By marc

Aside from everyone giving me hell for using "2.0" in the title, the most frequent response to my Web Development 2.0 post has been how reckless it is to ignore QA as a discipline. The most thoughtful of these responses came from Jonathan Alexander, in his post, Does QA Matter? My last job, like Jonathan's current job, was in a security software company, so I'm very sympathetic to his point of view. (In case it wasn't clear, my post was a catalog of observations, not necessarily recommendations, though I am, as I said, impressed with the results I've seen from these practices.)

Antonio Rodriguez has an interesting and, I think, compelling argument for another way of considering this question. He writes, in his post, …

i talked at scale 4x, and you can download the exciting slides. the picture is of future oracle employee and zend co-founder andi gutmans, and there are a few more pictures from the first day.

(neither andi nor dave from sleepycat admitted to the imminent acquisitions of their companies by oracle.)

Back in October when Oracle announced it was acquiring InnoDB I pondered the impact and decided that while irritating, it wasn't that big of a deal for MySQL. I even suggested that MySQL switch the InnoDB functionality to Sleepycat's BerkeleyDB. But now that Oracle is in allegedly in talks to buy Sleepycat as well it adds a new level of complexity.

A few people are starting to make the argument that Oracle is buying up the components of MySQL to put some kind of stranglehold on the non-internal IP. But I think that's merely a by-product of the bigger picture.

By acquiring JBoss and Sleepycat, Oracle automatically positions itself as the owner of two very broadly used products. (NOTE: Since Zend doesn't technically own PHP I can …

MySQL AB today announced the completion of an $18.5 million Series C round of financing led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), the Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm. Corporate investors in the round were Intel Capital, Red Hat, SAP Ventures, and Presidio STX, the U.S.-based venture investment subsidiary of Sumitomo Corporation. The open source database developer will use the proceeds to fund continued growth into the enterprise database market, including new product development as well as expansion of business development, sales and marketing activities.

The February meeting of the Boston MySQL Meetup will be held on Monday, February 13th (tomorrow!) at 7 pm. We have a new location, on the MIT campus. This means that there is close subway access AND plenty of FREE PARKING. The meeting is free, including pizza (with toppings) and soda.

To view details, see
http://mysql.meetup.com/137/events/4829769/?a=rem_c

The topic is “So You’ve Inherited a MySQL Instance” (which I *just* found out last week was not accepted for the MySQL Users Conference. Probably too basic of a workshop for the conference). It will be useful for beginners, and experience MySQL users will refresh their memory on what needs to be secured.

It has a unix focus, but most of the ideas can be applied to Windows users as well.

I was talking to a friend at a party (I know it sounds pathetic, but we also talked about non work related stuff) about a java banking application he is working on. The application needs to run with whatever RDBMS is already installed at the client. He noted that they have the most trouble with IBM DB2. He did speak favorably about Apache Derby aka IBM cloudspace, but then again he actually likes java, so go figure ;-)

One of the issues is that appearently DB2 is so configurable that it becomes very difficult to be able to determine if the queries will even run at the clients site. I guess you can configure all sorts of buffers and thresholds that if set too aggressively will simply prevent their application from running at all. Now you could say thats the DBA's fault. But the fact of the matter is that they are trying to sell an application and it does not help things if this requires the DBA to change parameters that affect other …

Some recent blog posts by Markus and Frank got me thinking about some important things when considering an upgrade to MySQL 5. Did adding much-needed features — such as stored procedures, views, and triggers — to the MySQL server lead to poorer performance than previous server version without these additional features? This is a question that, over the next few months leading up to the MySQL User's Conference, I plan on writing quite a bit about, and detailing in a number of webinars and blog entries about performance tuning, index selection strategies, and coding techniques for optimal performance. The first of these webinars is tentatively scheduled for March 1st; check back …

Dissecting MySQL fulltext indexing and the mathematics behind it.

I am very happy to see Markus go in great detail about why the "new" features such as stored procedures and triggers are needed in MySQL. Many thanks to all those who took the time to comment.

I had asked the same question on Ruby on Rails list and following are the responses I received.

Joe said:

I think it's more along the lines of keeping everything in one layer. See this:

Choose a single layer of cleverness
http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000516.html

I'm sort of coming around to that way of thinking. I switched from MySQL to PostgreSQL about two years ago and loved it. But now it DOES sound appealing to just handle stuff in Ruby/Rails instead of switching to pgsql for sprocs, constraints, triggers, etc. …