Buy the ticket, take the ride --Hunter S. Thompson

The star schema and bitmap indexes are a marriage made in heaven. The bitmap indexes and their use in accelerating star schema joins is currently available in commercial databases only. Corollary: never buy a database for data warehousing that does not support star schema joins using bitmap indexes.

The advantages of bitmap indexes compared to b-tree indexes are:

1. Small
   
2. Extremely fast AND operations on individual indexes created for each low cardinality attribute
   
3. Fast creation, no sorts required
   

The following bitmap indexes are created on the star schema example shown, to optimize the star schema join:

1. With Oracle, one bitmap index is created for each foreign key on the fact table: …

I really like this thread:

“OpenBSD is free as in air,” Theo de Raadt [interview] stated in a recent thread on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list. The discussion began with a note that the Open Sound System [story] had recently been “open sourced” under the GPLv2 and CDDL leading Theo to comment, “noone cares about being Open and Free anymore. They just care about being called Open and Free, and how convenient — a bunch of laywers generated an organization that will label then Open and Free when they are not in fact so.”

This is an interesting statement.

The GPL and BSD licensing camps have always had a core fundamental difference in theory. If GPL is copy-left and Microsoft is copyright then the BSD is copy-center.

What’s nice about the BSD license is that there’s NO complexity. You can turn around and sell the code if you want to and just …

Roland’s giving his talk on MySQL Stored Procedures at the e Dutch PHP conference. Mostly basics, but with a good extended focus on how work with SPs from PHP.

It’s obviously something that interests people: Quite an audience has shown up even though most have never even gotten as far as reading the manual sections on SPs, much less attempted to use them.

Highlights:

• mysqlnd is a native driver for PHP, i.e. it’s written in pure PHP and does not depend on libmysql. Should be …

I’m working with Roland in the Netherlands in the next couple of days, and we timed the visit to coincide with the Dutch PHP conference taking place today.

I just attended the Zend framework presentation by Gaylord Aulke of Zend.
There were some good pointers, among which was that there is currently some 60+ PHP MVC implementations out there all with different strengths and weaknesses. The Zend framework aims not only at implementing MVC, but also ads a “Meta-framework” of defining coding styles, etc. And — perhaps most importantly for many — ensuring that every component in the framework carries the same license terms.

The framework is expected to be released as v. 1.0 Real Soon Now(tm), being in final RC at the moment.

My …

I'm back from the MySQL EMEA Support Team meeting.. and it was just fantastic!

Most know that MySQL is a virtual company and we don't see to much colleagues. Most goes via our internal IRC server, email and phone. However, we in Support for example, try to meet up each year. This year we did it a bit differently by actually gathering and actively doing support together (in Bielefeld, Germany). You know, like in a real office!

The cool thing about the EMEA Support Team, and I can safely say this for the global Support Team, is that we simple play along very well. Each of us comes with baggage of experience when joining MySQL. Most importantly, we think mostly alike. When we disagree we settle or make it better. For people only meeting up once a year or less it is just spectacular!

It's also lots of fun and drinking beers, socializing and sleeping together.. I mean sharing rooms! Fact that I had my …

Made some commits to my proxy for MySQL tonight. These are significant enough that they warrant another preview post.

original post

git clone http://consoleninja.net/code/dpm/dpm.git - to get the latest code, always
http://consoleninja.net/code/dpm/dpm-export.tar.gz - a tarball of the latest code, for those unwilling to git.

This feels more like a "real" preview now. Aside from one silly bug, it looks like I fixed most of the really bad stability issues. There're still a handful left, but I was pretty abusive just now and wasn't able to break it.

Grab it, build it, read the README.

The demo allows you to do some fun things:

- …

Made some commits to my proxy for MySQL tonight. These are significant enough that they warrant another preview post.

original post

git clone http://consoleninja.net/code/dpm/dpm.git - to get the latest code, always
http://consoleninja.net/code/dpm/dpm-export.tar.gz - a tarball of the latest code, for those unwilling to git.

This feels more like a "real" preview now. Aside from one silly bug, it looks like I fixed most of the really bad stability issues. There're still a handful left, but I was pretty abusive just now and wasn't able to break it.

Grab it, build it, read the README.

The demo allows you to do some fun things:

- …

I'm back from the MySQL EMEA Support Team meeting.. and it was just fantastic!

Most know that MySQL is a virtual company and we don't see to much colleagues. Most goes via our internal IRC server, email and phone. However, we in Support for example, try to meet up each year. This year we did it a bit differently by actually gathering and actively doing support together (in Bielefeld, Germany). You know, like in a real office!

The cool thing about the EMEA Support Team, and I can safely say this for the global Support Team, is that we simple play along very well. Each of us comes with baggage of experience when joining MySQL. Most importantly, we think mostly alike. When we disagree we settle or make it better. For people only meeting up once a year or less it is just spectacular!

It's also lots of fun and drinking beers, socializing and sleeping together.. I mean sharing rooms! Fact that I had my …

Diary: Saturday 16th June 2007

Today, Miss She-BA Sheeri Kritzer married partner Tony in Boston. For those that remember, Sheeri was the 2007 Community Advocate of the Year at the MySQL Conference.

The official photos and videos are already up, so I’ve add my snaps online now. This was an excellent day, it had some the best planning I’ve seen in a …

Well, the foundations for the Traffic Analyzer module were finally laid today; the basic classes of the module are now up in the SVN repository.

So far I've only constructed the classes for Unix and not Windows, I've created a separate branch for the Windows code but the associated directory is currently empty. Of course, there may be source files which will end up being common to both branches, however I don't think that maintaining a more complex directory structure in order to have both branches share common source files is something that's currently necessary (or something I currently know how to do!).

So right now the Traffic Analyzer can detect packet traffic and deconstruct packets sequentially using some clever pointer logic and special structs; nothing new there. There are a few command line arguments that the user can use to customize how the program runs and I've even included the old ConfigReader class from …