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/).

It's been an exciting week again with my MySQL colleagues (PS team). We don't see each other lots, but when we do, we do it good! Last evening was fun playing a MySQL Trivia. Like, when did Monty wrote the first lines of code or who joined before our CEO Marten got in the company. Good thing we had Max in our team, we won!

Orlando is, I've been told, maybe not a good starting point to get a taste of US. It's like a big entertainment place with restaurants linking amusement parks. However, via Chad and his wife Mary Ellen, we got to know some other folks. We went to a bar and that was great experience. The Orlando downtown bar on a roof was also very interesting, good music there.

Either ways, I'm happy I'm going home soon. In a land where you get a 20oz T-bone steak or 3 cm think pork chop, I wouldn't survive long. Probably going to other states will be good to know this big country, but I'm not in a hurry. There's still …

It's been an exciting week again with my MySQL colleagues (PS team). We don't see each other lots, but when we do, we do it good! Last evening was fun playing a MySQL Trivia. Like, when did Monty wrote the first lines of code or who joined before our CEO Marten got in the company. Good thing we had Max in our team, we won!

Orlando is, I've been told, maybe not a good starting point to get a taste of US. It's like a big entertainment place with restaurants linking amusement parks. However, via Chad and his wife Mary Ellen, we got to know some other folks. We went to a bar and that was great experience. The Orlando downtown bar on a roof was also very interesting, good music there.

Either ways, I'm happy I'm going home soon. In a land where you get a 20oz T-bone steak or 3 cm think pork chop, I wouldn't survive long. Probably going to other states will be good to know this big country, but I'm not in a hurry. There's still …

Charlie Babcock has a fantastic article on the rising tide of open source in the latest edition of InformationWeek. As I've written recently, the bar is getting lower to launch a successful open source business. That said, there are tens of thousands of lame open source projects, for every good one (the same is true of proprietary software, btw). As Babcock writes:

There are 139,834 open source projects under way on SourceForge, the popular open source hosting site. Five years from now, only a handful of those projects will be remembered for making lasting contributions--most will remain in niches, unnoticed by the rest of the world. For every Linux, Apache, or MySQL, dozens of other open source efforts fizzle out. …

innotop 1.3.5 is the latest release of the increasingly popular MySQL and InnoDB monitor. I recommend everyone upgrade to this release. Aside from incomplete documentation, it's close to a stable 1.4 release (I'm counting on you to find the bugs!). There are many significant new features since version 1.3, which make it more powerful and easier to use.

Note: Part I is located at the page that describes part one

Disclaimer
Just a minor clarification to anyone that was confused: I am currently experiencing Sphinx for the first time. Everything I’m writing about is new to me as well, for the most part. So far, I’m drooling over some of it’s capabilities; I may come back in a month and rip it a new ass hole.

Back to Configuration… (not really, this is the bitching section)

In preparation for my previous post about Sphinx, I had originally played with a number of configuration options, and even encountered a couple of issues that caused my confused butt to have to debug a number of things, and even recompile --with-debug and gdb the thing …

innotop 1.3.5 is the latest release of the increasingly popular MySQL and InnoDB monitor. I recommend everyone upgrade to this release. Aside from incomplete documentation, it’s close to a stable 1.4 release (I’m counting on you to find the bugs!). There are many significant new features since version 1.3, which make it more powerful and easier to use. Here’s what’s new: Support for colorizing rows. Default color rules are included for Q, T and M modes; it’s easy to write your own.

Over-the-Top Tales from the Trenches. Motto: Bringing order to the chaos of every day DBA life. Dear Diary, Are we there yet? How much farther? Ever heard this during a recovery of a downed database? The poor thing has either a minor scratch, requires immediate attention, or is dead on arrival (DOA). You could cut the tension in the air with [...]