In my blog post before the holidays, I briefly mentioned that we were adding a second full-time open source analyst to The 451 Group. I’d like to introduce Jay Lyman, although for many of you, Jay will be a familiar name in the open source world already. Jay’s focus at The 451 Group will be Linux operating systems and distributors, virtualization, databases and other free and open source software. Conveniently for me, Jay is located in Portland, Oregon, and with the two of us here, I can now state with greater validity that Portland is The 451 Group’s ‘open source office.’

Prior to joining The 451 Group, Jay was a daily writer for LinuxInsider and TechNewsWorld, where he covered open source and a range of other IT topics from 2003 to 2006. Jay also covered open source software communities, development and products as a contributing editor with NewsForge from 2004 to 2006. He has been a regular contributor to other technology …

Dear Stupid Web,

Here is a crazy idea.

Every website that has events should publish an ical file. Just like they publish RSS, they should publish their events based on dates. ICS files with VCALENDAR entries are easy to publish.

Today when I look in my browser it looks in the header for a line that looks like this:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://tangent.org/index.pl?node=rss" />

I want to see something like the above with calendaring information. I can subscribe to it, so therefor I want my browser to auto discover it.

Calendaring is more then just shoving it into a database, its about finding events and being alerted to them.

And no, don't just put the events into RSS since my calendaring program doesn't know RSS, it knows about …

Been wanting to play with Falcon?

The tree is now public:
http://mysql.bkbits.net:8080/mysql-5.2-falcon

Instructions can be found here on how to download and compile from the source trees:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/installing-source-tree.html

Just to point this out:
1) Don't use this in production.
2) Don't assume you can upgrade from it
3) While we haven't designed it to crash, this is compiling from a source tree so bugs are very likely (please report bugs to bugs.mysql.com)

The changeset that is likely to become the Alpha is "Cset 1.2384"

Have fun!

BÃ¥rd published a short note on his blog that the call for papers for the 5th annual eZ Conference is now open. Deadline for submissions is February 1st.

The conference is worth attending not only for eZ Publish or eZ Components users and geeks, it is also interesting if you’re interested in content and knowledge management or PHP/LAMP in general. Last year, I enjoyed talking to guests such as Martin White and Anne Jubert, Rasmus Lerdorf and David Axmark …

Every programmer loves to optimize, even when we know we shouldn't. To satisfy your cravings MySQL has several keywords that can be placed in your SQL statement to give the database server an explicit optimization instruction.

I should point out that using the hints incorrectly will most likley cause your queries to perform worse, so be sure that it actually makes sense to use them before you go nuts. This means use EXPLAIN and read the documentation on each hint before using.

It's also a good idea to enclose the hints within a SQL comment, for example SELECT /*! SQL_NO_CACHE */ columns FROM table. This can help to make your application a bit more portable.

Let's take a look at some MySQL Optimization Hints:

SQL_NO_CACHE

The SQL_NO_CACHE hint turns off MySQL's …

At the end of November, I activated Google Analytics to db4free.net, so now I have the data for a whole month which already shows some interesting facts about where the visitors come from, which browsers and operating system they use etc.

Very interesting is the Geo Map Overlay:



This is based on 5,736 visitors. The total number of pageviews is 21,854.

2,831 visitors used the Internet Explorer - 2,210 of them version 6.0 and 601 used version 7.0, 20 used an older version.

2,303 visitors used Firefox - 1,454 used Firefox 2.0 and 742 used Firefox 1.5 (and the rest older versions).

434 visitors used Opera.

The use of operating systems splits up as follows: 5,402 visitors use Windows (4,929 of them Windows XP), 235 use Linux and 85 MacOS.

1,014 new users registered for a new …

I just found this new HowTo at www.howtoforge.org:

http://www.howtoforge.org/secure_mysql_connection_ssh_tunnel

It describes how to set up a secure tunnel between your MySQL Server and a locally running MySQL Administrator using Putty. I haven't tried it out myself, but I strongly assume that this works for all the other GUI tools as well.

Jim Starkey's Falcon storage engine for MySQL is now available as open source.

Brian "krow" Aker has more on Falcon.

Scalability is going to be a huge focus from the community this year due to recent changes at MySQL. Tweakers.net has a pretty good breakdown of the present mySQL binary with and without the fix to INNODB scalability bug.

Tweakers.net also has an interesting comparison of POSTGRES on various platforms. It's behaving nicely under high concurrency, much better then INNODB even with the patch to it's scalability bug. If Falcon ever gets released it would be nice to Bench it.

If I get some time, I might run some of my own benchmarks to see what else can be squeezed out of MySQL.

Ismael at IT Redux claims an 83% success rate on his 2006 predictions and I like his picks for 2007. Besides the love for Mule, his notion that "the first Open Source database vendor (EnterpriseDB, Ingres, or MySQL) to release a plug-compatible replacement for the Oracle database that can support the SAP R/3 applications for over 10,000 concurrent users will get the best home run in database history since Sybase" is dead on. The legacy burden of SAP is monstrous. The OSS vendors that figure out how to make things work with SAP (in addition to trying to displace it) have a huge market opportunity.

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