Thinking I had something new, I wrote this article about recovering deleted files. However, it turns out Frits Hoogland had already blogged about recovery of deleted files on linux, as Frits pointed out in a comment on my blog, where he also mentioned a metalink note on this matter. The note ID is: 444749.1 “Retrieve deleted [...]

Seattle will soon be attacked by giant sea monsters with radiation
breath!

(... or was that Japan...)

Who is going to stop them?

Skykee the Spy Robot! (http://www.erectorusa.com/category_pages/spykee.html)





All those years spent during childhood learning how to build ferris wheels and big choppy machines with my erector set, those skills may finally be of use!

(...unlike my graduate degree...)

From the copy:

Build your spy robot and control Spykee from anywhere in the world via the internet through a wifi connection.

If this copy is right, I'll take three. Maybe four... One for each cat and dog in the house, and a final …

Could commercial open source become a victim of its own success? Is the industry putting too much pressure on its flag-bearers to get rich quick? I’ve been meaning for some time to mention this article by MySQL CEO, Marten Mickos entitled “How to be a disruptor”. One of Marten’s tips for success jumped out at me: “Get rich slow”.

“When I see the fantastic growth MySQL is experiencing now, I never forget that it took us 12 years to get here,” he writes. “For the first six years, the team focused exclusively on perfecting the product…. Startups wanting to copy our success need to be aware of the significant ramp-up we invested in.

“Because the MySQL database is an infrastructure product, that growth probably took longer than it would have for an application or consumer product. But the growth phase of the company really did not …

Incredible, but true.  It seems that MySQL AB will be exhibiting next week at Oracle Open World.  This of course isn’t the first time a competitor would advertise or exhibit on it’s rival’s home turf.  Still it certainly signals a changing landscape, and heats up the battle for market share.

Here’s a longer list of exhibitors at the conference.  I don’t see Enterprise DB there, but anything’s possible.  You will see RedHat as well as Suse, now owned by Novell, represented there as well.  Also if you make it to the conference, be sure to visit the Oracle pavilion section, where there are sure to be smaller booths for …

"I heard it is faster if I use server side prepared statements" - Many people
Possibly - but it's not necessarily the silver bullet it's described as.

A little bit of background:
A server side prepared statement allows you to first prepare a query on the server side, without actually specifying the values at all.

INSERT INTO users (username, email, password) VALUES (?, ?, ?);

This is step 1. From here, the application now only needs to send the individual values to the server next time, and not repeat the entire query (step 2).

The values will also be sent using the binary protocol so they do not need to be escaped in the same way they would in a regular query. There is no SQL parsing overhead, and certain steps of the execution plan have already been figured out.

Sounds great, why this doesn't always convert to being faster? …

Barcamp Brussels 4 is comming

It?s decided! Barcamp Brussels #4 will take place on Saturday Dec 1st, in the mVillage business center in Schaarbeek, close to the Koninginneplein, Kruidtuin/Botanique and the Brussels North station (thanks for the help, Simon).

I have just posted the presentation that I gave at the Hamburg MySQL User Group last Tuesday. You can download the presentation here.

I have added a few slides on advanced topics: backup, replication and the distributed repository, which did not actually make it into my talk. However, these topics came up in the discussion over a few drinks afterwards.

Thanks to Lenz for the opportunity to present the BLOB Streaming Project and to those that were there for the good feedback.

As Lenz said, it was a "pretty technical crowd". For example, it did not go unnoticed that a denial of service attack could be launched by a malicious client, that establishes many upload connections that fill up the server's …

I've been wanting to test diskchecker.pl on EC2 for while. It's a shame - since now that I think about it, there is no way I can prove whether or not it works, and I feel like an idiot for not realizing prior.

I thought I would try my best to offer an explanation to save someone the trouble:

Normally when you write a file, it just writes to a buffer. Think of it like a funnel - there could be a little or a lot of other writes trying to make it to the disk, but to improve performance your operating system will allow you to continue without having to wait. Under normal circumstances all those writes will eventually make it, so when that happens shouldn't concern you.

The problem is that when you have a database application, having something in a buffer that's pending isn't good enough. You want to know that when you send a write, …

Available here