A few weeks ago I edited this page in the Crash wiki: http://www.crashatmine.org/wiki/City_and_Country_Database

I'm still smiling thinking of the problems geocoding solves. To quote the page:

The country and city database as used in Couchsurfing.com et. al. uses a country and city database. There are some known problems with this:

• It doesn't always contain newer countries (Serbia for example), and requires maintenance
• It often only contains major cities (users in smaller cities are forced to choose the closest city)
• It only supports English for city names by default.
• Someone just has to be in a "city"; those closer to the city center are not differentiated.
• Users looking to stay in New York City should also look in neighbouring cities like Jersey City.

Last week I was in Tampere (Finland) attending the Openmind/Mindtrek event where I had the chance to meet quite a lot of open source people, from Finland and beyond. Surprisingly (or maybe not) I knew already quite a bunch of them. Henrik has a pretty good post about the event, the people and the beers with Stephe and Mikko (which together with the festivals of Pilar that started last Saturday are going to kill my liver ).
I must say that it has been one of the most interesting events I have been in the last year. The first day I ended somehow being invited to Novell’s diner for special guests and I was lucky enough to sit close to …

Matt Asay has some interesting news about a shareholder proposal that will be presented to Oracle’s forthcoming shareholder meeting asking the company to detail its commitment to open source and use its patent portfolio to protect open source.

Oracle isn’t keen on the idea, which is the tabloid headline. The interesting news, as Matt suggests, is the fact that this proposal has been made at all.

The proposal has been put forward by Lawrence Fahn of As You Sow, a corporate accountability group, and asks “that the Board issue, at reasonable expense, an Open Source Social Responsibility Report to shareholders by April 2008 that discusses the social and environmental impacts of Oracle?s existing and potential open source policies and practices.”

The mod_ndb 1.0 release candidate is now available from mod-ndb.googlecode.com. mod_ndb is a "web services node" for MySQL Cluster: an NDB API node that runs as an Apache web server module and handles requests over HTTP. It supports MySQL Cluster 5.0 and 5.1, and Apache 1.3, 2.0, and 2.2.

A few months ago, I felt that mod_ndb's configuration parameters were getting too complex to remember, and realized that a SQL-like configuration language ("N-SQL") would be more intuitive. It's not quite as simple as SQL -- it does not have an optimizer, so it still requires you to dictate an access plan -- but it is more concise and readable than the strict Apache-style configuration that mod_ndb started with.

A lot of other details have fallen into place in the last two months, especially regarding error handling, HTTP response codes, and documentation, so the newest …

Your comments on the Advanced MySQL Features chapter were great. A lot of the questions I got (in the comments and via email) about chapter 6 are really addressed in chapter 5, "Query Performance Optimization," so I'm posting its outline too. I have the same questions: are there things you'd like to see us cover? Do you have any favorite techniques you'd like to see us include? Any other comments or questions?

I had the pleasure to attend this years Oktoberfest in Munich together with a few fellow MySQL'rs.

Per Wikimedia, "the event traditionally takes place during the 16 days up to and including the first Sunday in October"...so maybe it should be called Septemberfest anyway...

It is an impressive sight and the numbers are huge. Over 6 million 1L mugs are consumed, I did my best with 5 or so but still lost the volume race to my MySQL friend (who is counting at that point anyway).

We had our specific time table (punt intended) reserved for a 2 1/2 hour window in the Hippodrome, which is a very cool tent, but not really a tent anyway, it's a rather permanently looking structure. We did manage to shoehorn in over 20 people at three tiny tables so things do get close, shoulders rubbing and glasses ...

The Münchner Zwietracht played all evening long and the noise level is huge from the combined …

I'm working on alternative strategies to make the use and maintenance of a multi-terabyte data warehouse implementation tolerably fast. For example, it's clear that a reporting query on a 275-million row table is not going to be fun by anyone's definition, but that for most purposes, it can be pre-processed to various aggregated tables of significantly smaller sizes.

However, what is not obvious is what would be the best strategy for creating those tables. I'm working with MySQL 5.0 and Business Objects' Data Integrator XI, so I have a couple of options.

I can just CREATE TABLE ... SELECT ... to see how things work out. This approach is simple to try, but essentially unmaintanable; no good.

I can define the process as a BODI data flow. This is good in many respects, as it creates a documented flow of how the aggregates are updated, is fairly easy to hook up to the workflows which pull in new data from source systems, and …

Q from Sven - Are mysqlhotcopy and ibbackup only part of 6.0?
mysqlhotcopy is available in all releases. ibbackup is a separate offering that has been available for a long time

Q from Adam: Is the SQL based output portable to another database server engine e.g. MSSQL?
There are options of mysqldump that make the output as much generic as possible, and that is portable, but we can't guarantee it works with every RDBMS. The DDL is the less portable section

Q from Andrea: Is a hot mysqldump generally a good idea?
Unfortunately the answer is "it depends". With MyISAM, for example, this is not generally a good idea, since you have to lock the tables to make the dump consistent - i.e. it is not a hot dump anymore, you may call it "warm". With InnoDB the dump is consistent, provided we execute it with the Repeatable read isolation level.

…

Thanks to all of you who have attended! (and apologise for having posted this info after such a long time)
We have had lots of questions and very interesting feedback and suggestions.

You can find the slides and the Webex presentation here.

I would like to post more on this subject, specifically on snapshot backup, comparing the different options with NetApp, DRBD and LVM.

I’m reminded of an old painting, where there’s a meeting of minds. Since Heidelberg was largely informal (very few stand-up presentations with the audience sitting) with discussions, equally useful conversation and work were done over dinner, in hotel lobbies, and in-between sessions.

Meeting of the Minds: Kaj and Jeremy (large)

I particularly like this photo, as there’s lots of community contributors in the photo. Clockwise from Jeremy, we have Paul (Mr. PBXT, and now MyBS), Pascal (Mr. Yahoo!) and David (co-Founder).

I’m now uploading photos of birds, from our …