I had a customer recently who had very hierarchical data, with some complicated measures that didn’t aggregate up according to regular ole aggregation rules (sum, min, max, avg, count, distinct count). Now, one can do weighted averages using sql expressions in a Measure Expression these rules were complex and they also were dependent on the other dimension attributes. UGGGGH.

Come to that: their analysts had the pristine, blessed data sets calculated at different rollups (already aggregated to Company Regions). Mondrian though, is often too smart for it’s own good. If it has data in cache, and things it can roll up a measure to a higher level (Company Companies can be rolled up to Regions if it’s a SUM for instance) Mondrian will do that. This is desirable in like 99.9% of cases. Unless, you want to “solve” your cube and just tell Mondrian to read the data from your tables.

I started thinking - since …

Living in Portland, OR, I was sad to see O’Reilly move OSCON to San Jose this year (don’t they have enough with MySQL, Velocity, …?). So what did the Portland locals do? Start their own:

Open Source Bridge (we have a lot of bridges here in Portland).

It looks like they just opened up their call for papers recently, quoting from their page: “Open Source Bridge is accepting proposals now through March 31st for our 2009 conference, which will take place June 17–19 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR.”

February 2009 has been a very busy time for presentations on Open Source Software in the Dallas/Fort Worth Area. Yahoo's Tommy Falgout presented at the recent DallasPHP.Org meeting on Scaling MySQL. You can find his presentation at http://www.dallasphp.org and I highly recommend their meetings as an excellent.

Next up is the Dallas OpenSolaris/Dallas Sun Users Group(DSUG)and they are offering the ultimate geek-bait! Free Pizza!

Meetings Held the Third Thursday of Every Month
Next Session: Thurs Feb 19th (6:30PM Pizza, 7:00PM Program)
Topic: Open Source Roundtable - share your Open Source experiences with the group
Speaker: Jim McGuinness will kick off the discussion with updates on MySQL, Glassfish and Openoffice
Location: Dallas Sun Office, Mansion Conference Room
16000 North Dallas Parkway, Suite 700

Register here: …

Last week, my good colleague Gerv gently took me to task about requiring that videos submitted to the Mozilla Net Effects video program be licensed under the Creative Common NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (instead of an actual Free Culture licensed like Creative Common ShareAlike license or Creative Common Attribution license) . I thought about this for a while and got to wondering why I’d ever let fear of misuse overcome my experience and common sense.

Licensing and contract choices are often driven by fear and greed. We work, play, love and give in an …

Just read it !

The only unrealistic part about the scenario is that I fear that most purchasers within a government agency won't be asking these questions, yet.

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Unless you are doing it wrong.

And sadly I`m seeing more and more people doing it wrong.
To a lot of people Open Source means that they have a piece of software that does almost what they want and which they can modify to their best wishes and use internally.

So they fork locally,, they don't redistribute their code , but they aren't contributing their changes back upstream, chances are these changes wouldn't be accepted upstream anyhow as they are really customizing the code for their specific cases. At first sight this doesn't look so bad , at second sight ..

When weeks or months later the upstream project releases an urgent security fix, the local fork has deviated soo much that it can't upgrade anymore and stays with an insecure version.
Often it's worse.. a feature that could have been accepted upstream has been implemented slightly different in the local fork, the result being that newer features depending …

The slides for my Monitoring MySQL talk , which I gave earlier today in an overcrowded MySQl Developersroom at Fosdem are now online, both at my site and at Slideshare

As of now I actually expect people to use those slides for schoolwork or next year in a main Fosdem track :)
As afterall that is the goal of Open Source and spreading the word ..

MySQL Monitoring Shoot Out View more presentations from Kris Buytaert. (tags: mysql …

When I read Monty's post on leaving this passage struck me the most.

The main reason for leaving was that I am not satisfied with the way the MySQL server has been developed, as can be seen on my previous blog post. In particular I would have like to see the server development to be moved to a true open development environment that would encourage outside participation and without any need of differentiation on the source code. Sun has been considering opening up the server development, but the pace has been too slow.

In short, Sun isn't open enough. I think I've said that enough, it's typically more Open Core than Open Source .. and for a growing amount of people.. that isn't good enough.

Reacting on that post we see Matt Asay …

In just over 2 weeks I’ll be the invited speaker in Washington DC to Best practices for migrating applications to MySQL. This workshop is being held in conjunction with Carahsoft and Sun/MySQL and aims to provide to the Federal sector valuable information for the continued usage and uptake of Open Source and specifically MySQL.

As part of my preparation I’m happy to hear from any organizations that have successfully migrated from Oracle/SQL Server/Informix/Sybase etc to MySQL and would like to be cited.

While I have been involved in the process I am also happy to hear of reasons why a migration failed, was aborted or postponed. This is all valuable information in determining what are the most ideal applications.

There are plenty of new databases coming out, aiming to tackle the massively scalable domain that Google's BigTable pioneered. On the Radar mailing list, Jesse pointed out Cassandra (Facebook's offering) and Mike Loukides countered with Hypertable, asking "We're sort of being overrun with BigTable-style databases; I wonder what's going to win?". (Artur observed, "Cassandra is less like BigTable and more like a distributed column store with autocreating and searching in column namespace, but lacks a lot of indexing needed for BigTable.")

Jesse replied it'd be the one that's easiest for developers to use quickly, and I expanded that to:

• language and platform integration (e.g., Ruby, Rails, Django) so it can be used in the language you use to get stuff done
• higher abstractions available …