My former boss, Marten Mickos, has created an excellent new resources for early stage founders, managers and execs called www.Schoolofherring.com. Each post has a short write up and often a 2-3 minute video covering a topic such as giving feedback, Peter Drucker's principles of good management, what it takes to build an effective team, hiring for strength etc. Some of these topics are very practical, like how to send good email, others are more thought-provoking, such as the notion that …

Getting started with MariaDB, by Daniel Bartholomew, is a good book for people who wants to approach MariaDB without knowing MySQL. While this book covers all basic topics, it provides a vast overview of what MariaDB is and can do. In other words: the text is not just about SQL queries.

The book also mentions topics that are not strictly related to MariaDB, but are important for MariaDB users; for example the importance of phisically securing a server, or how to secure a LAN.

The fundamental topics for a MariaDB newbie are covered: installation, …

There is a good article over at Re-Code by ex-Microsoft VP Steven Sinofsky called "The Four Stages of Disruption".  It describes the evolution of products and markets through disruption, drawing from Sinofsky's own insights and also building on the work of Everett Rogers ("The Diffusion of Innovations") and Clayton Christensen ("The …

As a leader of a technical operations team I often have to work on technical operations engineer hiring. This process involves a lot of interviews with candidates and during those interviews along with many challenging practical questions I really love to ask questions like “What are the most important resources you think an Operations Engineer should follow?”, “What books in your opinion are must-read for a techops engineer?” or “Who are your personal heroes in IT community?”. Those questions often give me a lot of information about candidates, their experience, who they are looking up to in the community, what they are interested in, and if they are actively working on improving their professional level.

Recently, one of the candidates asked me to share my lists with him and I thought this information could be valuable to other people so I have decided to share it here on my blog.

Must-Read Books List

First …

Instant Innodb, by Matt Reid

This book does a good job of explaining the InnoDB internals. I have found particularly useful the section where it describe in detail all the server variables affecting InnoDB. Although these variables are also in the MySQL manual, some of them have never been explained to me as thoroughly as this book as done.

The title claims that it is a InnoDB reference. If is more than that, as the reference part id covered in three chapters. The rest of the book gives useful advice on maintenance, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

As most people still do I learned to read using books. WhooHoo!

Books are nice. Besides reading them they are also a nice decoration on your shelf. There is a brilliant TED talk by Chip Kidd on this subject.

But sometimes books have drawbacks. This is where I have to start the comparison with vinyl records (Yes, you're still reading a database oriented blog). Vinyl records look nice and are still being sold and yes I also still use them. The drawback is that car dealers start to look puzzeled if you ask them if your new multimedia system in your car is able to play your old Led Zeppelin records. The market for portable record players is small, and that's for a good reason.

The problem with books about databases is that they get old very soon. …

Here are some of the fake O'Reilly book covers I mentioned in a prior post.  These have been optimized for use as black & white Kindle screensaver wallpaper images.  If you haven't done so already, you can install a Kindle screensaver hack with a couple of downloads. 

Update: I've embedded a slideshow from PicasaWeb, but it requires Flash.  If you don't see it you can click on the links below to go directly to PicasaWeb.

• Kindle hacks:  …

Read the original article at Book Review – Help! by Oliver Burkeman

Help! How To Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done

I've long overcome that sheepish feeling when browsing the Self-help section at the bookstore. Sure, How to Make Friends and Influence People or the Seven Steps to World Domination in your bookcase aren't exactly the sort of titles to suggest a deep intellect but I like to keep an open mind when checking out the latest hardcover secret to happiness and prosperity. Basically I try not to diss a book just because it's got "soup" on the cover.

I will concede that publishers have …

Here's an interview with Nicolas Pujol who has written an excellent new book called "The Mind Share Market."  Nicolas and I were colleagues at MySQL for several years and we often discussed the role of our free open source product as a way to gain market share in the commercial sector.  In MySQL's case, our goal was to be the #1 choice for web developers worldwide both in the free and the commercial market.  Over the years, the notion of having a free product has transcended Open Source and now has many more applications in other markets.  It can be quite …

IBM's Watson natural language Question & Answer system made headlines recently with its primetime debut on Jeopardy.  Despite a few embarassing answers, Watson trounced top Jeopardy players Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings.  Watson is built from 90 IBM Power 750 IBM Linux servers with 16 terabytes of memory providing 80 Teraflops of processing power.  Watson is perhaps the most famous "Big Data" systems out there.  Watson's knowledge base consists of 200 million pages of text data that is pre-processed using  …