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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 …

When I work on database designs, either on my own projects or as advisor to others, I often find people very reluctant to use an enum type for any columns. Now, I'm not about to advocate the gratuitous use of an enum column, they definitely have some pitfalls, but I think it is important to understand these rather than just shouting "enum evil!" if anyone should mention them.

There are cases where an enum is the correct choice for a particular type of data, so let's look at what an enum type actually is and does.

Enum Type Intentions

An enum column type is a column which allows only the specified data values. This means that if a particular column can only take certain values, for example 'art', 'music' or 'sport' then you can specify this when you create the table:

CREATE TABLE `teachers` (
  `id` INT(11) PRIMARY KEY …

Here are some quick commands for installing the proper packages and requirements for the MySQL dbbenchmark program.

export PKG_PATH="ftp://openbsd.mirrors.tds.net/pub/OpenBSD/4.7/packages/amd64/"
pkg_add -i -v wget
wget http://dbbenchmark.googlecode.com/files/dbbenchmark-version-0.1.beta_rev26.tar.gz
pkg_add -i -v python
Ambiguous: choose package for python
 a       0: 
         1: python-2.4.6p2
         2: python-2.5.4p3
         3: python-2.6.3p1
Your choice: 2

pkg_add -i -v py-mysql
pkg_add -i -v mysql
pkg_add -i -v mysql-server
ln -s /usr/local/bin/python2.5 /usr/bin/python
gzip -d dbbenchmark-version-0.1.beta_rev26.tar.gz
tar -xvf dbbenchmark-version-0.1.beta_rev26.tar
cd dbbenchmark-version-0.1.beta_rev26
./dbbenchmark.py --print-sql
 - login to mysql and execute sql commands
./dbbenchmark.py