In case you missed its mention on Slashdot, the Financial Times has a funny (and telling) column today by James Boyle (Professor, Duke Law School) on the dark underbelly of the "long tail. You remember the long tail, right? It's manna from heaven - a chance for the Internet to enable a wider variety of sellers to find the wider variety of buyers than our previous markets have allowed.

Well, maybe life under the long tail isn't as rosy as life pontificating about the long tail, as Boyle discovers:

The academic in me has been very interested by the much hyped arrival of the “long tail” economy – the idea that the future lies in using the efficiency of the internet to sell smaller quantities of more goods (think of the astounding …

Almost six months ago, I firstly wrote about the effect the EPLA could have on software patents in Europe in this blog entry. I reiterated this concern on various occasions, including the Commission’s July 12 hearing. Earlier this month I published a two-page diagram and a three-page briefing document to explain the nature of the problem.

My related concerns are shared by a growing number of people and organizations. Yesterday, the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament issued …

I've been very lucky, I got a paper accepted for the Australian Computers in Education Conference which is being held 2-4 October in Cairns, Far North Queensland. So I'm heading North, about 1850 km, as I live in Brisbane in South-East Queensland. Cairns is a great place, I actually lived there for a while. It's where the tropical rainforest meets the great barrier reef.

So, about my talk. It's actually about a pet project of mine, and I prepared the paper together with Shaun Nykvist from the Queensland University of Technology. The paper is called Introduction to the pragmatic teaching of database concepts and in it we look at the possibilities for teaching relational database fundamentals without getting bogged down in theory. And we're not thinking "monkey-see monkey-do" …

My favorite question during Interview for people to work as MySQL DBAs or be involved with MySQL Performance in some way is to ask them what should be tuned in MySQL Server straight after installation, assuming it was installed with default settings.

I'm surprised how many people fail to provide any reasonable answer to this question, and how many servers are where in wild which are running with default settings.

Even though you can tune quite a lot of variables in MySQL Servers only few of them are really important for most common workload. After you get these settings right other changes will most commonly offer only incremental performance improvements.

key_buffer_size - Very important if you use MyISAM tables. Set up to 30-40% of available memory if you use MyISAM tables exclusively. Right size depends on amount of indexes, data size and workload - remember MyISAM uses OS cache to cache the data so you …

For some reason I keep asking myself "Could someone use Jabber as a transport for geographical replication?".

Weird thought aye? Biggest problem? Not enough of the replication calls are abstracted through any interface to make this happen (my current thinking is that they should be functions into handlerton... easy enough patch to do but no one has done it).

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve been working recently on documenting the Cluster utilities; I’m still working on ndb_config, but should get that into the Manual Real Soon Now™. In the meantime, here’s a tip I received from one of the developers. This generates a connectstring for use with data, SQL, or API nodes, using ndb_config, which you should be able to find in your mysql/bin directory:

ndb_config −−config-file=path/to/config.ini −−query=hostname,portnumber −−fields=: −−rows=, −−type=ndb_mgmd

For this to work, you need to have the Cluster management server running, with a viable config.ini at the location specified by path/to/config.ini.

Hope that someone finds this useful.

Yesterday afternoon, the EU’s internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy spoke in the European Parliament’s plenary in Strasbourg. The speech and ensuing debate as well as the vote on a resolution of the EP that has meanwhile been scheduled for October 12, had been announced about a week before.

In his statement on future action in the field of patents, McCreevy conceded that the proposed European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) leaves a lot to be desired in its present form. Firstly he acknowledged the recent motions for a resolution filed by four groups in the European Parliament criticizing the draft EPLA: “I am aware of some critical voices against the …

Jeff Bar recently wrote about MySQL and EC2:
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2006/09/amazon_ec2_mysq.html

Here are a few of my thoughts on EC2 and S3.

S3 to me means high latency, which for a lot of applications is a no go. Where do I think it would be brilliant? Some backup vendor, like Zmanda, should write a module to plugin their backup system to it. Why? What problem does it solve?

Offsite backups. These are the bane of the backup world. Sure, you make a backup, the first hurdle, but then how do you get it off premises? S3 and something like Zmanda would solve that. What does S3 mean for a database, aka MySQL? For MySQL it would be possible to write a replication reader that read the binary logs, aka the point in time recovery logs, to S3.

The problem with this plan is that the time for recovery, aka …

Kicking off day two of the Gartner Open Source Summit in Phoenix, Gartner gurus Yefim Natis and Niko Drakos hosted a "Mastermind panel" featuring Stuart Cohen (OSDL), Brian Behlendorf (Collabnet) and Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse Foundation). Here's my best efforts to capture the session in real time and I think I got about 90% of it. If I didn't get the words completely accurate, I hope I at leat captured the spirit of the conversation.  Some of the converation is a bit basic, but that's partly a reflection of the fact that Gartner is aimed at the mainstream.

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Version 0.1.152 of innotop is a small maintenance and bug-fix release. I found some more ways to make it deal with garbage input without crashing. Of course, that means it's harder to find errors because it doesn't complain and let me know they exist, but that's what you are for :-)