This past week I was in a couple of different strategic planning meetings.  Some sessions were noticeably more effective than others in encouraging creative ideas.  I started to wonder why that is and came up with the top ways to kill new ideas. If you see these tenets taking hold in your organization, then you need to change things up to get people thinking more radically. 

1. Every idea must be perfect
   The enemy of good is perfect.  If you aim for perfection you'll probably never get out of the starting gate.  By making something good (or even "good enough"), you can get it to market and improve it.  As Philippe Kahn used to say at Borland in the 1980's "Shipping is a feature."  In other words, until you get to market, you haven't done anything.  Good ideas that get implemented can be improved.  Great ideas that never get out don't amount to …

Recently Jay Pipes published great article about lazy connecting and caching which reminded me my post on this matter is well overdue.

Let me start with couple of comments about Jays article. First - caching in files should be used with caution. It may be very efficient especially if number of cached objects is small but if you get too many small objects which need to be cached files can become inefficient, especially if you do not care about putting them into different directories on file systems which can't handle too many files in the same directory efficiently. The other problem with files is of course being local to the local node which might be inefficient with many web servers. Putting cache on shared storage could work but that is extra complication. There are cases when file cache works pretty well - …

At OSCON, I met with Ian Murdock, Jim Zemlin and Amanda McPherson of FSG (http://www.freestandards.org), together with our founders Monty and David. We discussed ways of making MySQL Linux Standard Base 3.1 compliant.

Starting MySQL 5.1, we will strive for LSB 3.1 compliance. We’ll make the packages (RPM files, dpkg files) LSB compliant. Tarballs will still exist, but for other purposes, and will not aim at LSB compliancy.

LSB compliancy is planned to make MySQL …

Tonight is census night in Australia, and the 20,000,000 people (including 9 MySQL Employees!) will be filling out questions like what religion we are, how much we earn, how many people live in our houses.

This is a once in every 5 years event, and the first time it's ever moved online - I'm impressed.

I figured they'd wasted the paper by sending the form to my house, so I might as well go old skool, but Groggy didn't get a choice. It turns out that they expected that he have a postcode, when not all of us do.

I thought I'd share some other quirks about data (feel free to comment on any localised ones that I omitted):

• Not everyone has a surname (not everyone has a middle name, and some people have more than one middle name). Thanks: Arjen
…

Over the past few weeks, there has been a significant amount of commercial activity relating to the open source database, PostgreSQL. EnterpriseDB raised $20 million US in its Series B funding round (press release), and signed a deal with Sun Microsystems to provide PostgreSQL support to Sun’s customers (article). GreenPlum and Sun announced a partnership for an open source data warehouse appliance powered by PostgreSQL (press release). While all of this new activity is taking place around PostgreSQL, Pervasive exited this market entirely ( …

Partitioning is a way of pre-organizing table storage. You can say "some of the table's rows will go here, some will go there, still others will go to to still other places". Often, depending on the storage engine, the effect is to spread the table's rows over different files or even different disks.

Why would you ever want to deliberately cause a deadlock? Sometimes a very large deadlock in MySQL will fill the output of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS until it truncates, so you can’t see information about transactions, log and I/O, buffers, and so forth. I know only two solutions to this problem: 1) restart MySQL and 2) cause a small deadlock so the LAST DETECTED DEADLOCK section shrinks to an acceptable size.

I'll warn you right now, this is going to be a long article. More than likely, I'll put a version of this up on the MySQL developer zone and PHP zone. This article is intended to highlight various basic topics concerning proper methods of handling connections to MySQL databases in PHP, guidelines for caching dynamic content, and a technique called "lazy loading". Hopefully by the end of the article you'll have learned how to combat a very widespread and potentially devastating scalability problem seen in an enormous number of PHP web applications.

An introduction to the problem

Before I start the discussion on connecting to MySQL servers via PHP, it's worth pointing out that the relative cost of connecting to a MySQL database, versus connecting to a PostgreSQL or Oracle installation, is very, very low. However, the fact that connecting to a MySQL resource is inexpensive does not mean that connection resources can be abused. …

In an earlier article I explored the finer points of multi-table, cross-database deletes in MySQL, but I didn't get it quite right. This article explains the subtleties I've discovered since then. This is more complex than the MySQL manual documents.