I met GNU for the first time fifteen years ago. I was working as a consultant in support of a criminal investigation, and as part of my duties I had to analyze a database hosted on a SCO server.
As often happens, the database was proprietary, and it did not include any facility to analyze data. I needed to build an application to explore the data thoroughly.
Most of my working libraries were written in C, which I used in other operating systems. So I contacted SCO and asked to buy a C compiler. I was told that it would cost me quite a lot (I was prepared for that, although not for the price they told me, but since I was going to expense it, I would not care), and that it would take one month to get the software. I did not have one month at my disposal. I needed to nail down the evidence for the investigation immediately. So I started asking around. I was doing some side work for …

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It’s important that for any software application good standards exist. Standards ensure a number of key considerations. Standards are necessary to enforce and provide reproducible software and to provide a level of quality in a team environment, ease of readability and consistency.

If you were going to create a MySQL Naming Standard you have to make a number of key decisions. Generally there is no true right or wrong, however my goals tend towards readability and simplicity. In 2 decades of database design I’ve actually changed my preference between some of these points.

1. Pluralism

Option 1
All database objects are defined in the logical form, that being singular.

For example: box, customer, person, category, user, order, order_line product, post, post_category

Option 2

For database tables & views, objects are defined in plural. …

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I came across the OStatic Free hosting service that provide Solaris + Glassfish (Java Container) + MySQL.

They offer “Now you can get free Web hosting on Cloud Computing environment free of charge for up to 12 months. ”

The catch “accumulate 400 Points for participating on the site“.

A rather novel approach, you get 100 points for registering, but then only 5-15 points per task. The equates to approximately at least 30 tasks you need to perform, such as answering a question, or reviewing somebodies application. That seems like a lot of work?

In this case, Free has definitely a cost and time factor to consider.

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As part of a project of Technocation, Inc I took a whole bunch of videos at OSCon 2008. The conference was about a month ago, and about 2 weeks ago I’d finished processing and uploading all the videos, but it was only today where I had the 5-6 hours I needed to finish posting all the video, and making this matrix of video.

The video may not be the quality that the O’Reilly folks took and put up on blip tv’s OSCon site, but all the videos here are freely downloadable or playable in your browser.

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I have not said much about Drizzle here; that is because there is not much to say. It is premature, really, to say anything about it at this point. Some have said they will support Drizzle; as Pythian supports several database systems, it is very likely that we will support Drizzle as well. Particularly since there is in-house Drizzle expertise already. But I digress; my point is that it is premature to really say much about Drizzle.

My involvement in Drizzle goes back to around the end of April/beginning of May 2008. Given my early involvement, (more…)