Just a quick note: Kickfire is not based on SSD (solid-state device) hard drives. Their old website says “SQL goes solid state” but that just means SQL in hardware, not SSD.

When I was a child, we had a Sears Lady Kenmore clothes washing machine that boasted “solid-state circuits” on the panel, in flowery script writing. It was not based on SSD, either.

Finally, I am not on the Kickfire payroll. I’m not getting anything from working with them, except perhaps the fun of being in their labs while they’re still in stealth mode. It’s a harder balance than you might think, writing about a product that I don’t know about and am excited to learn about, and sounding objective. If I’m sounding like a fanboy, I don’t mean to. Trust me, if it’s vaporware you’ll hear it here first.

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Some of you have noticed Kickfire, a new sponsor at this year’s MySQL Conference and Expo. Like Keith Murphy, I have been involved with them for a while now. This article explains the basics of how their technology is different from the current state of the art in complex queries on large amounts of data.

Kickfire is developing a MySQL appliance that combines a pluggable storage engine (for MySQL 5.1) with a new kind of chip. On the surface, the storage engine is not that revolutionary: it is a column-store engine with data compression and some other techniques to reduce disk I/O, which is kind of par for the course in data warehousing today. The chip is the really exciting part of the technology.

The simplest description of their chip is that it …

While I was updating my blog recently, I read the top part of it which said "My adventures in database developing". I realized that I have really neglected database developing with all my research into other programming languages.
So I was trying to play around with SQL statements to brush up on my skills.

Luckily (or unluckily), someone at my work, a java developer, needed to do a data export and thought that I can do it in 1 SQL line. He said.... and I quote "You only need 1 SQL line. Whats the problem?".
Whenever I hear the "whats the problem" line, there usually is one.
So, with him having great confidence in my SQL-ing ability or a complete misunderstanding of database developing, I was forced to do the data export.

I realized early on that it would take a long time. Just to start off, I needed like 20+ columns, but each column was a row somewhere in 4 different tables.

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Today, we run into an issue when a client of ours. They wanted to see some of the data on our website and when doing a search, they didnt see all the days they asked for in the search

Why didn't they see all the data? Because they did a search by date and some of the dates were stored via the website in the form of '2008-01-01 00:00:00' and some were stored via the database in the form of '2008-01-01 12:35:49'.
Now, for some magical reason, if you hide the time in the date in your searches, like so:
where signupdate between '2008-01-01' and '2008-01-02'
or
where signupdate between date('2008-01-01 00:00:00') and date('2008-01-02 00:00:00')
then you might not see all the data between the days 01 to 02.
Depending on which way your date was stored, you might only see the dates between those 2 dates and not equal to those dates as well.

So for example, if you had:

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My wife wants to learn database design. She is an archaeologist. She wants to read a book written in plain English, not h4×0r jargon. She is smart and capable and knows her own data, but does not know SQL or database theory. She wants to be able to design databases and be understood by others who know database design. She also wants to be able to explain her ideas to a programmer who will build the systems she’s designing. Is there a book for her?

Books, Database Design

As a I wrote a couple of days ago, I went to the second day of PostgreSQL Conference East 2008 last Sunday. I had a good time and really enjoyed meeting everyone, listening, learning, and occasionally talking. I asked a number of fearless-newbie questions that paid off handsomely: people were very willing to humor me. I also left with a beautiful t-shirt, mug, and bag combo thanks to EnterpriseDB. The bag has already been put to use for a grocery shopping trip.

Note to conference/website organizers: I can’t link to anything but the front page, so I assume my link above will someday point to the 2009 conference, or the 2008 West conference. It would be good to give each event a permalink right from the start…

One thing that surprised me was the distance …

I’m heading out to PostgreSQL Conference East in a few hours. Alas, I missed the first day but I’ll be there all day tomorrow. I hope to learn, meet people, and generally participate in goodness.

And no, I’m not an expert in PostgreSQL as I am in MySQL, but I have always held it in very high esteem. I am not going to try to spread the MySQL-ness into the PostgreSQL camp :-)

See you there.

mysql, PostgreSQL

I have an ingrained (possibly even genetic) aversion to stock images. Actually, not all stock: just the vacuous kind. You know what I mean: like the politically-correct, gender-balanced, racially-balanced, age-diverse ones where people are all smiling and pointing at a computer screen you can’t see. Ugh!

(Photo credit: istockphoto.com)

There are many reasons not to use images like this. I guess it’s okay in some situations — for example when you just want a smiling, attractive woman with a customer-service headset to reinforce that you’ve come to the right place for support. However, even these really don’t have to be stock images. One of my former employers used their own employees for such photos, almost exclusively, and it made the site much more real. And there are plenty of examples of companies that use photos of their own employees and get “realness” as a result. If I’m not mistaken, …

Effective April 1, I will join Percona full-time as a consultant. I’ll be helping people build high-performance applications with MySQL, but I’ll also be continuing to develop and improve tools such as Maatkit.

This career change has been a long time in progress. I’m really looking forward to it, but at the same time it’s hard to leave my current employer, The Rimm-Kaufman Group (RKG). Working with them has been the best job I’ve ever had. But ultimately, my dream job is to help as many people as I can, and consulting will be a better way to do that.

At a time like this, I like to reflect on the trail that has led here. It’s a good opportunity to realize how fortunate I really am and fill up my gratitude tank. So I’d like to thank everyone who has …

I have an issue I hope someone can help me with. I am generating RRDtool graphs (for Cacti monitoring templates for MySQL, which I’ll release soon) that have up to 11 different metrics on them. With that many lines or areas on a graph, it becomes very hard to pick colors that are easy to see and easy to distinguish from each other. What’s a good way to choose such colors? Is there a way to do it automatically — is there a formal method that will produce good results?

I know some color theory and I have read about how you can distinguish colors from each other (hue, value etc). But I am unsure the best way to choose this many colors. Trying by hand produces garish results or graphs that are just hard to read.

My first attempt to solve this with a program was to simply create …