I have a strong professional and personal relationship with Kosovo. Before and after the war, from 1998 to 2002, I was part of the OSCE-UN mission that helped the …

We ran a quick scalability test of Calpont join behavior across using a Star Schema Benchmark data set at a scale factor of 1000. The Star Schema Benchmark transforms a TPC-H / DBT-3 data to a more standardized data warehouse star schema data model, and the 1000 scale factor includes 6 billion rows in the primary fact table. Information on the star schema bench (SSB) can be found at http://www.cs.umb.edu/~xuedchen/research/publications/DataWarehousePerformanceDissertationProposal.pdf .

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-- Note that these queries are run without any tuning or indices created for these joins or filters.
-- Basically, this is just 1) Create tables (without index or …

Before you think I’ve posted an animal story in my MySQL category please read on. For reference, The RAT and the CAT is something I wrote back in 2006, that explains the CAT part.

I was reviewing the website performance tonight of a client. I had access to an idle system so being lazy in collecting SQL after my initial audit of the system and MySQL, I turned on the General Query log and hit the home page. NOTE: Do not do this on a running production system, especially with any volume.

What I got was 77 lines of output (after I removed newlines in the queries). 74 were queries, and 72 were from the same table, via some unnecessarily complex sub-joins. I wish I could have laughed but it wasn’t really funny.

My Friday wisdom for writing SQL is this:

• Don’t write duplicate SQL statements
• Look the entire …

1. Defragging the Stimulus -- each [recovery] site has its own silo of data, and no site is complete. What we need is a unified point of access to all sources of information: firsthand reports from Recovery.gov and state portals, commentary from StimulusWatch and MetaCarta, and more. Suggests that Recovery.gov should be the hub for this presently-decentralised pile of recovery data.
2. Memetracker -- site accompanying the research written up by the New York Times as Researchers at Cornell, using powerful computers and clever algorithms, studied the news cycle by looking for repeated phrases and tracking their appearances on 1.6 million …

Gearman is an open source generic framework for distributed processing. At OSCON 2009 I attended the Gearman: Build Your Own Distributed Platform in 3 Hours tutorial.

While it’s very easy to install Gearman, and follow the first example, if you missed the all important additional PHP steps listed on just one slide you may be left with the “‘Class ‘GearmanClient’ not found” error.

The following are detailed instructions for the installation and configuration of Gearman and PHP on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty.

Add the Drizzle PPA to get pre-packaged versions of Gearman.

cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.orig
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/drizzle-developers/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/drizzle-developers/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main" …

This blog post was inspired by Masood Mortazavi's comment: "OSCon to be somewhat disappointing this year -- many low quality sessions and a celebration of forks"I did not attend OSCON, even though I live in California. I did not even bother to submit a presentation proposal, even though people who attended my talks at the MySQL Conference and Expo earlier this year and the year before, all

I just finished reading Joel Spolskys book "Joel on Software", and I had a good and interesting read I have to say. This doesn't mean that I agree with everything in this, by now a bit dated, published in 2004 and as it is a collection of writings from Spolskys website www.joelonsoftware.com, it is more dated than that.

Spolsky writes in a rather humorous, witty style, and he is very opinionated and has strong opinions on many things. And he sometimes hits some rather minor issue which he dislikes with a baseball bat. But I enjoyed reading the book, it was a fun read and it got me thinking on issues, even though I didn't agree with Spolsky always, frankly, most of the time I didn't (he's not too hot on Open Source for example, and gives examples why it's not going to work, and we now know, as the book is dated, how things went. And he was wrong). But the deal with this book …

Currently Drizzle offers three (3) separate query logging plugins. These plugins offer an extensible means of gathering all or selected queries and provide the foundation for a query analyser tool. Additional filtering includes selecting queries by execution time, result size, rows processed and by any given regular expression via PCRE.

During this tutorial I’ll be stepping though the various logging_query parameters which log SQL in a CSV format.

Confirm Logging Plugins

You can view the current ACTIVE plugins in Drizzle with the following SQL.

drizzle> select version();
+--------------+
| version()    |
+--------------+
| 2009.07.1097 |
+--------------+

drizzle> select * from information_schema.plugins where plugin_name like 'logging%';
+-----------------+----------------+---------------+--------------------------------------+---------------------------------+----------------+
| PLUGIN_NAME     | PLUGIN_VERSION | …

A core economic principle is the Complementary Good . In short, when two or more things are used together, they are complementary. When the price of an item goes up, the usage of all of its complementary goods goes down. Similarly, if the price of an item goes down, the usage of all its complementary goods goes up. An example is the computer printer. Printers and ink are complementary goods. Proprietary ink products are extremely valuable—at one point ink delivered 60% of HP’s profits —so HP, understanding the principle of complementary goods, practically gives away printers because they make money on the ink. This is the classic razors and blades business model.

Businesses want to lower the cost of their products, while maintaining or improving their margins. …

Absolutely nothing?

5.4.0 was released with a change in the MySQL Binary distributions, delivering only 1 64bit Linux platform and two Sun Solaris platforms. This was officially announced on April 21 2009 however the 5.4.0 Release Notes state 05 April 2009. So it’s not a big deal, but consistency would be nice.

I’ve seen in a few posts 5.4.1, so I decided to try it out. Spending the time to read what’s changed in 2 months with the 5.4.1 Release Notes before I go downloading and installing, you read.

This release does not differ from 5.4.0 …