Next development release v0.2.0 of MySQL Connector/Python is available for download and testing. We still don’t recommend to use it in production: it is not beta or GA yet, but we are getting there.

Bug reports and feature requests are welcome through the Launchpad bug tracking tool.

Highlights:

• .executemany() now optimizes INSERT statements using the MySQL
  multiple row syntax.
• Setting sql_mode and time_zone when connecting as well as collation.
• Raw Cursors can be used when you want to do the conversion yourself.
• Unittests now bootstrap own MySQL server instance.
• Tidying the source tree.

Full list of …

Scribd is a top 100 site on the web and one of the largest sites built using Ruby on Rails. As one of the first rails sites to reach scale, we’ve built a lot of infrastructure and solved a lot of challenges to get Scribd to where it is today. We actively try to push the envelope and have contributed substantial work back to the open source community.

Scribd has an agile, startup culture and an unusually close working relationship between engineering and ops. You’ll regularly find cross-over work at Scribd, with ops people writing application-layer code and engineers figuring out operations-level problems. We think we’re able to make that work because of the uniquely talented people we have on the team.

To allow us to keep scaling, we’re now looking to add a strong, experienced operations guru to the …

My wife – a good web designer with 6 years of experience with web design, HTML and CSS is looking for a job. Here is some information about her:

• Her web site (of course she is the one who designed it)
• Her portfolio
• Her resume
• Her LinkedIn profile

We’re physically located in Toronto, Canada, but she has a great experience of working remotely too. So, if you need a web designer or a junior web designer, feel free to contact Tanya.

…

These are the slides to a talk I did earlier this week for students of the professional bachelor in ICT course at KaHo St. Lieven. I wanted to give a clear and simple introduction to the memcached service, as I think it’s an invaluable tool in today’s web development.

I've been working in a fully distributed work environment for almost 8 years now (I joined MySQL AB in April, 2002). Therefore I've been reading Toni Schneider's blog post about the "5 reasons why your company should be distributed" with great interest – he raised several points that I fully agree with and which I covered in my talks about "Working for a virtual company - how we do it at MySQL" at last year's next09 conference (slides, video) and at …

We planned for a company meeting to be in Iceland, with just about a month’s notice. You can do that, when you’re a fairly small company. Having been back from London during the winter, where it was snowing in the New Year, I was not exactly jumping high to visit Iceland. Ice? Gasp.

It was not exactly easy to get to Iceland: KUL – SIN – FRA – CPH – KEF. Five countries, in a little over a day (would have been about it, had it not been due to a delayed flight from Copenhagen — seemed that the plane was snowed in from Iceland). Upon getting my boarding pass for the last leg, I was asked by the SAS ticketing agent if I’d like a window seat – I naturally replied aisle, and he confirmed my choice with me, as if shocked. Then I realised, there might be some interesting …

I no longer work at MySQL/Sun Microsystems. So if you’ve sent any email to {colin|byte}@mysql.com, or {colin.charles|byte}@sun.com in the last month, they’d silently have gone into /dev/null as I have not had access to my accounts. Don’t hesitate to resend them to byte@bytebot.net if you’d like me to see them.

I’ve enjoyed my journey at MySQL, but it just seems like its time to move on. I haven’t left the MySQL community yet, though. In fact, I expect nothing but more active participation in it.

What’s next? I’m going to split my time between working on MariaDB, at Monty Program Ab, as well as Open Ocean Capital. I’ll work with Open Ocean portfolio companies Web of Trust and MoSync.

Do you use …

Things are growing yet again at work and with it the number of people needed to keep things flowing smoothly. This time it’s the Sales Engineer team that needs a new person, working in the Baltimore/Washington area (our home office):

Responsibilities

• Provide exemplary pre-sales technical expertise through technical and product presentations, product demonstrations, pilot implementations, beta program administration, consistent communication, and on-going technical consultation.
• Translate complex technical problems for non-technical clients as well as translating non-technical specifications into precise technical requirements.
• Meet with clients to evaluate their current systems and needs and make recommendations for software and hardware and integration.
• Travel approximately 30% in support of sales and customer activities.
• Respond to RFIs, RFPs and serve as …

OQ Engineer Walter Heck working from Samara, Costa Rica

Life as a Location Independent Professional can be hard at times, and very good at others!

Not so long ago, in a galaxy not very far away... a middle-aged programmer battled to free memory from the dark side of the hibernate query cache.  He was successful, or so it seemed. For the query cache memory problems had risen from the ashes -- stronger and more bloated than ever...

What's With All This Garbage?
We hit a case at work (again), where the java server process came to a grinding halt.  It wasn't dead, it just wasn't making much forward progress either.  A quick look at the heap stats showed we were nearly at capacity and that garbage collection was eating all CPU time, thus not allowing any real work to happen.  Looks like it is time to whip out the ol' memory profiler.  This time I went with Eclipse's Memory Analysis Tool .  …