Join Percona Chief Evangelist Colin Charles as he covers happenings, gives pointers and provides musings on the open source database community.

Beyond spending time getting ready for Velocity and Open Source Summit Europe this week, there was some feature testing this week that compared MySQL and MariaDB. Naturally, a long report/blog is coming soon. Stay tuned.

Releases

I reckon a lot of folks are swamped after Percona Live Europe Dublin and Oracle OpenWorld, so the releases in the MySQL universe are a bit quieter.

• Percona Monitoring and Management 1.3.2. Fixes around Query Analytics
• …

Monty’s talk at Velocity 2010 seemed to go down really well (at least from reading the agile admin entry on Drizzle). There are a few great bits from this article that just made me laugh:

“Oracle’s “run Java within the database” is an example of totally retarded functionality whose main job is to ruin your life”

Love it that we’re managing to get the message out.

• Share this on Facebook
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There has been a significant increase in interest in the Memcached, the open source distributed memory object-caching system, in recent months, as a number of vendors look to exploit its popularity in Web 2.0 and social networking environments.

Like Hadoop, which has become the focus of a number of commercial plays, it would appear that the time is right for commercialization of Memcached. But what is it, here did it come from, and what are the chances for vendors to rake in serious cash? Here are the details.

What is it?
Pronounced mem-cash-dee, Memcached was originally created by Danga Interactive (the developer of LiveJournal, which was acquired by Six Apart in 2005) to speed up the performance of dynamic Web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached has become an industry standard for improving the performance of dynamic websites.

The code is available from the …

If there's a site that exemplifies explosive growth, it has to be Twitter. It seems like everywhere you look, someone is Tweeting, or talking about Tweeting, or Tweeting about Tweeting. Keeping the site responsive under that type of increase is no easy job, but it's one that John Adams has to deal with every day, working in Twitter Operations. He'll be talking about that work at O'Reilly's Velocity Conference, in a session entitled Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World's Most Popular Micro-blogging Site, and he spent some time with us to talk about what is involved in keeping the site alive.

James Turner: Can you start by describing the platforms and technologies that make Twitter run …

Last year I was surprised to be going to Velocity.  Read the post, it was an adventure.  But, I really like the conference.  It is the perfect conference for me.  While a good majority of my work is done coding PHP/MySQL apps, I tend to focus on architecture, frameworks, performance and that kind of stuff.  So, a web performance and operations conference is just perfect.

Last year, I was on a panel with some great guys.  I was able to share just a bit about my experience dealing with the instant success of a web site.  This year, my proposal was accepted to talk more about dealing with success of a web …

I was invited to give a short introduction to Ruby on Rails at Tech Meetup in Edinburgh a couple of days ago. I’d been racking my brain for days on what to talk about — 15 minutes is too short for me to give a meaningful introduction to Rails — and eventually settled on telling a few stories.

The slides don’t make much sense on their own, so I’ve included the “script” of what I talked about too. I deviated quite a bit from the script as I got into it, so hopefully I should be able to provide audio (or, dread the thought, maybe even video) of the talk in due course.

Intro

I’m Graeme. I’m the Managing Director of Rubaidh Ltd, and have been developing Ruby on Rails applications professionally for 3 years now.

Telling Stories

To be honest, I didn’t know what my audience this evening was going to be like. I wasn’t sure if …

I just made my reservations to attend Velocity Conference in Burlingame, CA. Velocity is a new two day conference being organized by O'Reilly. I was happy to learn at Lunch today that one of my good friends from CafeMom will also be attending. Over at Facebook I see Don McAskill has RSVP'd for the event as well.

Jesse Robbins, chair for Velocity conference graciously provided a 20% discount coupon as a comment on my blog post.

The early registration is about to end, but I find it really interesting that many slots still mention TBC (to be confirmed). I would have expected the schedule to …