Diary: January 21st 2008 - Martin Luther King Day (Day doctor’s practices are closed BTW.)

“I have a dream”, poetic . Actually I have thumping 5 day straight headache but that’s another story.

I have a dream for MySQL Camp III. A 48 hour Global Hackfest. I ran this by Jay over Thanksgiving, to get back to more the purpose of the Camp, for hackers, coders and the very experience to get to together to share their skills, and for those at the top of our respective game to learn just a little more. MySQL Camp II was a success to attendees in general, but of little value to the experts.

I hope to get us middle to advanced ground. Here is an overview.

• 48 hour event
…

Diary: January 21st 2008 – Martin Luther King Day (Day doctor’s practices are closed BTW.) “I have a dream”, poetic . Actually I have thumping 5 day straight headache but that’s another story.

Sun acquires MySQL. Oracle acquires BEA. OpenAds obtains $15m in funding. (and more)

Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire MySQL, Developer of the World’s Most Popular Open Source Database, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Oracle to Acquire BEA Systems , Oracle (Press Release)

Openads Closes $15.5 Million Series B Funding Led by Accel Partners, Openads (Press Release)

IBM Accelerates Desktop Customer Choice With Support for Ubuntu, Red Hat and Novell Software, IBM (Press Release) …

Last time I talked about point queries.  The conclusion was that big databases and point queries don’t mix.  It’s ok to do them from time to time, but it’s not how you’re going to use your database, unless you have a lot of time.  Today, I’d like to talk about range queries, which seem much more useful for the analysis of big databases, say in a business intelligence setting.

Recall that the focus is on the storage engine (a la MySQL) level, and a database on a single disk—the one we are using for illustration is the 1TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.  It has a disk seek time 14ms and transfer rate of around 69MB/s [See tomshardware.com] Now imagine filling the disk with random pairs, each 8 bytes.  So that’s 62.5 billion pairs.

Range Queries

Suppose the above data is stored in a B-tree, and that you’d like to iterate over all the data in order by key.  Further suppose that the …

MySQL AB today announced that Flixster and NowPublic -- two of today's hottest Web 2.0 companies -- have selected the MySQL Enterprise database to power their rapidly growing businesses. MySQL continues to expand its presence as the database of choice among the new generation of online companies looking to cost-effectively manage the scalability of their high-growth businesses using proven, high-performance open source software.

I’m starting up a schema to hold stored procedures that automate common DBA tasks. SQL file for import is here: opsmonitor.sql

More SPs will be added in time… whenever I get the time to write them that is.

UPDATE: Jeff Stoner will be heading up this project to contain his scripts, of which the ones currently listed in the first link are written by himself.

Two employees of Sun Finland, Margot Wik (whom I studied French with in the 1980s at the Helsinki University of Technology) and Thomas Branders (another fellow HUT student, from whom I tried to learn how to sing Helan går while having fun at HUT’s Swedish language student corporation Teknologföreningen, but don’t blame him for the end result on YouTube) invited me to Sun Finland’s Friday Coffee Meeting 25.1.2008 at about 14:00. I was happy to accept. It’s only natural to do the inaugural ambassador visit in my native country.

I’m looking forward to learning from Margot, Tomi and their colleagues, and telling them about MySQL!

At the risk of making it seem like this is all we’re talking about here at Pythian, here we go again. Paul Vallee pointed me towards this article by John Dvorak that more or less echoes a blog post I wrote in French the day previous for my personal blog that you can read here: Le [...]

The MySQL All-Company Meeting in Orlando is now over. Many are already back at home (= back at work), and others are in transition. What a meeting!

One of the mildest surprises of the week were the name tags carrying a flag that represented the country of residence, as opposed to nationality. These matters are emotional. While I happen to like Germany, it’s not as if I were German. Teased by others for deserting my native country of Finland, I spent time retaliating at innocent fellow countrymen for their “even more foreign” flag than mine. Max Mether had a French flag. Birgitta Löfberg had a Swedish flag (OK, that’s the least foreign, but still foreign). And, for the largest distance from Finland, Mårten Mickos carried a US flag. Eminently teasable.

Also, on my initial name tag, I had the title “Sr. Director Sales Operations”. However, it turned out not to be an innovative way for …