OverviewTest suites are hard, but your business needs to have one.
They are hard because modern applications are complex.
Technology can help you. There are tools that can simplify the task of creating a thorough test suite.

Does your main business have a regression test?The likely answers to the above questions are:

• Yes. - Good chap. Keep up the good work. You may stop reading, but just out of curiosity, read on.
  
• No. I don't need one. - You may stop reading. Most likely your business is already doomed. :)
• No. I don't have time (don't know how) to make one. - Keep reading. There is something for you.

What's a regression test? Is a useful watchdog that tells you if your software is working the way it was intended to.
If you don't have one, you have no quick and reliable …

Wow! It has really been 4 months since my last post?? Moving over to development has cut into the time I had for blogging, documenting, communicating, you name it! We are coding like crazy.

Well, I'm back because I am heading out to ODTUG Kaleidoscope next week, and in preparation for the show, I decided to setup Pentaho on Oracle's Java Edition App Server, which is OC4J, which is based on the Orion app server. I was pleased that I managed the migration in less than a day, and I wanted to share the steps with all those folks who are too impatient to wait for this to get into our J2EE deployment distribution :)

Mind you, it takes a bit of tweaking, but it is certainly very do-able, and all server features are stable (minus the portal stuff, I didn't get a chance to address moving the portal over). Here is the repro of where I started, what I …

Today, Lenz was putting together some stats on PlanetMySQL feeds added since January this year, and asked in an email whether he should include totals in the stats. I responded yes, and offered a quick SQL solution to get those numbers out of the database. I thought it might be useful for others, so here goes...

Rolling sums (or averages) are a way to include a running, or rolling, aggregate of certain columns in the output of your SQL. For instance, let's say you want to list order totals, grouped by product category, but in each row of the final output, you wish to include the running total of all rows in the output up to and including the current row. A running sum would allow you to do such a calculation.

In the specific example that came up today, Lenz had the following SQL statement which listed the month the feed was …

By Tim O'Reilly

This story has been heard before: distribute millions of copies of your open source software for free, then build a business by servicing the customers who're using that software. Red Hat, JBoss, MySQL have all made a great success with this business model.

Why did it take so long for someone to figure out that this could also be a brilliant new take on the online advertising business? Step one: distribute a free, open source ad server; step two: package up the resulting publisher network for advertisers, regardless of which ad network they want to work with; step three: build additional services for those advertisers.

I caught up last week with Scott Switzer, OpenAds co-founder and community activist, to learn a bit more about OpenAds. It took me a few minutes to understand the OpenAds story (and even now, I may have a few details wrong.) As it turns …

From the city centre of Zurich to the major connecting points for travelling (main station, airport, motorways) it takes you an average of 7 minutes to get there. There's no other city in Europe that as fast to get out of. People argue wether this is a good or bad thing.

The Webtuesday people I met here in Zurich were coming from a couple of independent web-development shops and they are working on some of the top 20 Swiss websites. From the feedback, the talk was well received; overall, they found it interesting to learn about a new technology they could actually use. I'll be putting up the slides for the talk soon.

What I found most interesting were the discussions after the talk, when a couple of guys spend some time trying to apply CouchDb to the problems they currently face. The first bit of interest is that …

In May 2005, I wrote a widely-referenced article about how to efficiently archive and/or purge data from online transaction processing (OLTP) database servers. That article focused on how to write efficient archiving SQL. In this article I'll discuss archiving strategy, not tactics. OLTP servers tend to have complex schemas, which makes it important and sometimes difficult to design a good archiving strategy.

Yesterday night, I presented "Scaling InnoDB for Fotolog" at the New York MySQL Meetup. Judging from the number of questions, and how many people stayed after the presentation was over, I can say that it was a success.

I was very excited when I saw Partha Dutta (of Right Media) enter the room. Had really good chat with folks from New York Times.

Later, Kerry Ancheta, Partha, Michelle and I went to Les Halles. I had "cotes d'Agneau grillees au Romarin", which was really yummy.

A big thanks to Marc Simony of Logic Works for inviting me to speak and for sponsoring the event.

This article does not even contain the words database or MySQL. I still believe it is somewhat interesting.

Mail has, for some reason, always been playing a big role in my life. I have been running mail for two, my girlfriend and me, in 1988. I have been running mail for 20 and 200 people in 1992, setting up a citizens network. Later I designed and built mail systems for 2 000 and 20 000 person corporations, and planned mail server clusters for 200 000 and 2 million users. And just before I became a consultant at MySQL I was working for a shop that did mail for a living for 20 million users.

Mail is a very simple and well defined collection of services. You accept incoming messages to local users, you implement relaying for your local users with POP-before-SMTP and SMTP AUTH, you build POP, IMAP and webmail accesses, and you deploy spam filter systems and virus scanners for incoming and outgoing messages. This services …

Sun enhances multicore support for OpenSolaris. Oracle Enterprise Linux sets price performance benchmark record. Pentaho adds single sign on. (and more)

Sun Tunes Solaris Express Developer Edition for Enhanced Multicore Development, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Oracle Database Standard Edition One and Oracle Enterprise Linux on HP Set New World Record for Price Performance with TPC-C Benchmark, Oracle (Press Release)

Pentaho Enhances Enterprise Security for Open Source Business Intelligence, Pentaho (Press Release)

…

git clone http://consoleninja.net/code/dpm/dpm.git

Read the README, read the TODO. If you need a tarball, ask and I'll toss one up, or modify the post hook, or whatever.

What is this?

- A event based network daemon which implements the MySQL 5.0 client/server protocol. It implements the Lua scripting language. The scripting language is used for the meat of the functionality, while all of the common functions are done in C.

Why a preview and not a release?

- Proof that this thing exists, it works, and an example of its scripting API.
- An example to the community that some people do want this, or would find it useful.
- So people may start submitting feedback and patches. I'm fairly good at the theory, networking, blah, but so good at putting …