsa.

So as not to bore you with repeating the MySQL on-boarding discussions we had, which were much the same as everywhere else, let me instead share our experience of how to login into Russia, and, more complicated, Marriott Grand Hotel on Tverskaya.

Scene 1: Yesterday, 15:00, Domodedovo airport, Rusaero Biznes Terminal.

• Immigration lady: Do you need an immigration card?
• We: Uhmm, if you say so
• No further action, we depart from Domodedovo, which …

Overview:Peter Zaitsev's recent article about Evaluating IO subsystem performance for MySQL spurred my interest in doing something similar on EC2.I have covered running sysbench against MySQL on EC2 however not specifically used sysbench to test IO. Rather I had used bonnie++ and iozone to do that.I don't have a lot of respect for the EC2 small instance. Whilst it was reasonable in the middle of

Overview:

Peter Zaitsev’s recent article about Evaluating IO subsystem performance for MySQL spurred my interest in doing something similar on EC2.

I have covered running sysbench against MySQL on EC2 however not specifically used sysbench to test IO. Rather I had used bonnie++ and iozone to do that.

I don’t have a lot of respect for the EC2 small instance. Whilst it was reasonable in the middle of 2006 when Amazon EC2 was launched, you can (even in Australia) pick up Dual and Quad Core CPUs with enough memory for 32 …

2>.\my_lwrite.c(31) : warning C4996: ‘write’: The POSIX name for this item is deprecated. Instead, use the ISO C++ conformant name: _write. See online help for details.

WTF.

If Visual Studio 2008 crashes one more time today….

NetBeans 6.1 Beta was released last week. Amongst the many improvements, one of them is the bundled JRuby 1.1 RC2 and Rails 2.0.2. The jMaki plugin used to work fine with Rails 1.2.3 but need to be updated because of changed file name extensions for the default generated views (".rhtml.erb" instead of ".rhtml"). With this release of NetBeans, jMaki plugin has been updated to work in this configuration as well.

This blog provide detailed steps to install jMaki plugin, create a simple Rails 2.0 application using NetBeans IDE and update the generated scaffold to use a Yahoo Data Table widget for displaying the …

Old school technologists don't think kindly of PHP. Its adepts are believed to be sloppy programmers that create brittle applications. It takes programmers like Sebastian Bergman to level the score and to show that a good programmer is shown by best practices, not by the choice of language.
The best thing a good programmer can do while developing an application is testing. Sebastian shows why you should do it, and how. Not only that, it will show you how easy it is. At the end of …