In early 2006 Paul Hurley (ideeli’s CEO) and I (Mark Uhrmacher, CTO) were thinking about a new business. We had the idea to create a community based around great deals for Women’s fashion products where we saw a great deal of potential for great content and product sales. Now, over five years later, we’ve realized much of that vision. Our business success has been chronicled over the years in several places (see here and here). Though we’re very proud of our achievements there, that isn’t what this blog is about.

Insatiable Demand is about a mostly untold story. Over the past five-plus years we’ve built a phenomenal technology platform and team. From two people and three servers to a 70 person team and a 100 instance production environment, …

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Surge 2011 conference in Baltimore, MD.  I thought it was a great conference, and I’m already looking forward to next year.  I’m sure there’s already a plethora of great blog posts on Surge, but here’s just some thoughts based on my experience.

In no particular order:

EC2 has changed the world, everybody hates EC2

I don’t think I heard a presentation where somebody didn’t use EC2 and the other assorted AWS products.  Amazon (as far as I know) was not represented at the conference, and it seemed awkward for them to not be there (to me, at least).  This …

MySQL Connector/Net 6.4.4, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This is an update to our latest GA release and is intended for full production deployment.

Version 6.4.4 is intended for use with versions of MySQL from 5.0 – 5.5

It is now available in source and binary form from here and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time- if you can’t find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

The release is also available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) and will be available from Oracle eDelivery.

This release includes several bug fixes including a fix to using Windows authentication.  Please review the change log and documentation for a review of what changed.

Enjoy and …

Update: I won't be in Moscow after all. I was denied visa on grounds that my passport is beginning to fall apart and there wasn't time to get new passport, invitation and visa. Maybe next year - I was excited to go.

October brings 2 very interesting conferences. I will be speaking first on Oct 3rd at HighLoad++ in Moscow and a few weeks later on Oct Oct 25 at Percona Live in London. I will give a talk called Choosing a MySQL Replication / High Availability Solution which is based on my thinking developed in my recent blog post The ultimate …

A few days ago we announced the availability of our new MySQL Installer for Windows.  While it’s a great first edition we know that you are going to have questions and we wanted the community to be able to help.  So we have created a new forum for the community to be able to discuss questions and issues with the new installer.

You can access the new forum here.

So, go forth and post!

Well, our baby is born!  Some time ago we analyzed the feedback from users and customers and determined that far too many of our server installs were failing.  We have the best open-source database on the planet but no one can see that if we can’t get it properly installed.  Clearly something had to be done.

So, the new MySQL Installer is born.  It’s a Windows application that comes delivered in a bundle along with a version of the database server, applications like Workbench, connectors, samples, and documentation.  It includes some customized configuration screens that help with setting up the proper configuration files.

One of the great benefits of using the new MySQL Installer is that it comes with all the products very tightly integrated such as automatically creating connection entries in Workbench for the freshly installed server.  Our goal with MySQL is to have you up and running in 15 …

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 …

I wrote last year about the way Google’s Android mobile operating system was serving as a more open alternative to Apple’s iOS, but not so open that it didn’t leave opportunity for an even more open alternative.

Given that we continue to see software patent-based attacks on Android, as well as swirling FUD around coverage of the attacks and never ending suits and settlements and courtroom developments, it is clear it will be a long time before any of this legal business is ever close to settled, unless ended by settlements first, which is likely.

However, I’m more interested in the technology in the meantime. I also think it’s interesting to see, if not a ‘more open’ …

When I spoke at Percona Live (video here) on running an E-commerce database in Amazon EC2, I briefly talked about using RAID 10 for additional performance and fault tolerance when using EBS volumes. At first, this seems counter intuitive. Amazon has a robust infrastructure, EBS volumes run on RAIDed hardware, and are mirrored in multiple availability zones. So, why bother? Today, I was reminded of just how important it is. Please note that all my performance statistics are based on direct experience running a MySQL database on a m2.4xlarge instance and not on some random bonnie or orion benchmark. I have those graphs floating around on my hard drive in glorious 3D and, while interesting, they do not necessarily reflect real-life performance.

Why? …

MySQL Connector/Net 6.4.3, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This is a GA release and is intended for full production deployment.

Version 6.4.3 is intended for use with versions of MySQL from 5.0 – 5.5

It is now available in source and binary form from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.4.html] and mirror
sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time
- if you can’t find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)
The release is also available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) and will be available from Oracle eDelivery.

** New features found in 6.4 include (please see release notes for more information) **

* Windows Authentication*
This release includes our …