It's finally here: a single-file download for all the tools in MySQL Toolkit. During this process I also upgraded every package in the toolkit to a new release, combining new versioning and some simple non-functional changes with (mostly minor) changes I'd committed but not yet released. Details are at the end of this post.

You might have noticed that there’s been quite a (mostly civil, I think) debate about RAID and scaling going on recently:

• I originally wrote a call for help in Help convince Dell to leverage LSI to Open Source MegaCli
• Kevin Burton followed up asserting that “RAID is dying” in MySQL and the The Death of RAID
• I responded to Kevin touting the benefits of RAID and giving my side in RAID: Alive and well in the real world
• Kevin responded, taking on a few of my points, in …

Call for Papers
Open Source Developers' Conference 2007 - Brisbane Australia
"Success in Development & Business"

OSDC is an Australian grass-roots conference providing Open Source developers with an opportunity to meet, share, learn, and of course show-off. OSDC focuses on Open Source developers building solutions directly for customers and other end users, anything goes as long as the code or the development platform is Open Source. Last year's conference attracted over 180 people, 60 talks, and 6 tutorials. Entry for delegates is kept easy by maintaining a low registration fee (approx $300), which always includes the conference dinner.

This year OSDC will be held in Brisbane (Australia) from the 26th to the 29th of November, with an extra dedicated stream for presentations on Open Source business development, case studies, software process, and project management. The theme for this year's conference is …

Booking.com, Europe?s largest online hotel reservation site, has selected the MySQL open source database to process tens of thousands of online bookings every day for over 30,000 hotels in 8,000 destinations worldwide. The Booking.com Web site, which is offered in 15 languages, manages its hotel information and reservation requests in a scale-out architecture consisting of approximately twenty MySQL database servers.

How good are your SQL and/or general coding skills? I have a specific challenge I’d like your help solving. I am not sure it’s possible, but I’d love to be proven wrong. I’ll explain some background for the problem first, and then pose the challenge at the end of the article. The problem Several of the algorithms I’ve been implementing require data to be partitioned for a divide-and-conquer approach. This is easy enough with numeric and even with temporal data, but character data is more difficult, and I don’t have a good strategy yet.

This screencast shows how a jMaki-wrapped Yahoo DataTable widget can be used to pull data from MySQL database using ActiveRecord in a Rails application. This is a screencast of the detailed instructions posted earlier.

Enjoy it here!

Technorati: jmaki rubyonrails ror …

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde

Dimensional modeling, explained by Ralph Kimball, provides industry specific techniques to ensure that:

1. The number of rows in the dimension tables is small. The row size can be large, row size is the sum of bytes stored for all the attributes in a row;
   
2. The row size of the fact table is small. The number of rows can be large, use range partitioning for fact tables with very large row counts.
   

The star schema thus created …

Timothy Lee writes a compelling argument against software patents in the New York Times today. It's the very same argument that Bill Gates advanced back in 1991 against software patents, but now has done a complete about-face. As Lee writes:[I]n recent years, [Microsoft] has argued that patents are essential to technological breakthroughs in software. Microsoft sang a very different tune in 1991. In a memo to his senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, ?If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today?s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete... READ MORE

We are working on Zmanda Management Console for our MySQL backup product line: Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL. ZRM for MySQL is an enterprise backup and recovery solution for MySQL.

We are looking for MySQL administrators in San Francisco bay area who would be interested in providing functionality and usability feedback for the user interface. We are particularly interested in MySQL administrators responsible for implementing backup solution for their MySQL databases. Please send an email to me (paddy-at-zmanda-dot-com) with your availability and why you would meet our requirement. We will pay a small stipend for your time.

I recently came across this blog post on using String.Compare instead of the tried and true method of converting one string to lowercase and comparing to a known lower case value.  It's important to remember that strings in .NET (as in Java) are immutable so the act of lower casing a string will always make a new string.  The memory subsystem for .NET is turned for  handling lots of small objects but the fewer objects you create, the fewer that have to be checked and managed by the garbage collection system.

Still I wondered what the time difference would be between the two approaches.  So I setup a very simple test where I compared the string "FooBar" to a string variable that contained the value "foobar" one million times.  The first test used the approach of …