I'm reading an interesting research paper (to be blogged later) that mentions a fact that I find pretty compelling:

In 2001 Debian included more than 55,000,000 lines of code, with an estimated (COCOMO) value of $1.9 billion.That's just Debian (and, as Wheeler notes, it grew to 230 million lines of code by 2005, putting its COCOMO price at $8 billion).

What number would we get to if we added MySQL (2M+ lines of code, I believe), JBoss, etc.? I can't even begin to come up with a rational number, but I'm guessing we're north of $50 billion. $50+ billion worth of free (as in cost and freedom) and open source software.

Priceless.

(Keep in mind that there's more to good software than code size. …

I'm reading a research paper [PDF] by Nicholas Economides (NYU) and Evangelos Katsamakas (Fordham) called "Linux vs. Windows: A comparison of application and platform innovation incentives for open source and proprietary software platforms." Long title, but the conclusion of the paper is relatively brief:

In our model, firms and developers invest to improve the quality of the platform or the application and expand the demand by users of these software products. When the operating system is proprietary, the platform provider and the application provider invest only in their own product to maximize their profit. When the operating system is open source, there is no platform provider firm, but the users invest in the platform to maximize their user surplus and their development reputation, which depends on the success of the platform measured by its …

best practices, database, internet, mysql, security, software, technology web

With recent posts by Frank Mash and Stewart Smith about password …

Back in May Dan Morgan was kind enough to invite me to do a guest lecture at the University of Washington about “Data Warehousing Basics.”  After having emailed these slides as a decent overview to a few customers lately, I realized they’d probably be useful online.  It is obviously a little light on content (their just slides) but they do provide some good “high level views” of dimensional modeling/DW/BI in general.  My employer, Pentaho, was generous enough to allow me time to build this presentation for the students at UW for which they, and I are grateful.  THANK YOU!

The online version: Univerisity of Washington Guest Lecture May 9
The PDF of …

Open source is democratic, open, real.

While I have a good sense for which Tech Tips would be useful, I’d also like to ask the community for what tips they’d like to see written up:

• Mondrian: Star Schema to OLAP cubes
  A very basic Star Schema with a Fact and Two Dimensions show how this is built into a Mondrian cube and how to built a “Pivot view” Pentaho report.
• Mondrian: Advanced MDX
  Sets, top, running totals, etc
• Kettle: Portable ETL
  Showing how to use paramater injection to make your Kettle solution (Jobs and Transforms) executable inside of Pentaho.
• Kettle: Custom rollups using Excel
  Showing how to build a dimension, reporting table, etc using a very easy to use interface for business users.
• Reporting: List of Values
  Show how to use the most unfortunately …

The 451 Group is calling for change in the business models of the so-called "stack providers." (OpenLogic, Spikesource, Sourcelabs, etc.) Dave and I have seen this coming for some time, and the vendors, themselves, have, too, as each has been tweaking its model over time.

(Dave has never been a big believer in Spikesource (here is his first assessment), though I've been more sanguine, and I've also skewed pro OpenLogic and BitRock.) …

James Montebello, a friend, a mentor, a fantastic engineer, and the person who introduce me to mySQL in 1999 passed away August 24, 2006.

I write this today in dedication to a great man. I also write this in appreciation for all the time we had together, and for guiding me on what are the right things to do.

He was among the 1st to believe in my designs

James you will be deeply missed.

I posted some Basic Documentation for MySQL Index Analyzer including a simple example. This is intented to get started with the tool without having to read the code.

Any ideas and suggestions for improvements are appreciated :)

Frank talks about Storing Passwords in MySQL. He does, however, miss something that’s really, really important. I’m talking about the salting of passwords.

If I want to find out what  5d41402abc4b2a76b9719d911017c592 or 015f28b9df1bdd36427dd976fb73b29d MD5s mean, the first thing I’m going to try is a dictionary attack (especially if i’ve seen a table with only user and password columns). Guess what? A list of words and their MD5SUMS can be used to very quickly find what these hashes represent.

I’ll probably have this dictionary in a MySQL database with an index as well. Try it yourself - you’ll probably find a dictionary with the words “hello” and “fire” in it to help. In fact, do this:

mysql> create table words (word varchar(100));
Query OK, 0 rows …

I recently discovered that I’d made a huge blunder in the Partitioning Limitations section of the MySQL 5.1 Manual. I’d had the idea that unique keys don’t effect your choice of partitioning columns unless there’s no primary key.

My latest revision of the documentation for this limitation isn’t much better.

Then, as I was sitting here just now trying to persuade my daughter that she really ought to have something for lunch besides marshmallows, it came to me.

It’s very simple, really.

For any user-partitioned table in MySQL 5.1:

1. If a table has any unique keys, then all columns used in the partitioning expression must also be part of any and all of these keys.
2. By definition, a primary key is a unique key.
3. If the table has no unique keys, then you don’t have to worry …