I find Wal-Mart fascinating. Wal-Mart is a near perfect example of Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma," in many ways. The very things that have made it spectacularly successful are also causing its stuttered growth, as BusinessWeek captures in this illuminating article.

...[Wal-Mart's] fundamental business problem is that selling for less no longer confers the overwhelming business advantage it once did. Low prices still define the chain's appeal to its best customers, the 45 million mostly low-income Americans who shop its stores frequently and broadly. But the collective purchasing power of the "loyalists," as Wal-Mart calls them, has shriveled in recent years as hourly wages have stagnated and the cost of housing and energy have soared.Even if this pool of low-income "loyalists" were flush with cash, Wal-Mart still has to …

mysqlconf mysqlconf07

In this episode, we take a walk through the Expo part of the MySQL Conference and Expo. We spoke with 3 companies about their solutions for backup and reporting.

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R1 Soft
http://r1soft.com

Actuate
http://www.actuate.com/birt
or
http://www.eclipse.org/birt

…

All of my slides:

Understand the plugin API
Scaling Web Applications
Storage Engine Tutorial
5.1 In Depth

I sometimes wonder what it might be like to be the smartest man in the room.

I’ve met lots of people that think they are the smartest man in the room, the worst are the ones that always try to convince everyone else.

Today I heard Eben Moglen give his presentation titled Freedom Businesses Protect Privacy to almost 1500 attendees at the mySQL Conference. He was brilliant, convincing, mesmerizing and frightening all at once. I’m already paranoid about my click stream, but after hearing him, it got me thinking about how I can protect my privacy even further.

I wish I had the podcast to quote him, but that will have to wait until it comes on line. For now lets just say that as far as the issues of privacy, freedom and technology’s ability to impact them for both good and evil, he’s was the smartest man in the room.

By …

Back when I first heard that the MySQL source code was being split into Enterprise and Community editions and that the Community edition binaries would be release only every few versions, I knew that there would soon be a project to provide binaries to the community of both editions by a third party.

It didn’t take too long. Here at the conference Solid and Proven Scaling introduced Dorsal Source, a site providing binaries of all community and enterprise releases of MySQL.

The builds are of course unofficial but certainly welcome by those needing a new version that is not being released in binary form by MySQL.

Unfortunately, I had to skip out on my presentation at this year’s MySQL Conference.

Thankfully, my friend Mike Hillyer was able to pinch hit for me. I had planned to do a podcast of the session, but - as he is totally awesome - Mike even recorded the session.

Real time. Roland has built a cool Pentaho application that collects data from MySQL performance tables and metadata views and shows reports on this performance, errors, etc. Cool stuff for DBAs.

Picture, total crap from the mobile

If, like me, your eyes were opened to the power of SQL by Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties, or even if they weren't, Beat Vontobel is a great speaker to hear. I use SQL every day, and I think I could use a talk like this every 6 months to remind me of the power of SQL as a declarative programming language.

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MySQL AB today announced the results of recent DBT2 benchmarks of its MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition database. The announcement was made this morning at the 2007 MySQL Conference & Expo. Tests were conducted in collaboration with Intel Corporation and Dolphin Interconnect Solutions.