While Web 2.0 is probably at least as hard to define as pornography (e.g. I know it when I see it) there's no doubt that it's growing rapidly.  By our estimates, more than 90% of all Web 2.0 sites are powered by MySQL including the likes of media darlings like YouTube, FaceBook, Digg, Wikipedia, Cyworld, Flickr and most of the social networking sites.  In fact, if you add in all of the sites using MySQL it's probably over a billion page views per day and doubling every six months. 

And if you don't like Tim O'Reilly's definition of Web 2.0, then you can …

automation, best practices, database, internet, technology, tips web

http://www.artfulsoftware.com has a “Common Queries” page, which I find rather useful. I hadn’t realized its history, as described on the homepage:

Our collection of common MySQL queries outgrew Chapter 9, and is still growing, so we turned it into a PHP page driven from a MySQL table.

We’ve released new bits for the beta of solidDB for MySQL. We now have a version compiled for 64 bit Linux. Check it out at http://dev.soliddb.com/download/

The posts I've been reading and writing recently have reminded me how Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) systems make it fun and convenient to interact with databases. For some of the reasons they're a developer's favorite, they can be a database administrator's nightmare (think surrogate keys). But designing tables with a consistent set of columns has its benefits. Just because the columns are meta-data that have no intrinsic meaning doesn't mean they have no value. In this series of articles I'll show you several ways to use such "meaningless" meta-data to enable powerful, efficient application-level role-based access control (RBAC) in the database, with a focus on web applications, though you could do this for any application.

The systems I've built are complex, so I'll split this into at least two articles. This first article will discuss other privilege systems I've seen in web applications, including …

There's a new blog in town by MySQL consulting guru Nitin Borwankar.  Nitin's working on a few super secret startups and invariably they are using a lot of open source technology to create sophisticated tagging systems that create "folksonomies" or tagging systems that are developed in a collaborative fashion.  Sounds easy, but how do you map that in and out of standard MySQL?  Ahh... that's the question.  And Nitin has some practical answers borrowing from data warehousing techniques that help illuminate the way.  You may not always agree with how Nitin's does it, but its thought provoking …

Vim 7.0 introduces tabs to Vim. I wasn’t aware of this until BigE pointed it out to me, and to this tip; that lets you move around the tabs with firefox style short-cuts for tab navigation. That’s a great tip, but what about us OS X users who prefer using the “apple/command” key? I decided to use Safari style tab navigation for vim, as some of the would have caused problems with default keybindings. You can see the details here.. For people wondering how to get Vim 7.0 for their Macs, MacVim.org is your best bet.

Tags: php, vim, mysql, …

The VMWare Server allows to do great things that you usually wouldn't like to do on your working machines, mostly because of the danger to damage something that can take a lot of time to recover. And it's also a great thing to play with advanced MySQL issues.

So I installed myself a "MySQL playground" - a VMWare machine running SuSE Linux 10.1 - and installed three MySQL 5.1.11 servers (placed in different directories and assigned the ports 3306, 3307 and 3308). The first thing that I played with was to set up a multimaster replication example, based on Giuseppe Maxia's article: Advanced MySQL Replication Techniques (I planned to do this for quite a while and now I finally did it!).

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I did a bunch of housekeeping in the MySQL Cluster documentation today.

Confession: I’m the bright light who came up with the term “SQL node” because I didn’t like “API node”. At the time, it seemed like a good idea, but as time has gone on, I’ve come to see the error of my ways. However, lots of people now use the term, so I guess it’s not a good idea to change it out from under them. So here’s what I’ve decided:

API node - Any application that accesses Cluster data. Basically this means any NDB API application.

SQL node - A subspecies of API node that provides an SQL interface to a Cluster. Basically, this means a MySQL Server that’s part of a Cluster. (mysqld itself isn’t an NDB API application, but the bits that let it talk to a Cluster use the NDB API.)

Also, ndbd processes were in the distant past referred referred …

If you want to play with the next generation of ADO.NET, now's your chance.  The ADO.Net team has released the August CTP for download.

The bits are young and fresh but they give you an idea of where Microsoft is heading.  I can't commit to a timeframe, but we are working on the next generation of our .NET provider which will be compatible with vNext.

Note: The May LINQ CTP is a pre-requisite.

If you've spent more than a few years in the programming or technology business, sometimes it takes a bit of a refresher course to take you back to that warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from accomplishing your first programming "miracle". Yesterday, I happened to give that refresher course to myself while walking my twin brother, Andrew, through the first steps of setting up a MySQL database and creating a simple PHP page which displayed the contents of a table. I tell you, when I heard my brother say for the first time, "Wow, that's really cool!", it took me back about ten years to that "lightbulb-going-on" moment when I created my first Symantec Q&A database application on a 386 machine in a warehouse at United Parcel Service.

That feeling, you know, the one of "holy crap, I just made the computer do something!" It's a pretty great feeling, as I'm sure anyone reading this will attest. It's a feeling of simultaneous bewilderment …