I just received a confirmation that my presentation proposal for the MySQL user conference 2011 was accepted! The title for my proposal is MQL-to-SQL: a JSON-based Query Language for RDBMS Access from AJAX Applications, and it covers pretty much everything implied by the title.

As always, the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, California serves as the venue. The conference will be held from April 11-14. Except for the venue and period, I think this year's conference will bear few similarities to previous editions. Let me try and explain.

This year's theme is "MySQL, the ecosystem and …

O’Reilly’s 2011 edition of the MySQL conference has an expanded agenda, with good representation from Postgres, CouchDB, MongoDB, and others. Take a look at the full schedule listing, which is being filled out as talks are approved and the speakers verify that they’ll give the session.

I am certainly looking forward to this year’s event. A tremendous amount of progress has landed in GA versions of open-source databases this year. To name just a couple, there’s a new version of Postgres (9.0) with built-in replication and many more improvements; there’s MySQL 5.5 GA; there’s the HandlerSocket NoSQL interface to MySQL; Drizzle has a beta release; and the list goes on. I believe that this conference will have balanced and representative coverage of what’s really important to users. …

The follow-up blog post on moving your MySQL applications to CouchDB has been posted on the CouchOne blog. Part 2 digs into a bit more detail on the specifics of views, and how to perform some of the more common operations used in MySQL, such as paging and aggregation in your CouchDB view. You can read Part 2 here

The follow-up blog post on moving your MySQL applications to CouchDB has been posted on the CouchOne blog. Part 2 digs into a bit more detail on the specifics of views, and how to perform some of the more common operations used in MySQL, such as paging and aggregation in your CouchDB view.

You can read Part 2 here

I’ve started a little series on how to migrate your MySQL applications and databases over to CouchDB. Most of the process is about how you think about your data, not about the database itself, the application, or the interface to the database storage. There are some use cases for data storage that lend themselves to the CouchDB document model that provides some advantages over the table-based structure in MySQL. The first part of the series is Moving from MySQL to CouchDB: Part 1.

I’ve started a little series on how to migrate your MySQL applications and databases over to CouchDB. Most of the process is about how you think about your data, not about the database itself, the application, or the interface to the database storage. There are some use cases for data storage that lend themselves to the CouchDB document model that provides some advantages over the table-based structure in MySQL.

The first part of the series is Moving from MySQL to CouchDB: Part 1.

It seems obvious that given the decreasing cost of storage and computation, there's going to be a significant increase in the volume of data that organizations accumulate over the next 10 years.  But the type of data being accumulated may be different from the areas where traditional DBMSs dominated.  It's not just about transactions; it's search patterns, on-line behavior, click-thru data, events fired off by smartphones, messages over Twitter & Facebook, log data of various kinds.

If an organization can figure out a better way identify prospects, or deliver more targeted ads, or optimize pricing decisions by analyzing terrabytes of data, they'd be crazy not to. Over the long term, companies that don't develop these capabilities will be at a competitive disadvantage.

As to what the implications are from a …

This miniconf aims to cover many of the current methods of data storage and retrieval and attempt to bring order to the universe. We’re aiming to cover what various systems do, what the latest developments are and what you should use for various applications.

We aim for talks from developers of and developers using the software in question.

Aiming for some combination of: PostgreSQL, Drizzle, MySQL, XFS, ext[34], Swift (open source cloud storage, part of OpenStack), memcached, TokyoCabinet, TDB/CTDB, CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase….. and more!

Call for Papers open NOW (Until 22nd October).

I'm the boards of two companies (Pentaho, Revolution Analytics) that are starting to see a lot of customer traction around Big Data. More and more companies in media, pharma, retail and finance are doing advanced analysis, reporting, graphing, etc with massive data sets. It made me wonder what other areas of the technology stack might evolve with the trend towards Big Data.  Obviously, there's new middleware layers like Hadoop and Map Reduce, and we're also seeing the emergence of NoSQL data management layers with Cassandra, MongoDB, MemBase and others.  But what …

CouchDB is a document-oriented database written in Erlang that addresses a particular “sweet spot” in data storage and retrieval needs. This blog post is an introduction to CouchDB for those of us who have a relational database background.

A CouchDB database doesn’t have tables. It has a collection of documents, stored in a B+Tree. A document is a collection of attributes and values. Values can be atomic, or complex nested structures such as arrays and sub-documents. When you add a document to a database, CouchDB stores it in the B+Tree, indexed by two attributes with special meaning: _id and _rev.

CouchDB lets you store related data together even if it isn’t all the same type of data; you can store documents representing blog posts, users, and comments — all in the same database. This is not as chaotic as it sounds. To get your data back out of CouchDB in sensible ways, you define views over the database. A view stores a …