MySQL is a Finnish/Swedish founded company, so it's nice to congratulate both countries to this successful weekend!

On Saturday, Finland won the Eurovision Song Contest. That's fantastic - finally, Europe woke up and let a Hard Rock song ("Hard Rock Halleluja" from Lordi) win!

To explain the Eurovision Song Contest to Non-European readers, I'd like to quote Kaj Arnö: "that?s a yearly classic event going on since tens of years, which everybody watches but nobody admits watching.". That's usually true - but this years winning song literally ROCKS!

Today, Sweden won the Ice Hockey World Championships. It's the first time that the Olympic Champion wins the …

Apache Web server could frequently be bottleneck for your LAMP stack, or you might be wasting resources on your web servers. The problem with Apache server comes from "client per process" architecture which you have to stick to at least for dynamic content served by PHP or ModPerl. With "client per process" you end up having large amount of processes if you have many clients. As processes service all requests they can get you end up having a lot of memory allocated per process which is not fully released to OS even if process is serving static requests or doing keepalive. So why do you need many processes ? Keep alive is one thing, which you can disable of course. But the real problem is slow clients which need to be spoon feed. This is especially the problem for large pages and files but with bad/slow networks even small objects may cause the stall. There are multiple solutions and workarounds to this problem:

• Just get …

Jose Mourinho is quoted today about how pleased he is that the best striker on this planet - Thierry Henry - turned down two record offers of nearly $90M from Barcelona and Real Madrid to stay with Arsenal. Why would the coach of the world's most competitive team (in the transfer market, anyway) be happy that Arsenal will be stronger next year?

Because competition is good.

Who cares if Chelsea wins if they have no competition? Indeed, Mourinho has bemoaned this fact lately - no one takes him seriously as a coach since he has billions to spend on buying up every good player on the planet.

It's the same in the open source world. First, it's becoming a bit distressing to me that the proprietary players have come up with such anemic rationales for why IT buyers should choose them. Innovation? Open source has that in spades. Or how …

Here is the comparison between mysql fulltext and lucene search engines. On the forefront the only thing that distinguishes one from another is

==> speed of fulltext search in lucene is much faster as compared to mysql
==> lucene is much more complex to use as compared to mysql.

In mysql, you can simply mark an index on a text/varchar column as fulltext, and your work is done. All you need to do next is to fire MATCH AGAINST queries. Adding and modification of indexes is handled by mysql internally as and when new data is added. On the other hand, in lucene, the addition/modification of documents is to be handled programatically. Moreover Mysql is pluggable to your application using available apis. Mysql is running on a port and all you need to do is connect to the port and fire sql queries to that port using your application. Whereas in case of lucene, you will have to plug your application to the index …

These are the slides of my replication talk at the MySQL User Conference 2006:

Lars Thalmann’s Replication talk at MySQL UC2006

Enjoy!

NYPHP announced the speaker, tutorial and keynote program for NYPHPCon 2006. The New York PHP Conference & Expo 2006 is taking place in New York City, at the historic New Yorker Hotel, June 14-16, 2006. There will be three full days of sessions, tutorials, exhibits, and networking events.

NYPHPCon 2006 focuses on the The PHP Business Community, with two featured parallel tracks plus tutorials: Business Strategy and Technical Solutions. Over 400 are expected to attend, including business and technical professionals from around the world.

Find out more at http://www.nyphpcon.com/

As I discussed earlier in A picture can tell a thousand words, I outlined briefly what the intention of UltimateLAMP was for. Let me spill the beans so to speak.

What is UltimateLAMP?

UltimateLAMP is a fully functional environment allowing you to easily try and evaluate a number of LAMP stack software products without requiring any specific setup or configuration of these products. UltimateLAMP runs as a Virtual Machine with VMware Player (FREE). This demonstration package also enables the recording of all user entered information for later reference, indeed you will find a wealth of information already available within a number of the Product Recommendations starting with the supplied Documentation.

My executive punch line with the “right” buzz words is:

You have heard of all the hype in …

Some people think that normalization is the ultimate goal of databases. Pure bunkum. Your data should be structured to make typical queries tractable. A typical example is search engines. Normalization isn't sufficient if access time sucks.

Admittedly, search engines are a relatively trivial case. Regardless, query time contributes to user satisfaction and insertion time contributes to search coverage. If your schema handles both with ease then you're done. To achieve this, your schema will be normalized, or at the very least, strategically de-normalized.

Trees

This is very good but sometimes the simplest and most reasonable requests leave me stumped:

I want to do a simple query that displays categories and all it's nested subcategories in order. ... Is it possible to do this with one query or must I make a loop to get them all?

-- …

Expect a longer post in the near future on upgrade procedures. For now enjoy this quote from a gentoo user illustrating the worst way to upgrade.

linolium: is there a way to wipe every single table and start over from scratch?
linolium: ( the upgrade from mysql 4 to 5 didn’t go as smoothly as planned
me: did you read the upgrade notes?
linolium: no, I just hoped that portage would be kind enough to do those things for me

I’m a keen advocate of MySQL. However, while I use it and promote it within my limited IT circles, I often wonder how MySQL can get better traction and exposure, especially within both the industry sectors and physical locations where I am presently.

This presents a dilemma, it’s almost like the term that has been used in Venture Capital, and in the well named book, Crossing the Chasm. I see and believe that MySQL already has good penetration within certain industry sectors, specifically Internet Based, Startup Based, or Small Based segments. However, I’m sure within other commercial sectors, MySQL has either a token exposure or little to no exposure at all, at least in the circles I mix with.

So how can MySQL the product and MySQL AB the company get both better exposure and …