Apparently all of Google's developers suck:

Despite attempts at education, our developers regularly write loops that retry indefinitely when a file is not present, or poll a file by opening it and closing it repeatedly when one might expect they would open the file just once.

Developers rarely consider availability. We find that our developers rarely think about failure probabilities.

Developers also fail to appreciate the difference between a service being up, and that service being available to their applications.

Unfortunately, many developers chose to crash their applications on receiving [a failover] event, thus decreasing the availability of their systems substantially.

A word of advice... Just make your hiring practices more rigid. Google is apparently at 10 interviews now. Just make it 20 …

It seems like just days ago we were wrapping up the 2006 MySQL Conference and now we've got another one in the works.  Next year's conference is once again jointly put on by MySQL and O'Reilly and we've got the Call For Papers open until November 6.  Having helped organize many conferences in the past, I know that many (most?) potential speakers wait until the last minute to submit their talks.   However, your odds of being accepted are actually higher if you submit your talk earlier since conference organizers try to lock in some of the talks early.   The most popular topics are those that show "best practices" of using MySQL in real world scale-out applications.  Additionally, topics on performance tuning, clustering, partitioning and database management are always welcome. 

The conference will be held in Santa …

I was poking around in the MySQL source code, namely in sql/sql_yacc.yy, and found a hidden treat: there's a SHOW COLUMN TYPES command. It's fun to read source code!

Pentaho Acquires Weka Project, Pentaho (Press Release)

MySQL Expands Telecom Services to Meet Growing Demand, MySQL (Press Release)

Project.net Integrates Project and Portfolio Management Application with Oracle Database 10g Express Edition, Project.net (Press Release)

OpenBI Introduces OpenQuick Suite Solutions, OpenBI (Press Release)

IT Industry Veteran Steve McManus Joins Zenoss Executive Team, Zenoss (Press Release)

…

MySQL AB today announced that it is expanding its telecom-specific services and consulting offerings to meet increased industry demand for MySQL-powered software. MySQL's momentum in the networking and telecommunications industry has been growing as a number of the industry's top carriers, operators and infrastructure ISVs select the MySQL and MySQL Cluster databases for low-cost, reliable and carrier-grade data management.

The final release of python 2.5 is out! The list of what’s new is pretty impressive, but I’m especially happy to have the new “with” statement. Ruby has block methods, or closures, which can be used for doing very clean setup/cleanup. While full-blown Anonymous block statements were rejected from Python, the new “with” statement handles the part I care about: making it easier to write code that works correctly in the case of failures.

The 3 typical use cases are a file that needs to be closed, a lock that needs to be released, and and a database transaction that needs to be either committed or rolled back. The database case is the …

Will NAND Flash / Solid State Disk (SSD) will be the future for Database I/O systems? Actually SSD are still limited in size (64 GB) and expensive (EUR 30/GB) and thus cannot yet compete with SCSI or IDE disks. But they also have an advantage. They are fast! For some uses like databases the price per GB is not that relevant. Also most of the databases fit into one or two 64 GB disks (more than 90%).

When you really get an I/O bottleneck you should consider to choose SSD:

Red Hat made an announcement yesterday concerning its acquisition of JBoss. The deal closed over 90 days ago and Red Hat was ready to talk specifics about integrating JBoss’ products and services into the Red Hat portfolio. This announcement has two main components:

• JBoss subscriptions are now available through Red Hat’s global channel partners, providing a much greater reach than existed previously.
• The Red Hat Application Stack aimed at LAMP and Java deployments. The stack includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), JBoss Application Server, Apache Tomcat, JBoss Hibernate, and support for MySQL and PostgreSQL. Additional LAMP components, such as Apache Web Server, PHP, and Perl, are included as part of RHEL.

In addition, Red Hat remains committed to JBoss multi-platform support. Although its new stack …

I wanted to quickly mention a couple community members who have contributed to the MySQL Forge this week, in completely different ways.

That Damn Error 2003

Long-time MySQL Forum extraordinaire, Bill Karwin, has put together a wiki page in the Forge wiki on the various causes and solutions to perhaps the most common MySQL error encountered by newbies (or even veterans who haven't installed MySQL in a while... ).

So, why does this page deserve mention? A few reasons. First, the wiki page highlights both Windows and *nix solutions. Too many times, users of Windows or *nix have a tendency to forget (or ignore) the fact that the other side of the equation even exists. Bill does a great job in balancing the OS worldview and providing insight on how to diagnose and fix connection issues on both major platforms. Secondly, he has …