Google has just announced their alternative to Amazon’s s3 called
‘App Engine’.
I think that if this is successful it will provide a shift in
some of the basic web development economics and practices, even
more than Amazon’s s3 has.
why?
- Small hosting providers (ones that offer a shell account for
$12/month) will be marginalized. why pay for something when you
get it for free?
- M&A. It will create a 3rd platform to develop on. you
currently have LAMP and Windows. The google app engine provides a
3rd. The major difference is you can’t buy it. If we acquire a
company who runs on this platform we have 2 choices. continue
paying google for the infrastructure, or redevelop it onto LAMP.
of course this suits google as their integration costs are
lessened. Google might provide a ‘open source’ version of their
infrastructure.. but I doubt it.
- …
While recently migrating Tschitschereengreen.com from Symfony to Django plus changing the database backend from MySQL to PostgreSQL, there were mainly two tasks more time-consuming than I’ve had thought beforehand:
SQL dump
The old database used a latin1 encoding for the database fields and utf-8 as the server and client connection encoding. With these settings, even trying to get a correctly encoded database dump from phpMyAdmin is a bad idea.
Using mysqldump with an explicitly specified character-set is much better:
mysqldump ? ?default-character-set=latin1 …[Read more]
I have my own idea for a Summer of Code Project; an implementation of
mysqldump, but in Python. I see it as a good choice because the
spec is already there for you - you just have to make it work.
There's also a lot of concepts to learn in writing it (consistent
snapshots, dealing with a potential combination of character
sets).
My intention of proposing this isn't as a replacement to the
existing mysqldump, but rather as a community maintained
alternative. There are some features missing in mysqldump that I
could add myself if it was in a language I am friendlier with.
Two of these would be --slave-data, and parallel dumping[1], but
that is not a complete list.
[1] Yes, I'm aware of maatkit. I want to use the mysqldump interface
though.
It's been nearly a year since the last post, so you might
naturally wonder if I am dead or stopping development of MySQLdb.
Actually I've been sick for the last year and a half or so, and
hadn't really been motivated enough to do anything. Here's what's
been going on:
John Eikenberry has taken over development of
ZMySQLDA, since I pretty much don't do anything with Zope these
days. He's made a couple of releases on the way to a 3.0 release.
As far as I know, ZMySQLDA is still only useful with Zope 2 as
Zope 3 has a different architecture and comes with MySQL support
directly.
Monty Taylor from MySQL AB has volunteered to help out on
MySQLdb. I believe the way this is going to work out is he's
going to be doing maintenance on the 1.2 branch, and get some
minor bug fixes out there. In addition, he has a good start on a
native (i.e. written in Python) …
While browsing the many blog entries on blogs.sun.com about the
MySQL Acquisition (thanks a lot for the very warm welcome!), I
stumbled over this (Python-based) utility: SnapBack, a tool that uses ZFS snapshots to
perform physical backups of MySQL databases on Solaris. Very
cool! This is actually something I was wanting to add to the
mylvmbackup script, too - I have to take a closer
look at how this is done (I tried to install OpenSolaris on a
VirtualBox instance, but it caused it to crash the
emulator).
2007 is almost over and what a year this has been for Wave2!
My programming preferences have gone full circle, from beginning the year playing snakes and ladders (Python), I spent the summer drinking coffee (Java) and finally settled down surrounded by Camel’s, Lama’s and Parrots (Perl). Bizarre but never dull!
Steady progress has been made all round and as always the Open Source community has proven a valuable resource. Not a day went by where I did not discover something new or think of a new idea that could be built using Open Source Software. I only wish I had more time in the day!.
My Christmas present came early this year in the form of a MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA Certification Study Guide. I have been putting off the final MySQL certification while waiting for the book to arrive, and now it is in my hands the only thing preventing me from taking the …
[Read more]The titles of the videos look very much like “must watch”. Found via ThinkPHP, thanks.
After having a week to recover from the first exam I finally got around to taking the second one….and passed!!
Part II of the MySQL DBA Certification focused a lot more on the day to day running of the server, compared to Part I which was very much installation / configuration based.
Studying for the exam was a little difficult as I also had to work this week (as opposed to being on holiday!), but the skills you gain can be directly applied to everyday management of MySQL, and can be very rewarding especially if you focus on optimisation.
So what next you ask? Well after getting this far I thought it only fair that I give something back to the MySQL Community in the form of a MoinMoin Macro - …
[Read more]
The 2007 MySQL Conference is over, and I finally made it back
home. I have some notes on some of the sessions, which really
aren't that great, so if you want to see what you missed, you
should read Planet MySQL. But I will give some of the
highlights.
There's a lot of new development around storage engines.
MySQL-5.1 has a pluggable storage engine architecture which
allows you to load and unload storage engines while the server is
running. Brian Aker explained that this is for cases where you
have a stable server setup and only want to upgrade the storage
engine. All the storage engines in 5.1 are pluggable, and there
are already some third-party proprietary storage engines
available.
One of the relatively new third-party storage engines is SolidDB.
Solid has been around for quite awhile. In fact, I was using
Solid for a project in the late 1990's …
I'm putting together a page of projects which use MySQLdb. If your project is not
on this list, leave a comment, with a URL and brief description,
and I'll check it out.
Frameworks/Libraries
- …