PHP is different. Unlike Java for example, there is no formal
community, and no formal community process. PHP does not see
itself as controlled by a company, or even large corporate
players. PHP is not developed, it kind of grows. People using
other languages see this as a weakness, but I actually think of
it as a strength of the language, the platform and the
community.
PHP is used differently than for example Java. Successful PHP
projects use different strategies. If you have listened to what
Rasmus has been telling you in his speeches during the last two
years, you might get an idea of how PHP is different, and why. If
you are comparing the approach MySQL has been using in the Dell
DVD webshop benchmark uncontest with the other PHP approaches,
you can see some of these principles applied.
Unfortunately, for many of these principles and methodologies no
fancy names exist. So in my untalk on the PHP unconference at
…
Back in April MySQL had its yearly user's conference. Each year
there are more users and more people to talk to, which means I
get fewer chances to listen to any of the talks being presented.
I did though take time out to listen to the talk on Second Life. I've been playing with BBS'es, Talkers, and
other assorted digital online communities ever since I got my
first modem. What fascinated me about Second Life was the
prospect of it taking a shot at being the first "metaverse". I am
a big fan of "Snow Crash" and would love to see that sort of
environment spring to life. I work daily with friends and
colleagues using IM and IRC, and any depth that can be added to
those conversations is great as far as I am concerned.
I have also been fascinated with learning about how they are
scaling with MySQL. Their design is fairly classic with
replication, but what is interesting is to look and see how this
is applied to a virtual …
At the developers conference this year, held in Sorrento, Italy, I was fortunate enough to meet and have dinner with some Italian MySQL users?some of whom had travelled from Rome to be with us that evening at a lovely traditional Italian restaurant just off one of the main squares.
I?ve recently written about techniques for archiving, purging, and re-indexing huge database tables. These techniques exploit both data structure and usage patterns. In this article I?ll develop that theme further, and explain how to write more efficient non-backtracking maintenance jobs when the update and insertion patterns permit.
part of my focus for the next couple of weeks will be on rolling
out some improvements to the mysql bugs system. the first step in doing
that was to upgrade from mysql 4.1 to the latest mysql 5.1 beta, which turned out to be entirely
painless.
the next step is going to be some database normalization and code
refactoring. but because there are some other people who have
written ad-hoc tools against the existing schema, i?ll be hiding
the schema changes behind some views.
the first big schema change will be moving the categories from a
bunch of hard-coded strings in the source code (and a
varchar(32) field) to a table organized using the
nested set model. that?s something i?ve been …
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), (http://www.lpi.org), the world's premier Linux certification organization, and MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database, today announced a joint initiative to offer MySQL 5.0 certification exams through LPI's global proctor network, beginning with the C3 Expo, June 27th ? 29th, 2006 at the Javits Center in New York City. Prosoft Learning Corporation, LPI's affiliate in North America will be offering these exams at C3 Expo along with LPI Certification exams.
are you a committer or a member of a large OSS project?
do you participate in any other large open source project?
I’m trying to get a understanding of how all the different major oss projects are being cross pollinated by having people participating in different projects.
feel free to comment, or mail me directly at ian at holsman.net
Thanks!
I've been working on a presentation the last couple of days with
a few of my colleagues. The presentation is centered around
looking at MySQL Cluster from various perspectives within the
company to help determine some future initiatives. It was an
excellent exercise in discovering all the things that are great
about the product, but also in helping prioritize a few things we
need to work on.
One of the great things about working at MySQL is that there is
never a shortage of ideas or opinions on how to make things
better (even if we manage to "build a bike shed" now and
again...what software company doesn't?) . Fortunately, everyone
that works on the Cluster product in whatever capacity here at
MySQL, really wants the product to be a success. Their day to day
efforts show it and its always great to be a part of that.
One of things we really sharpened during this process, was the
definition of the product itself. I think …
The modular concept of MySQL that separates the storage engines
from the SQL parser and optimizer has recently caused a number of
new, independently developed storage engines to surface. Here's
an incomplete selection of projects around this concept:
- DDE - Distributed Data Engine, a research project of the Technical University of Dresden
- mdbtools - a storage engine that allows readonly access to Microsoft Access .mdb database files
- PBXT - a new, transactional storage engine by Paul McCullagh
- ritmarkFS - a storage engine that represents the content of a directory as a table
- …