Dear Kettle fans,

A few weeks ago, when I was stuck in the US after the MySQL User Conference, a new book was published by Packt Publishing.

That all by itself is something that is not too remarkable.  However, this time it’s a book about my brainchild Kettle. That makes this book very special to me. The full title is Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration : Beginner’s Guide (Amazon, Packt).  The title all by itself explains the purpose of this book: give the reader a quick-start when it comes to Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle).

The author María Carina Roldán ( …

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After Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle, there has been a large amount of discussions in the business and developer community on the future of MySQL community involved in its development.

A Community Fork?

Interestingly, MySQL community has been able to create a new Database by a fork from the public branch and has revived the project as MariaDB.

On it’s website, AskMonty.org [founded by Michael “Monty” Widenius, the founder and creator of MySQL] states that its aim is,

To provide a community developed, stable, and always Free branch of MySQL that is, on the user level, compatible with the main version. We strive for total interoperability with both our own, and our upstream, communities.

…

For all of those linux users out there that have moved over to, or tried out, Solaris10 or OpenSolaris because they heard the tales of how MySQL is faster on Solaris… or perhaps you wanted to learn how to use Sol10 for the great features of Zones or the ZFS filesystem? Regardless of why you’re on it you are probably wondering why Linux has colored output of filenames and directories but Solaris does not. The question of ‘why?’ isn’t important, but how to enable colors is. It’s very simple, and here’s how I fixed it. This is a result of digging through multiple semi-related links on Google.

1. Download all packages from SunFreeware.com
   • dependency: libintl-3.4.0-sol10-x86-local
   • dependency: libiconv-1.13.1-sol10-x86-local
   • dependency: gmp-4.2.1-sol10-x86-local
   • dependency: gcc-3.4.6-sol10-x86-local or libgcc-3.4.6-sol10-x86-local depending on your …

Oracle managed to score a major victory last week at the MySQL Conference by announcing performance gains of 200-360% in the forthcoming version 5.5.  This is a tremendous improvement and comes in part due to closer collaboration between what were historically two distinct (and occasionally competitive) groups: the InnoBase team and the MySQL Server team.  Bringing the InnoBase team under the direction of the MySQL Server team under Tomas Ullin is a great benefit not only to MySQL developers, but also for MySQL users.  No doubt these performance gains are a result of many months of hard work by not only Tomas, but also a good number of folks on both teams including guys like Mikael Ronstrum, Kojstja, Calvin Sun and others.  

Reaction to the new release has been positive in the community from the likes of …

An increasing number of large MySQL applications, e.g. social networking and SaaS back-ends, use a distributed MySQL architecture. MySQL data is distributed logically or heuristically on multiple, and in some cases thousands of, real or virtual servers. Backing up such large and dynamic environments presents its own complexities.

In this blog, we will use the cluster terminology - but we do not imply that NDB Cluster storage engine is being used for MySQL. Most implementations use InnoDB for data and MyISAM for dictionary. Typical architecture for such applications uses Database Sharding - i.e. shared-nothing partitioning of data across similarly configured nodes.

In most sharded environments, high availability is built-in - i.e. the cluster can continue to answer the queries and commit the transactions of all users in face of a node failure. This is typically accomplished either by database level replication or …

OSScamp returns to Chandigarh within 6 months for a splendid show on April 10th, 2010, at Chitkara Educational Trust, Chandigarh. Organized by the will and initiative of two 14 year old school kids, OSScamp Chandigarh has also received a good response from the tech community in Chandigarh and promises to be a grand FOSS event in the city. OSScamps are India's premier FOSS Unconference - an informal/casual event where the emphasis is put on participative and collaborative knowledge sharing over the traditional one-way sharing model. Tweetups are meetups of local twitter users, who come together to network with each other and discuss the world around them. The event schedule is as follows: …

1. ZeroMQ -- bold claim of "Fastest. Messaging. Ever." LGPL, C++ with bindings for many languages, past version 2 already. (via edd on Twitter)
2. Prediction Market News (David Pennock) -- HSX is going to be a real marketplace with real $. The real HSX will of course say goodbye to the virtual specialist and the opening weekend adjust, two facets of the game that make it fun to play, but that create significant amounts of (virtual) wealth out of thin air. The Cantor Gaming group is engaged in other interesting initiatives. They are taking over a sportsbook in Las Vegas and turning it into more of a derivatives exchange with live in-game betting, a step toward my dream of a geek-friendly casino. …

Google Summer of Code is now open for student applications and people (like Ronald Bradford) are noticing that MySQL is not participating this year. (Drizzle otoh is a mentoring organization.)

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I was reading another post comparing the different forks of MySQL (disclaimer: my employer), and again it seemed to me the term “fork” is somewhat imprecise. I agree with Morgan Tocker that “delta” does not capture these other creatures either – after all, isn’t a delta what makes a fork not a copy?

Wikipedia cites Eric Raymond‘s definition that “The most important characteristic of a fork is that it spawns competing projects that cannot later exchange code, splitting the potential developer community”, but also notes “However, this is not …

1. Tsung -- GPLed multi-protocol (HTTP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, WebDAV, SOAP, XMPP) load tester written in Erlang.
2. Myth of China's Manufacturing Prowess -- The latest data shows [...] that the United States is still the largest manufacturer in the world. In 2008, U.S. manufacturing output was $1.8 trillion, compared to $1.4 trillion in China (UN data. China’s data do not separate manufacturing from mining and utilities. So the actual Chinese manufacturing number should be much smaller). Also contains pointers to an interesting discussion of lack of opportunities for college grads in China.
3. OpenSSO and the Value of Open Source -- …