There are two common approaches for configuring web applications:

• Configuration file(s) in the web application's directory
• Storing configuration data in the database

What sort of data am I talking about:

• Email setup (where to send response form, error emails etc, whether to send mail to customers etc)
• Setup of things which need to vary between development and production - payment service provider configuration, setup of other third party integration things
• Error handler configuration (whether to display errors, where to log them, email them etc)
• Enabling / disabling features (for example, debug things)
• Visual stuff or branding (labels etc)

Clearly the database connection string needs to be stored somewhere too, but that can't be in the database for obvious reasons.
…

A quick note on mod_ndb: the official 1.0 release, and the first beta of 1.1, are now available for download at mod-ndb.googlecode.com. Mod_ndb is an Apache web server module that provides a Web Services gateway into MySQL Cluster. Its documentation is at MySQL Forge.

Mod_ndb supports MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 along with Apache 1.3, 2.0, and 2.2, and it is distributed in source code form only you build it for your particular versions of Apache and MySQL. One nice improvement in 1.1 is that it is easier to build mod_ndb for Apache 2.0, as the build system no longer has any dependencies on the old version of apxs.

Welcome to the 77th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. This is the last Log Buffer of 2007. . . a time for looking back at the year, looking ahead to the next, and generally focusing on time. It may not be the Oscars, but Firebird News is thrilled that Firebird is Sourceforge’s [...]

So I was reading Nate's PHP tip, and it got me thinking; he's basically describing bayesian session validity checks - what an awesome idea![1]. Here are my list of possible 'items' to form the test:

• Login IP address
• Login location (gathered courtesy of GeoIP)
• Operating System
• Web Browser
• Time of Day
• Origin of requests (both HTTP_REFERER and REQUEST_URI)

I was thinking of how damn accurately you could identify some specific cases of fraud though:

• "I only login from work" (time of day is always 9-5, location is always the same)

Each bit of information becomes more relevant the more frequently it occurs exclusively (or exclusively as part of a set). The only catch is that I would also need to identify the patterns …

The limits of my language means the limits of my world --Ludwig Wittgenstein

A properly designed star schema, along with appropriate performance optimizations, provides good performance and limitless scalability for the largest of the data warehouses. The main criteria for a properly designed star schema is that the dimension row counts are much smaller relative to the fact row counts. But there are dimensions, such as the customer dimension, that can be very large. These are called the monster dimensions, and stretch the star schema to the breaking point. These dimensions must be handled with caution, the bothersome data should be taken outside the data warehouse where appropriate.
…

Today from Slashdot:
http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/12/27/1953245.shtml

From Boing Boing:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/26/netgears-tiny-networ.html

First thing, 1TB drives are still too expensive. At around ~120 for a 500gig drive compared to ~$350 for a 1TB drive, bang for your buck still comes from buying 500gig drives.

For enclosures?

I like the concept of NAS, but the price point is not there. Netgear upped the price on the ReadyNas devices. The cost for one barebones is now around ~800. You can get cheaper NAS like what Synology (http://www.synology.com/enu/index.php) is selling.

My problem with Synology? They …

This release contains bug fixes and new features. The biggest new feature, in my opinion, is a new sync algorithm for mk-table-sync. Now you can sync any table with an index more efficiently than previously. This is the return of the speed I promised earlier. (Though I haven't yet benchmarked it; I am very short on time these days. Your benchmarks and other contributions are welcome).

I'm finally feeling like the table sync tool is getting in good shape!

Changelog etc is in the full article.

I recently ranted that Sun JRE installs /usr/java/jre*/lib/zi/, a nearly complete timezone database in it's own java-ish format, instead of using the Olson database in ZIC format in /usr/share/zoneinfo/.

It turns out that MySQL does the same thing, it installs a set of MyISAM tables with the TZ database.

It won't be too hard to write a read-only storage engine that reads the /usr/share/zoneinfo/ ZIC files, and presents tables that "look" just like the currently used tz tables, basically doing what mysql_tzinfo_to_sql does, only "live".

When I first heard about the mysqlnd project at the MySQL Camp in 2006, somehow I thought it was going to be 100% PHP code. I can't remember now if I was making an incorrect assumption or if they planned to write it in PHP but changed their mind.What we have today is a DLL that is a drop-in replacement for libmysql. This has a few nice advantages. It means the replacement library will be