A busy week at Casa Turner, as the infamous Home Renovations of Doom wrap up, I finish the final chapters of "Developing Enterprise iOS Applications" (buy a copy for all your friends, it's a real page turner!), pack for two weeks of vacation with the family in California (Palm Springs in August, 120 degrees, woohoo!), and celebrate both a birthday and an anniversary.

But never fear, WIR fans, I'll continue to supply the news, even as my MacBook melts in the sun and the buzzards start to circle overhead.

The law of unintended consequences

If you decide to install Lion Server, you may notice something missing from the included software: MySQL. Previous releases of OS X server offered pre-installed MySQL command line and GUI tools, but they are …

In this post:

• Introduction
• Reasons to submit a paper for an Oracle User Group event
• What should you talk about?

Introduction

Just a few days ago I received a reminder email from Burke Scheld for the “AUSOUG National Conference Series – Perth 2011 – Call for Papers”. I had an event-related conversation with several Oracle guys in my professional networks and the answers I received triggered this blog post. Some of the very good Oracle professionals I personally respect said “…I am not sure what I would get out of it …” or “…I haven’t done anything exciting for the last FEW MONTHS …”.
The answers I received shocked me a bit. Typically I am in the opposite situation where I have so many good things happening I would love to share with the world that I had to choose from too many topics to submit several. I am sure that I am not very different from other …

Most analytical and BI databases have date dimension table(s). One frequently needs to generate and populate such data. I present a solution below for such data generation, written in Python. Please use different database drivers/modules to connect to your specific database server (MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, etc.) for data population.

Notes:

1. It takes 2 parameters, start date and end date, in YYYYMMDD format, inclusive. Extensive error checking is built in, but let me know if you have comments/suggestions;

2. The script produce a Python dictionary (associated array) and print out its content;

3. The output includes dayNumber: a day’s position in a year. For example, 2011-02-01 is the 32ed day in 2011, therefore its dayNumber is 32;

4. The output includes weekNumber: a week’s position in a year. The week number in year is based on ISO standard. From documentation: the ISO year consists of 52 or 53 …

Open Cloud Initiative launches. HP joins OpenStack. Oracle releases Java 7. And more.

# The Open Cloud Initiative launched to drive open standards in cloud computing.

# HP announced its support for OpenStack.

# Oracle announced the availability of Java SE 7. The Apache Software Foundation warned of index corruption and crashes in Apache Lucene and Solr.

# Nebula …

Log Writer is busily and efficiently pumping out innumerable bytes from log buffer to online redo logs, while more and more exciting features are being added to the MySQL and the SQL Server community is getting more vibrant with each passing day, and in all this beautiful frenzy, we manage to catch some elegant blog [...]

It is a constant, yet interesting debate in the world of big data.  What scales best?  OldSQL, NoSQL, NewSQL?

I have a longer post coming on this soon.  But for now, let me make the following comments.  Generally, most data technologies can be made to scale - somehow.  Scaling up tends not to be too much of an issue, scaling out is where the difficulties begin.  Yet, most data technologies can be scaled in one form or another to meet a data challenge even if the result isn’t pretty. 

What is best?  Well that comes down to the resulting complexity, cost, performance and other trade-offs.  Trade-offs are key as there are almost always significant concessions to be made as you scale up.

A recent example of mine, I was looking at scalability aspects of MySQL.  In particular, MySQL Cluster.  It is …

CloudBees raises $10.5m. Microsoft commits $100m to SUSE. And more.

# CloudBees secured $10.5m in Series B venture funding.

# Microsoft renewed its vows with Attachmate’s SUSE business unit, committing to invest $100m in new SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates over the next four years.

# Oracle announced that it has acquired Ksplice, twhioch offers zero downtime update technology for Linux.

# Ingres announced that Steve Shine has been named Chief Executive Officer and President.

# Dell …

About a week ago I appeared to have started an argument which has now spanned several blog post comments, 39 Google+ comments and two other blog posts.  So the first thing I want to do is apologise to the MySQL@Oracle staff (and Sheeri).  I was disagreeing on the use of 'The' whilst the real problem is my personal understanding the meaning of the word/name/trademark 'MySQL'.  You guys are right and I am wrong.  To correct this I'll refer to what I used to call the "MySQL Ecosystem" as the Open Database Community until someone has a cool name for it.

The arguments were so severe that last week I was even thinking about leaving the Open Database Community.  Apart from Drizzle, mydumper and a few other things I don't contribute as much useful content I used to now anyway.  I would need about another 20 hours in every day to do as much as I would like to do.  But for now I will just stay more in the …

About a week ago I appeared to have started an argument which has now spanned several blog post comments, 39 Google+ comments and two other blog posts.  So the first thing I want to do is apologise to the MySQL@Oracle staff (and Sheeri).  I was disagreeing on the use of ‘The’ whilst the real problem is my personal understanding the meaning of the word/name/trademark ‘MySQL’.  You guys are right and I am wrong.  To correct this I’ll refer to what I used to call the “MySQL Ecosystem” as the Open Database Community until someone has a cool name for it.

The arguments were so severe that last week I was even thinking about leaving the Open Database Community.  Apart from Drizzle, mydumper and a few other things I don’t contribute as much useful content I used to now anyway.  I would need about another 20 hours in every day to do as much as I would like to do.  But for now I will just stay more in …

Once again this week, you are holding the new edition of Log Buffer in your hands. From across the database planet, fresh and sizzling blog posts of Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL are presented just for you in Log Buffer #230. Enjoy and give your feedback in the comments. Oracle: Have you ever wondered about [...]