I was at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo earlier today to participate in a panel on next generation web 2.0 platforms and how the hardware, software and network infrastructure would evolve.  The panel had a diverse crowd ranging from a Microsoft dude who had experience with 1,000+ server scale-out scenarios, a networking appliance guru from Crescendo Networks, one of the guys from Amazon's EC2 web services initiative and the moderator Alistair Croll from Coradiant who is a serious data center infrastructure and performance management wiz. Being a software guy, it had a bit more hardware / networking focus than I'm used to. 

As …

Robin Schumacher recently gave us an excellent rundown on sessions at the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo (April 23-26th in Santa Clara) for DBAs. As a proud developer I wanted to make sure that our enormous developer community had a similar guide. Now, developers will encounter the same problem that Robin pointed out: with so many excellent sessions, you'll be required to make some difficult choices sometimes in what sessions you attend. This guide will hopefully allow you to navigate the waters. I've broken the guide down into a general section and also into programming language specific sections.

I posted a note last week about the new beta of MySQL 5.1 being released (5.1.17). One thing that we believe needs a special call out is the fact that prepared statements can now work with the query cache. Observe:

Enter password: *******
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 3
Server version: 5.1.17-beta-community-nt-debug MySQL Community Server (GPL)
        
Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.
        
mysql> show global variables like '%query_cache%';
+------------------------------+---------+
| Variable_name                | Value   |
+------------------------------+---------+
| have_query_cache             | YES     |
| query_cache_limit            | 1048576 |
| query_cache_min_res_unit     | 4096    |
| query_cache_size             | 8388608 |
| query_cache_type             | ON      |
| query_cache_wlock_invalidate | OFF     |
+------------------------------+---------+
6 rows in …

In the spirit of our Free Ride program, Proven Scaling is offering fifty (50) free MySQL certification vouchers at this year’s MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California from April 23 through April 26.

You must be present at the conference to pick up the free passes, and they are only good at the at-conference certification testing area during the conference itself on April 24-26. Each voucher is good for one test, but it’s up to you which test you take.

Go to Proven Scaling FreeCert to enter!

I just pushed out version 0.03 of the awss3 storage engine.

There should be no user visible changes, it's all under the hood stuff.

Available via hg and tarball.

Rod Johnson, author of the Spring framework, thinks open source is hot right now, but its a “bubble” ready to burst, according to an article titled What Makes An Open Source Project Successful? by Charles Babcock.

Most open source projects are supported by an army of volunteers who buy into the hype, but “capitalism will inevitably reassert itself” and developers will find they need to put more effort into steady jobs and private lives, leaving “open source zombies”–unsupported, unmaintained projects–he predicts.

This is true, with many a project, that hasn’t built a successful ecosystem. Keep in mind that with the gazillion text editors out there, not all stand the test of time, like Emacs and vim do. Capitalism is always going to win hands down, because money in its essence is important to survival. Go …

We’ve been doing some tests with medium sized data sets lately.  We extracted around half a year of data (514M rows) from a warehouse where we’re doing a database partitioning and clustering test.
Below is an example where we copy +500M rows from one database to another one that is partitioned. (MS SQL Server to MySQL 5.1).  This is done using the following transformation.  In stead of just using one partitioned writer, we used 3 to speed up the process. (lowers latency).

Copying 500M rows is just as easy as copying a thousand, it just takes a little longer…

It would have completed the task a lot faster if we wouldn’t have been copying to a single table on DB4 at the same time. (yep, again 500M rows) This slowed down the transformation to the maximum speed of DB4.  That being said, if you still had any doubt about Pentaho Data Integration being able to copy large volumes of data, …

The presentation How to Be a Consultant has been posted to the Midlands PASS Chapter website. The presentation was given by Midlands PASS Vice President and Treasurer, Ben DeBow, of CounterLogic.com. There's a lot of great information on succeeding as an independent consultant from one who has been doing just that for a while now. It is not specific to any technology but rather focuses on the business side of being a consultant.


Technorati Tags: SQL Server | Microsoft SQL Server | …

Dirk Riehle has posted a paper on the The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software: Stakeholder Perspectives.

Let us take this article apart.


..should use open source software to grow their user communities and build an ecosystem around their products and services..


A good product is a good product. If we look at this from the stand point of the web has Livejournal been any more successful then Google because it open sourced its framework? I don't think so. Both exist because they delivered value. I've never been sure about why Brad open sourced LJ in the beginning but I don't believe it was because he thought the masses would contribute in mass to its evolution (and I speak as someone who has sent in patches and have had them accepted in the code). Open source had little to do …