Hey all -

Just wanted to thank everyone who has been using and testing the new Falcon transaction storage engine. Our first alpha release was downloaded over 52,000 times in January alone. Be looking for a new alpha release soon that has some performance improvements and other changes.

Also, I just started a new 3-part article series on Falcon that goes through the engine in detail, so be sure to check out part 1 on our articles page when you get a chance.

Thanks again - and be sure to shoot me your feedback (both good and bad) on Falcon.

On Tuesday our CIO, Johann-Peter Hartmann, gave a Web-seminar about security issues in the Web 2.0 era. We had about 140 participants and some very good questions in the following Q&A Session. We would like to thank you for the response and also we´d like to thank Jürgen from MySQL, our webinar-host.

We uploaded our slides as promised. To download them, click here.

If you missed the Web-Seminar you get a chance to see the recording of it here.
But be aware: It´s in german!!!

For english readers/speakers: Johann held an english security talk some time ago. Find it here

We already heard that …

So it's been a very long time again between posts. So much has happened. Let me first begin by saying that I am very impressed with iSCSI performance and I believe that it is mature enough to actually run production workloads (but it really depends on the type of workload).

After all of the benchmarking and analysis, we finally decided on moving forward with a purchase of an iSCSI storage solution. For the types of queries we run (large amount of records to scan, small resultset returned) we had to tweak the schema just a bit in order to realize the performance that we desired (that plus good quality fibre-channel drives to get that extra oomph that's needed).

Bottom line is we had to make a significant investment in hardware in order to realize the benefits of having a proper storage solution in place. The benefits though outweigh the overwhelming maintenance required to keep all of the machines running. Backups using …

Registration is now open for the 2007 MySQL Conference & Expo, which will take place April 23-26 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. The conference is poised to offer more than 110 sessions and tutorials geared to show participants how to rapidly build innovative database applications that can scale as an enterprise grows. Attendees that take advantage of early registration by March 14th can save $200 off the standard conference fee of $1195.

While looking through my new Vista, I found out that my cpu is 64bit capable! I was like.. OMFG hell yeah! I whipped out the 64bit Vista DVD and nuked all my hard work of setting up software without even giving it a second thought… About 20 mins later, I was back in my new found love, except this time I dove right into installing software. One by one, I get basic stuff installed in following order:

1. daemon tools (went out and got the upgraded vista version) no problems
2. Microsoft Office 2007 ultimate, uh.. thank god no problems there
3. McAfee VirusScan, ofcourse problems.. knew that from 32 bit version but what the hell.. was worth a try
4. Trillian - another no problem
5. VMWare Server………………………………………….PROBLEMS! Sigh.. they don’t support 64bit Vista. Who would’ve known? They support installing 64bit version as virtual machines but then why they don’t …

I'll be in Vancouver starting on February 12th till the afternoon of the 13th. I'm giving the keynote on the second day of the Vancouver PHP conference. The topic is on scaling out websites and for once it will be a completely new slide deck :)

There will be plenty of information on MySQL and other web infrastructure components like Apache. I will be covering both what is hot in design at the moment and the evolution that most sites go through while growing.

There I was sitting and working and minding my own business when I heard bunch of noise outside of my office. So I took my headphones off to tune in to the conversation. One of the developers has gone out and bought Windows Vista Ultimate edition and was talking about installing it and trying it out. I have always tried out all of the Windows flavors since 3.1 as soon as they came out and even did beta runs for NT 4, XP, 2000, 2003 and even Vista. But for some reason after installing and running beta 2 of Windows Vista, I wasn’t very impressed. But when they were talking about installing Vista, I myself got curious to find out how good/bad is the released version. So I went and got myself a copy of Vista Ultimate as well.

I didn’t want to destroy my laptop so I decided to install it on my old computer. The specs of that computer are:

Intel Pentium 3.2 with hyperthreading, 2 gig ram, Nvidia GeForce Ultra with Dual DVI

…

The second episode in my speaker spotlight series features Jess Balint, a software developer at MySQL who, like Reggie in Episode 1, also works on the MySQL Connectors team.

Jess will be presenting a session called "XA with MySQL and Java ? J2EE and Spring". I'm not a big Java guy, myself, and know pitifully little about J2EE, Spring, and the myriad acronyms all beginning with J that almost every Java developer has to know (it's almost another language, those acronyms, don't you think? ).

But, luckily for us, Jess knows Java. He knows it very, very well. And he's willing to share that knowledge with conference attendees interested in the distributed, coordinated transaction processing called XA. I asked Jess why he chose to talk about XA and Java, and what he's been working on recently. He wrote back:

Hi Jay. Java has definitely …

OK, so a number of you may have noticed some major gumming up of PlanetMySQL over the last week or so. Some feeds were not appearing at all, and yet other feeds were inserting entries that had nothing to do with MySQL — entries that previously never made it into the PlanetMySQL database. Here's the story on what happened, how I screwed everything up, and how I figured out what was going on...

The Backstory

All of the problems stemmed from a well-intentioned effort on my part to figure out why certain feeds weren't being properly aggregated by the PlanetMySQL feed reader. Arjen wrote the PlanetMySQL feed reader originally, back in 2005, and it has performed admirably up until this point. The feed reader uses the Magpie RSS library for its grunt work, and has a filtering system that allows the Planet administrators to assign a regular expression filter to a specific feed so that entries not related to MySQL don't get inserted into …

Solid has released 5.0.27-0058, which is the first point release after our GA in December. It is primarily a bug fixing release. You can get it from the usual place (http://dev.soliddb.com/download/).