We're publishing a new Strata Gem each day all the way through to December 24. Yesterday's Gem: Kinect democratizes augmented reality.

Today's databases are designed for the spinning platter of the hard disk. They take into account that the slowest part of reading data is seeking: physically getting the read head to the part of the disk it needs to be in. But the emergence of cost effective solid state drives (SSD) is changing all those assumptions.

Over the course of 2010, systems designers have been realizing the benefits of using SSDs in data centers, with major IT vendors and companies adopting them. Drivers for SSD adoption …

I am preparing a series of posts related to Sudoku. I am revisiting the “SQL only” solution I posted somewhere else a long time ago…  This time, we’ll get serious and optimize everything we can!  This lemon will be squeezed to the maximum!

Start your Pharo image (not mandatory since I will provide all necessary SQL scripts) and MySQL server as we’ll try to solve some Sudoku puzzles only with one SQL statement (no stored procedures or functions)!

Part 1 coming soon!

Let me know what’s your favorite database!

Enter the poll!

I’m back in the blogosphere!

This blog will focus on Smalltalk (mostly Pharo, Squeak, Dolphin, VAST and VW), databases (usually MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, DB2, InterBase and Firebird), algorithms and open source tools.  I’ll throw in some literature, music and mathematics occasionally.

Requirements to enjoy this blog : an interest in problem solving, a database and a Smalltalk environment!

CRIB is a CentRal Information Base for MySQL, a long time coming project since I worked on it on and off for a few weeks and now I decided it’s time to hand it over to the global MySQL community.

So, what is CRIB?

CRIB is a central database which collects information about all your MySQL instances which you set as clients. It is monitoring in a way, but not the typical number of connections, memory, index usage, table scans, cpu usage and such, but rather consists of a repository where, if you have tens, hundreds or even thousands of clients, you can see where a particular user was created, where a certain database name features or which tables does a database consists of. It also features a script which logs table sizes periodically (customizable) so you can graph disk usage over time and be able to forecast future disk space requirements easily.

Download the latest code with: bzr branch lp:crib

First …

Recently am part of Zynga‘s database team as I was pretty much impressed with company’s database usage. As everyone knows how popular Zynga games like Farmville, Cafe World, Mafia Wars,[...]

When we published our 2008 report on the impact of open source on the database market the overall conclusion was that adoption had been widespread but shallow.

Since then we’ve seen increased adoption of open source software, as well as the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle. Perhaps the most significant shift in the market since early 2008 has been the explosion in the number of open source database and data management projects, including the various NoSQL data stores, and of course Hadoop and its associated projects.

On Tuesday, November 9, 2010 at 11:00 am EST I’ll be joining Robin Schumacher, Director of Product Strategy from EnterpriseDB to present a …

Pagination is used very frequently in many websites, be it search results or most popular posts they are seen everywhere. But the way how it is typically implemented is naive and prone to performance degradation. In this article I attempt on explaining the performance implications of poorly designed pagination implementation. I have also analyzed how Google, Yahoo and Facebook handle pagination implementation. Then finally i present my suggestion which will greatly improve the performance related to pagination.

MySQL is the most popular open-source database in the world. It has the distinction of being the only database that is used in every continent. Yes, even Antartica!!! The reasons for such popularity is its availability, performance, robustness, etc. It provides three types of database engines, MyISAM, InnoDB, and MySQL Archive. Out of these, the MyISAM table is the default table type. It is fast, simple, and allows full-text searching. Although it is reliable, it can become corrupt and, thus, inaccessible following a system crash. You should use appropriate corrective measures to repair MySQL database. However, if you are not able to do so then you should use a third-party MySQL recovery software to do so.

Consider a scenario wherein you have MySQL 5.0.22 database running in your system. You use it for MediaWiki installation that is reported as corrupt. When you try to repair the table, the following error message is displayed:
…

1. Using MysQL as NoSQL -- 750,000+ qps on a commodity MySQL/InnoDB 5.1 server from remote web clients.
2. Making an SLR Camera from Scratch -- amazing piece of hardware devotion. (via hackaday.com)
3. Mac App Store Guidelines -- Apple announce an app store for the Macintosh, similar to its app store for iPhones and iPads. "Mac App" no longer means generic "program", it has a new and specific meaning, a program that must be installed through the App store and which has limited functionality …