On Tuesday (March 20th) I am doing a talk on "Real World Web Scalability" for the Los Angeles Perl Mongers. The talk isn't specific to Perl at all, so if you are in the area and work with web technologies it's likely it'd be worth a couple of hours of your time. I've been doing variations on this talk for a few years and if I may say so myself it's getting pretty good.

I am giving a tutorial next month with Jay Pipes (oops, I got his name swapped with another Jay in an earlier edition of this post - sorry Jay!) at the MySQL Conference with similar content but where I have 90 minutes for it rather than the usual 45-55. I'm excited about that because it means I'll have time to a) slow down a little bit, b) add more content and c) take questions at the end! …

MySQL Table Sync efficiently finds and resolves data (not structural) differences between two MySQL tables, which may be on different servers. It offers two search algorithms to find the rows that differ, and several methods to bring the destination table into sync with the source. It’s based on my earlier discussion on how to find and resolve data differences between MySQL tables and is part of the MySQL Toolkit project.

MySQL Toolkit's Show Grants tool makes it easy to extract grants from a MySQL server in canonical form. You can use it to replicate grants between servers, diff grants, and avoid spurious changesets in version control systems.

No, not another post about AJAX.

Instead, I'm thinking about A Digital Life by Gordon Bell in this month's Scientific American. The author is talking about the ability to set up computers and sensors to record all the experiences of a person during his or her lifetime. While I really don't want that for myself, I do think this is the future of user interface. Namely, the end of the concept of "user interface."

One day, it will seem strange that there was once a concept such as user interface. Instead, devices of all stripes will follow us around, record what we're doing, and then coordinate with each other to make our lives easier. The computer will become simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible. A terminal screen with a keyboard would be as quaint as an RCA Victorola.

…

MySQL Toolkit’s Show Grants tool makes it easy to extract grants from a MySQL server in canonical form. You can use it to replicate grants between servers, diff grants, and avoid spurious changesets in version control systems. It’s part of the Maatkit project on Google Code. It’s a fairly simple tool that connects to a MySQL server, issues SHOW GRANTS, and prints the results. By default it prints grants for every user, but you can specify users to show and users to ignore.

I'm so excited right now, because I just got Eben's abstract for his OSBC keynote this May 22, 2007 (San Francisco). Eben will be joining Matthew Szulik (CEO, Red Hat), Marc West (CIO, H&R Block), Marten Mickos (CEO, MySQL), Rob Curley (VP, Product Development, Washingtonpost.com/Newsweek Interactive), and Lee Thompson (Chief Technologist, E*Trade) as OSBC keynotes, but Eben always stands apart in any crowd.

Here's his session:

Copyleft Business Models: Why It's Good Not To Be Your Competitor's Free Lunch

Abstract: Now that the GPL wars are over, and we have two good GPLs to choose from, it is time to re-ask some fundamental questions about business models and software licenses. In this talk, I explain why smaller software-focused businesses will soon be deserting Apache- and BSD-style permissive licenses for GPL[2 3] and their …

So, the sitch as of today:

Added ndb_mgm_set_configuration() call to the mgmapi - which is not-so-casually evil API call that sends a packed ndb_mgm_configuration object (like what you get from ndb_mgm_get_configuration) to the management server, who then resets its lists of nodes for event reporting and for ClusterMgr and starts serving things out of this configuration. Notably, if a data node restarts, it gets this new configuration.

By itself, this will let us write test programs for online configuration changes (e.g. changing DataMemory).

I’ve also added a Disabled property to data nodes. If set, just about everywhere ignores the node.

This allows a test program to test add/drop node functionality - without the need for external clusterware stopping and starting processes.

If you start with a large cluster, we can get a test program to disable some nodes and do an initial cluster restart …

So my timeout patches for the MySQL Cluster Management API have been finished. This should solve a lot of people’s problems writing management API  applications that want to do something sane when the management server either dies or gets somehow disconnected from you.

More importantly I should say, the autotest run looks good. It passed 199 tests in the daily-basic suite… which is a new record (I added some tests, so that could be classified as cheating)… probably would have been 200 if a sporadically failing test hadn’t failed :(

During my trip back to Melbourne, Jonas will probably apply these to a bunch of trees (at least some of the telco release) - with 5.1 coming at some point.

We welcome back for a second time Lisa Dobson, who has published the 36th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, on the Oracle Newbies Blog. The editorship of Log Buffer is distributed amongst volunteers. There are a few editors lined-up for the coming weeks, but there’s always room for more. [...]

In addition to launching RHEL 5 earlier this week, Red Hat previewed their forthcoming online marketplace Red Hat Exchange, or RHX.  While no date has been announced, Red Hat has identified an initial set of partners which includes a who's who of leading commercial open source companies such as Alfresco, JasperSoft, MySQL, Pentaho, SugarCRM, Zimbra and Zmanda, among others. Under the Red Hat Exchange, customers will be able to buy support subscriptions for these products directly from Red Hat's web site giving newer companies direct access to Red Hat's installed base. And for Red Hat customers, they get the proverbial "one throat to choke" ensuring compatibility and integrated support. 

RHX is the brainchild of long-time Red Hat employees Matt Mattox and Mike Evans and I expect more details will be coming in the months that follow.  But in case …