I'm looking for someone who wants to hone their existing 3+ years of C hacking and debugging skills on some of the fastest, most highly stressed core infrastructure applications ever created.

The full job description is available on the OmniTI Careers page.

A successful applicant for the position will join the ranks of my Dark Apprentices and will have the opportunity to learn and develop skills such as:

• Performant, scalable thinking. Writing and troubleshooting code that runs in high stress environments.
• Sith debugging. Mastering the inner mysteries to deduce ways to effectively reproduce and resolve otherwise impossible problems.
• All the fun and happy details of the various email specs.

• Dry wit. You'll have the option of picking up some of my British humour.

…

At the first ever MySQL Camp Proven Scaling is holding a session/BOF on replication. We want to hear what you like and don’t like about replication. What better to get conversation going but FREE BEER!

There is one tiny problem. We don’t know how much to buy or what kind. If you’re going to the camp help us out by putting your name and your favorite brew (brand and type) on the MySQL Replibeertion page.

Novell filed an 8K form with the SEC yesterday. It gives the details of the Microsoft/Novell deal and is an interesting read (as SEC filings go :-).

What's perhaps most interesting (though not surprising to the conspiracy minded among us) is how much of the money goes Novell's way. If Microsoft were truly concerned wtih getting a fair return on its IP, wouldn't the vast majority of the money be flowing its way? After all, Microsoft is the one with the Mount Everest-like stack of patents, not Novell. So, clearly, this money is intended as more than a fair exchange for patent cooperation.

(And, again, it still strikes me as completely goofy that Microsoft will be distributing SUSE Linux. I suspect Oracle won't …

So, we (dealnews.com) rolled out a new site this month, metaprice.com.  Its young and lacking features of many of the other price comparison sites, but is has great potential.  Our hope is to bring together the best features of all the other players in the market in one great application.
Part of this project required using web services with several different data suppliers.  Most support simple REST and SOAP, but some only offer SOAP.  So, given that I bit the bullet and enabled the SOAP extension for PHP5.  Wow!  I was happily surprised.  The last SOAP code I had looked at was the old PEAR code.  It was not that attractive to me.  It required a lot of work IMO to talk SOAP.

Now, with just 3 lines of code, I can get back a nice object that has all the data I need.  Kudos to Brad …

Digg this article

There are several methods to do live MySQL database backups. These methods are either storage engine specific (InnoDB hot backup, mysqlhotcopy), or require read locks (mysqldump), or require additional hardware (backup using replication, LVM snapshot). Some of these backup methods can do backups of remote MySQL servers also. So far, there is no backup method that provides storage engine agnostic, consistent full backups of local and remote servers. Goal of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) of MySQL is to consolidate all these and future methods of MySQL backup and use the optimal method for the MySQL configuration.

One of the exciting developments in MySQL is the development of MySQL Online backup. The …

I've been following the emerging Event-Stream Processing field (also known as Streaming Database or Complex Event Processing) for a few years now. The relational database movement tamed disk-bound transactional data with a set of engineering techniques built on sound theoretical principles, and streaming databases offer to do the same for data in flight.

"Data in flight" is a broad term, encompassing signals generated by sensors, deltas generated by transaction processing, patterns recognized by algorithmic trading rules and intrusion-detection systems, and records flowing within a global enterprise's service-oriented architecture. The streaming database approach - though not currently any one product - can in principle address all of these application areas.

The relational database world fractured, for a time at least, into …

I didn't know such a thing exists.

kostja@bodhi:/usr/share/vim/vim70/syntax> ls -al mysql.vim 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16078 2006-05-24 20:16 mysql.vim

kostja@bodhi:/usr/share/vim/vim70/syntax> head -7 mysql.vim 
" Vim syntax file
" Language:     mysql
" Maintainer:   Kenneth J. Pronovici <pronovic@ieee.org>
" Last Change:  $Date: 2004/06/13 20:12:39 $
" Filenames:    *.mysql
" URL:          ftp://cedar-solutions.com/software/mysql.vim
" Note:         The definitions below are taken from the mysql user manual as of April 2002, for version 3.23

To enable it in the editor:

:set filetype=mysql

Or, in your .vimrc to highlight all .sql and .test files:

if has("autocmd")
        autocmd BufRead *.sql set filetype=mysql      
        autocmd BufRead *.test set filetype=mysql
endif

... or, taming the ORDER BY clause.
Say you want to implement a custom ordering for your queries, as an example, you want to display each customer's orders with shipped orders first, then waiting orders and open orders last.
That's ordering by the 'status' column and you can't use alphabetical ordering!
In this case you'll have to implement some kind of logic in your order by clause, and a CASE is very handy, like this:

1. SELECT * FROM SALES
2. ORDER BY
3. cust_no,
4. CASE WHEN order_status = 'shipped' THEN 1
5. WHEN order_status = 'waiting' THEN 2
6. WHEN order_status = 'open' THEN 3
7. ELSE 4
8. END;

Note how the ordering is performed on the values substituted by the CASE statement and not
for the original column values.
This example is based on Firebird's EXAMPLE.FDB database.

…

Whats is it?

ODBC Trace output (also referred to as ODBC logging) is useful when problem solving ODBC issues as it shows the calls made through the various layers of software. ODBC Trace output is often requested by support folks when asked to solve an ODBC issue so including one with a request for help is often going to lead to a faster response.

There are a number of ways, and places, to produce trace output. The two most common trace sources are;

1. DM Trace Output
2. Driver Trace Output

DM Trace Output
Trace output from the DM is usually enough to solve an ODBC issue and as such is the most interesting for an initial request for help. This trace is typically turned on/off via an ODBC GUI Administrator. On MS Windows XP you can find this program in the “Control Panel -> Administrator Tools” (you may have to turn on “Classic View” to find …

I recently got a message letting me know FreeBSD users will soon be able to install the innotop MySQL and InnoDB monitor through ports. Gentoo GNU/Linux users can find innotop in Portage.