The Drupal community just recently released another alpha test release of their upcoming Drupal 7 version, to shake out the remaining bugs and to encourage more users to test it.

If you would like to give it a try, but you don't have a free server handy, how about using a virtual machine instead? Using the fabolous SuSE Studio, I've created an appliance based on openSUSE 11.3, Drupal 7.0-alpha7 and MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled (both for the …

MariaDB just released MariaDB 5.1.50. Linux, Solaris and Windows (32-bit) are supported. Go give it a twirl.

Its also worth noting that today when you go install Drupal, and check out the documentation for requirements, you’ll see that MariaDB is now a recommended option.

Via the new news page at Monty Program’s newly designed website, I also found out that MariaDB is now recommended in the documentation for the next release of the Zend Framework. See the …

The future of open source licensing. OpenSolaris governing board quits. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Glyn Moody asked which open source software licensing is best for the future?

# The OpenSolaris Governing Board has collectively and expectedly resigned.

# OpenBravo has updated its rapid implementation ERP offering for small and mid-sized businesses, Openbravo QuickStart. …

This blag was originally posted at http://cafuego.net/2010/05/26/fast-paging-real-world

Some time ago I attended the “Optimisation by Design” course from Open Query¹. In it, Arjen teaches how writing better queries and schemas can make your database access much faster (and more reliable). One such way of optimising things is by adding appropriate query hints or flags. These hints are magic strings that control how a server executes a query or how it returns results.

An example of such a hint is SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS. You use it in a select query with a LIMIT clause. It instructs the server to select a limited numbers of rows, but also to calculate the total number of rows that would have been returned without the limit clause in place. That total number of rows is stored in a session variable, which can be retrieved …

Some time ago I attended the "Optimisation by Design" course from Open Query¹. In it, Arjen teaches how writing better queries and schemas can make your database access much faster (and more reliable). One such way of optimising things is by adding appropriate query hints or flags. These hints are magic strings that control how a server executes a query or how it returns results.

An example of such a hint is SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS. You use it in a select query with a LIMIT clause. It instructs the server to select a limited numbers of rows, but also to calculate the total number of rows that would have been returned without the limit clause in place. That total number of rows is stored in a session variable, which can be retrieved via SELECT FOUND_ROWS();  That simply reads the variable and clears it on the server, it doesn't actually have to look at any table or index data, so it's very fast.

…

The White House contributes to OSS. Growth for Pentaho and MuleSoft. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# The White House released some of the custom code it has developed for whitehouse.gov as open source.

# Pentaho reported 229% bookings growth and 177% Enterprise Edition customer growth in Q2.

# MuleSoft grew bookings by 140% in Q1.

# The beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is now available, without Xen.

…

I have an interesting problem, on a data migration project I'm currently working on. I'm importing a large amount of legacy data into Drupal, using the awesome Migrate module (and friends). Migrate is a great tool for the job, but one of its limitations is that it requires the legacy database tables to have non-composite integer primary keys. Unfortunately, most of the tables I'm working with have primary keys that are either composite (i.e. the key is a combination of two or more columns), or non-integer (i.e. strings), or both.

Table with composite primary key.

The simplest solution to this problem would be to add an auto-incrementing integer primary key column to the legacy tables. This would provide the primary key information that Migrate needs in order to do its mapping of legacy IDs to Drupal IDs. But this solution has a serious drawback. In my project, …

I have an interesting problem, on a data migration project I'm currently working on. I'm importing a large amount of legacy data into Drupal, using the awesome Migrate module (and friends). Migrate is a great tool for the job, but one of its limitations is that it requires the legacy database tables to have non-composite integer primary keys. Unfortunately, most of the tables I'm working with have primary keys that are either composite (i.e. the key is a combination of two or more columns), or non-integer (i.e. strings), or both.

Table with composite primary key.

The simplest solution to this problem would be to add an auto-incrementing integer primary key column to the legacy tables. This would provide the primary key information that Migrate needs in order to do its mapping of legacy IDs to Drupal IDs. But this solution has a serious drawback. In my project, …

I would like to point the crowd to the Call For Presentaions of Loadays. , the Linux Open Administration Days .

The Linux Open Administration days 2010 will be the first edition of a new conference focusing on Linux and Open Administration, we are trying to fill a gap for System Engineers and Administrators using Open Source technologies"

More details on the Linux Open Administration Days site

I'll probably be there .. given the fact that the event will be 5 minutes from where I live .

Technorati Tags: antwerpen cfp conference drupal …

Fosdem 2010 was my 10th fosdem Edition (including the first OSDEM)
As every year Fosdem suffered even more from it's own success.

On Friday evening ther was the obligatory Beer event... however as people need to eat to .. the Devops crowd fled the scene

I had made reservations for a 20 something group and with the CentOS crowd joining us (as there was some overlap anyhow) we were 25 when we arrived in the restaurant .

Dinner and Discussions were great .. I learned about some new projects and we had some insightfull dicussions on how fat your thin foil should be ...

After dinner we went back to the Beer Event were lots of Free Beer was tasted ...

Saturday was the first full day of Fosdem, as usual Fosdem was the victim of it's own success , too much interresting stuff to see .. too little time.

Lots of Devrooms had the "FULL" sign put up more than you want as a visitor ...
I …