We’re gearing up to release v0.5 of GenieDB right now, and the biggest new feature in v0.5 is the generic indexing framework.

Originally, GenieDB provided indices on fields of records. As we do not mandate a per-table schema, each record in a table could have totally different fields; so when an index is created on the field “foo” of the table “bar”, we index any record in “bar” that has a “foo” field under that value in the index. If the record did not have a “foo” field, then it doesn’t appear in the index at all (whereas records with a NULL value for “foo” are indexed under NULL, of course).

However, expecting future interesting developments, we made sure this part of the code – figuring out how a given record should appear in a given index – would be easy to extend in future. In general, there could be any function from records to zero or more index entries.

For …

To benchmark IO on Linux and MySQL transaction processing, SysBench is a popular choice that can do both. After poking around at the source code, it seems PostgreSQL and Oracle are also included for transaction processing testing if you have the proper header files, but I didn’t test those.

To benchmark IO on Windows and SQL Server transaction processing, Microsoft provides two tools, SQLIO and SQLIOSim. SQLIO is a misnomer in that it really doesn’t have much to do with SQL Server. It is a general purpose disk IO benchmark tool.

So today I was playing with SysBench and noticed that I can compile and build it on Windows as well. I decided I should run IO benchmark on a single machine with both tools (SQLIO and SysBench), and see if I could reconcile the results.

To make things simple, I thought I would just benchmark random read of 3G (orders of magnitude bigger than disk controller cache) files for 5 minutes (300 …

Lately I worked quite a bit with Python and Linux, writing monitoring and automation utilities. I am in a transition period, so I thought I ought to write some Python stuff interfacing with MySQL for fun, and start positioning myself for expanded career horizon, I hope.

To get started, I thought it would be fun to rewrite a Perl utility I wrote before with Python. That script converts MySQL character sets to utf8, a very common task for wikis and blogs during an upgrade. This time, I did everything from scratch: firing up an Amazon EC2 Linux instance, hand install and configuring MySQL 5.1.50 (creating mysql user, group, wget tarball, setting directory ownership and permissions, creating symbolic to MySQL binaries, editing my.cnf, /etc/init.d/ and chkconfig automatic startup, environmental variables, the works), compiled and …

I'm the boards of two companies (Pentaho, Revolution Analytics) that are starting to see a lot of customer traction around Big Data. More and more companies in media, pharma, retail and finance are doing advanced analysis, reporting, graphing, etc with massive data sets. It made me wonder what other areas of the technology stack might evolve with the trend towards Big Data.  Obviously, there's new middleware layers like Hadoop and Map Reduce, and we're also seeing the emergence of NoSQL data management layers with Cassandra, MongoDB, MemBase and others.  But what …

We’re proud to announce the next release of MySQL Connector/Net version 6.3.4.  This release is GA (Generally Available).

We hope you will make MySQL Connector/Net your preferred set of .NET components including our ADO.Net library and other Microsoft .NET frameworks components such as our Visual Studio plugin and Entity Framework for MySQL.

We are dedicated to providing the best tools for your MySQL database .NET applications.

Special thanks go to all the great MySQL beta testers that provided valuable ideas, insights, and bug reports to the Connector/Net team.  Your beta feedback truly helped us improve the product.

Version 6.3.4 provides the following new features:
- The ability to dynamically enable/disable query analysis at runtime.
- Visual Studio 2010 compatibility
- Improved compatibility with Visual Studio wizards using our new SQL Server mode
- Support for …

We’re happy to announce the latest maintenance release of MySQL Connector/Net 6.2.4.

Version 6.2.4 maintenance release includes:

• Enhancement that allows a procedure to be recreated with a different number of parameters
• Fixes for 29 bugs

For details see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/connector-net-news-6-2-4.html

MySQL Connector 6.2.4 :

1. Provides secure, high-performance data connectivity with MySQL.
2. Implements ADO.NET interfaces that integrate into ADO.NET aware tools.
3. Is a fully managed ADO.NET driver written in 100% pure C#.
4. Provide Visual Studio Integration

If you are a current user, we look forward to your feedback on all the new capabilities we are delivering.

As always, you will find binaries and source on our download pages.

Please get your copy from  …

MySQL Connector/Net 6.1.5, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This is a maintenance release of the 6.1 branch and is suitable for use with MySQL server versions 5.0 and higher. It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.1.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time – if you can’t find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

This is maintenance release.  Please review the change log (included with product or at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/connector-net-news-6-1-5.html) for details.

Thank you for working with MySQL!

…

MySQL Connector/Net 6.0.7, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This is a maintenance release of the 6.0 branch and is suitable for use with MySQL server versions 5.0 and higher. It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.0.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time – if you can’t find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

This is maintenance release.  Please review the change log (included with product or at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/connector-net-news-6-0-7.html) for details.

Thank you for working with MySQL!

…

MySQL Connector/Net 6.3.3, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This is a beta release and is intended to introduce you to the new features and enhancements we are planning. This release should not be used in a production environment.  It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.3.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time – if you can’t find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

The new features or changes in this release are:

• Visual Studio 2010 RTM support
• New sql editor.  Create a new file with a .mysql extension to see it in action
• Please check the changelog and release notes for more …

I managed to get an "early upgrade" of my iPhone 3GS to the iPhone 4 despite AT&T's best efforts.  I've had a couple of days using the new iOS 4 operating system on my 3GS and a couple of hours with the iPhone 4.  So here are a few highlights of the initial hands-on experience with more updates on the weekend.

Updated with additional information, video & photos.

Low-res video (VGA resolution):

Here's a gallery of additional photos from the iPhone 4:
(Double click to see larger versions.)

Upgrade Process

Other than AT&T's longstanding inability to deal with demand, the upgrade process is pretty simple.   I chased the UPS driver home to get my iPhone today and just plugged into the USB cable to restore my last iPhone 3GS backup.  That took about 20 minutes. …