Horay, we finally made it work. Registration for the Open Source Developers' Conference 2007 is now open. For non-presenters, the earlybird price is $275 (until October 14th), after that the full conference price is $325. All regular tickets include the conference dinner!
Cool & affordable, right?

As a reminder: the OSDC 2007 conference dates are 26-29 November; location: Brisbane, Queensland. Peruse the overview of confirmed sessions. You simply must be there, otherwise you're just not cool, and evil geckos will eat your undies.

So what was the holdup with the registration stuff? I'll try to clarify:
Naturally we want to provide the option for credit card payment. The kind people at Common Ground where our conference system …

Each year I pick a topic to explore for conferences. I look at trends, do some research, and I write a slide deck to give a talk.

Then the learning begins. As I go around the country, and the world, giving the talk, I get to hear from others. Learning from the collective lets me find new ideas and refine my own thoughts on the topic. Some ideas I hear over and over, and these bubble to the top.

This year's topic was scaling. To date I've given the "Scaling" talk as a keynote three times, and as a regular session another four times (and I need to apologize to at least two conferences that I had to
skip or I would have delivered it another two times).

At the moment Architects are looking at two forms of scaling, Macro and Micro. The computing clouds, distributed processing systems, routing …

Object Relationship Mapping (ORM) is probably the best things that happened to enterprise software development since the invention of the Lego brick in 1949. Implementing the database access through ORM allows you to access the account data of a customer through the class 'Account' (with pure Java code), rather than having to mix SQL code in your Java classes. A framework does the job of translating your Java code to SQL statements and executing them though a JDBC connection.

ORM adoption has faced (and still does) a lot of resistance from the IT industry in general, but even more with enterprise software. Can't blame them: database access is a very common bottleneck for software that has intense use of data. Would you give away your fine tuned SQL scripts in favor of some 'magic bullet' that will automatically write that SQL for you at run-time?

It certainly does not help that many ORM frameworks did not work, or were simply not …

Object Relationship Mapping (ORM) is probably the best things that happened to enterprise software development since the invention of the Lego brick in 1949. Implementing the database access through ORM allows you to access the account data of a customer through the class 'Account' (with pure Java code), rather than having to mix SQL code in your Java classes. A framework does the job of translating your Java code to SQL statements and executing them though a JDBC connection.

ORM adoption has faced (and still does) a lot of resistance from the IT industry in general, but even more with enterprise software. Can't blame them: database access is a very common bottleneck for software that has intense use of data. Would you give away your fine tuned SQL scripts in favor of some 'magic bullet' that will automatically write that SQL for you at run-time?

It certainly does not help that many ORM frameworks did not work, or were simply not …

If you use mondrian's parent-child hierarchies, you will know that performance sucks unless you create closure tables. Closure tables expand the hierarchy, and allow mondrian to the operations required to roll-up a parent-child hierarchy using raw SQL: really fast.

The problem is populating the things. Closure tables contain what computer science profs. call a transitive closure of the parent-child relation (hence their name), and transitive closures aren't something which relational databases are very good at computing (which is why the database performs so much better when they're around). You can't just define a view, or write a simple SQL statement to populate them. Up til now, you'd have to use a stored procedure (if your database supports them) …

Skoll is a Community-Based Testing project out of the University of Maryland. Their first testing framework comes for MySQL. Watch Sandro Fouché, graduate researcher on this project, take you through what Skoll is, how it's beneficial, and how you can use it with an actual demo.

The Skoll testing client for MySQL can be downloaded here:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/skoll/contribute/

Unless you've been coding under a blogosphere rock  you've heard that NCover has now gone commercial.  NCover has become a staple in many developer toolboxes.  I can understand this move.  People are so busy today that it's becoming increasingly hard to get people to contribute time to a good open source project.  And even fewer contribute money.  Unless you are functionally wealthy (read: actually wealthy or a nothing-better-to-do college kid), finding the time to significantly push projects forward can be daunting.

So the guys behind NCover and NCoverExplorer have banded together and formed a new organization named Gnoso.  Their first product is NCover 2.0 (now up to 2.0.1) and is available in x32 professional and x64 enterprise editions.

While the prices of these two products are fair, I …

Microsoft says that Visual Studio packages are binary compatible from 2005 so any packages that loaded successfully into VS 2005 should work in VS 2008.  Err, no.  At least not with VS 2008 beta 2.  I admit it didn't take much of a change to fix things, but it wasn't seamless.

So, I just committed a patch to our trunk repository that enables Connector/Net in VS 2008 beta 2.  Here's a shot of it running.

This trunk repository will eventually be our 5.2 release and you can grab a sneak peek by pulling a snapshot from here. 

I probably don't spend quite enough time following progress around MySQL considering how critical the product is to us. I'd like to consider it part of the infrastructure in a way I treat Red Hat Enterprise Linux, ie something I can trust to make good progress and follow up on a quarterly basis. Naturally we have people who watch both much more closely, but my time simply should, and pretty much is, spent doing something else.

However, it seems MySQL really demands a bit more attention right now. Today I went and read Jeremy Cole's opinion about MySQL Community (a failure), and I have to say I agree on many of the points. MySQL simply has not yet found a model that works as well as that of Red Hat's Fedora vs Enterprise …

Craig Mullins has weathered a very heavy week in the ’sphere and published the 63rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, on Data Management Today. Log Buffer’s dance-card is almost empty now. LB wants your attentions! If you’re a new database blogger, editing and publishing an edition of LB on your [...]