Open Source means that the source code is open. There are many inferences that can be made from this, and many stereotypes that can be applied, but in the end, all it means is that you can read the source code as well as use the binaries. I am not a developer. I fully [...]

I attended the Sun Tech Days last week here in Sydney, Australia with a number of objectives in mind. The first was to meet up with people I knew in Sun to see how the newly confirmed merger was working here in Australia and also to see some of the talks scheduled, particularly the database related ones.

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I attended the Sun Tech Days last week here in Sydney, Australia with a number of objectives in mind. The first was to meet up with people I knew in Sun to see how the newly confirmed merger was working here in Australia and also to see some of the talks scheduled, particularly the database related ones.

read more

The March (pun!) continues. Bill Boebel, CTO of Mailtrust (Rackspace’s mail division), saw my previous announcement and asked me to present CouchDB as part of their Racklabs series and I happily agreed. This is a very cool opportunity to meet a bunch of very smart engineers; I am eager to go.

On Monday 17th (St. Patrick’s Day) at 6pm Eastern Time, we meet at Mailtrust’s office. See the announcement for directions and details. There will be pizza and beer afterwards. The talk is open …

The March (pun!) continues. Bill Boebel, CTO of Mailtrust (Rackspace’s mail division), saw my previous announcement and asked me to present CouchDB as part of their Racklabs series and I happily agreed. This is a very cool opportunity to meet a bunch of very smart engineers; I am eager to go.

On Monday 17th (St. Patrick’s Day) at 6pm Eastern Time, we meet at Mailtrust’s office. See the announcement for directions and details. There will be pizza and beer afterwards. The talk is open …

The FederateX Pluggable Storage Engine for MySQL, version 0.2 has been released! I've started to go through a list of bugs in Federated that need fixing, and for this version, I've fixed bug 30051.

The cause of this bug was due to the removal of "check_foreign_data_source" which used to check the connection and existence of the table being referenced in the federated connect string or server definition during "CREATE TABLE". Since then, a nice clean convenience method "real_connect" has been added. I simply modified it to take two arguments: a share, and a simple flag saying if the method call is the result of create table. Before I modified this method, the class share was being used which is made available though the call of "get_share". However, when "CREATE TABLE" is called (ha_federatedx::create), get_share hasn't been called, hence …

Back when I was doing a lot of work with Oracle, I learned to lean heavily on the SYSTEM views - Oracle’s equivalent to the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database. These views can really help you when it comes to writing dynamic SQL in stored procedures, or just taking quick shortcuts while you’re writing code. Or, if you’re [...]

The March (pun!) continues. Bill Boebel, CTO of Mailtrust (Rackspace’s mail division), saw my previous announcement and asked me to present CouchDB as part of their Racklabs series and I happily agreed. This is a very cool opportunity to meet a bunch of very smart engineers; I am eager to go.

On Monday 17th (St. Patrick’s Day) at 6pm Eastern Time, we meet at Mailtrust’s office. See the announcement for directions and details. There will be pizza and beer afterwards. The talk is open …

I wrote a User-Defined Function that implements the FNV (Fowler-Voll-No) hash function for MySQL. I’m not the first person to do this – in fact, I was inspired by the Google patches for MySQL. But my implementation is a little bit different from most, in a very important way that leads directly to much higher performance, especially suited for the Maatkit tools. A bit of background: FNV hashing is a very fast hash algorithm that operates in fixed memory.

I was recently asked a question by someone who had attended my Shmoocon talk entitled “Why are Databases So Hard to Secure?”. PDF slides are available (1.34 Mb). I was going to put this into a more formal structure, but the conversational nature works really well. I would love to see comments [...]