Oracle's turn-about announcement of a NoSQL product wasn't really surprising. When Oracle spends time and effort putting down a technology, you can bet that its secretly impressed, and trying to re-implement it in its back room. So Oracle's paper "Debunking the NoSQL Hype" should really have been read as a backhanded product announcement. (By the way, don't click that link; the paper appears to have been taken down. Surprise.)

I have to agree with DataStax and other developers in the NoSQL movement: Oracle's announcement is a …

This is a written follow-up to a talk presented at a recent Strata online event.

A new breed of startup is emerging, built to take advantage of the rising tides of data across a variety of verticals and the maturing ecosystem of tools for its large-scale analysis.

These are data startups, and they are the sumo wrestlers on the startup stage. The weight of data is a source of their competitive advantage. But like their sumo mentors, size alone is not enough. The most successful of data startups must be fast (with data), big (with analytics), and focused (with services).

Setting the stage: The attack of the exponentials

The question of why this style of startup is arising today, versus a decade …

As we move toward a data economy, can we take the digital content model and apply it to data acquisition and sales? That's a suggestion that Gil Elbaz (@gilelbaz), CEO and co-founder of the data platform Factual made in passing at his recent talk at Web 2.0 Expo.

Elbaz spoke about some of the hurdles that startups face with big data — not just the question of storage, but the question of access. But as he addressed the emerging data economy, Elbaz said we will likely see novel access methods and new marketplaces for data. Startups will be able to build value-added services on top of big data, rather than having to worry about gathering and storing the data …

The elmcity service connects to a half-dozen other services, including Eventful, Upcoming, EventBrite, Facebook, Delicious, and Yahoo. It's nice that each of these services provides an API that enables elmcity to read their data. It would be even nicer, though, if elmcity didn't have to query, navigate, and interpret the results of each of these APIs in different ways.

For example, the elmcity service asks the same question of Eventful, Upcoming, and EventBrite: "What are the titles, dates, times, locations, and URLs of recent events within radius R of location L?" It has to ask that question three different ways, and then interpret the answers three different ways. Can we imagine a more frictionless approach?

I can. Here's how the question might be asked in a general way using the Open Data Protocol (OData):

 …

I chatted today about VMware's Cloud Foundry with Roger Bodamer, the EVP of products and technology at 10Gen. 10Gen's MongoDB is one of three back-ends (along with MySQL and Redis) supported from the start by Cloud Foundry.

If I understand Cloud Foundry and VMware's declared "Open PaaS" strategy, it should fill a gap in services. Suppose you are a developer who wants to loosen the bonds between your programs and the hardware they run on, for the sake of flexibility, fast ramp-up, or cost savings. Your choices are:

An IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) product, which hands you an emulation of bare metal where you run an appliance (which you may need to build up yourself) combining an operating system, application, and related services such as DNS, firewall, and a …

Memcached is one of the technologies that holds the modern Internet together, but do you know what it actually does? Brian Aker has certainly earned the title of Memcached guru, and below he offers a peek under the hood. He'll also provide a deeper dive into Memcached in a tutorial at the upcoming 2011 MySQL Conference.

What problem is Memcached meant to solve?

Brian Aker: In an operation like a database or an application …

Letting data speak for itself through analysis of entire data sets is eclipsing modeling from subsets. In the past, all too often what were once disregarded as "outliers" on the far edges of a data model turned out to be the telltale signs of a micro-trend that became a major event. To enable this advanced analytics and integrate in real-time with operational processes, companies and public sector organizations are evolving their enterprise architectures to incorporate new tools and approaches.

Whether you prefer "big," "very large," "extremely large," "extreme," "total," or another adjective for the "X" in the "X Data" umbrella term, what's important is accelerated growth in three dimensions: volume, complexity and speed.

Big data is not without its limitations. Many organizations need to revisit business processes, solve data silo challenges, and invest in visualization and collaboration tools to make big data understandable and …

A new healthcare project in Zambia is trying to integrate supervisors, clinics, and community healthcare workers (CHW) into a system that can improve patient service and provide more data about the effectiveness of care. Because of the technical challenges in an extreme rural setting, unique solutions are required. According to Cory Zue, chief technology officer of Dimagi, CouchDB went a long way toward keeping a consistent set of records under extreme circumstances. The full story will be laid out in Zue's talk at the upcoming MySQL conference, but here's a sneak peak.

You're involved with a …

Today, the United States Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) unveiled a new National Broadband Map, which can be viewed at BroadbandMap.gov.

The map includes more than 25 million searchable records and it incorporates crowdsourced reporting. Built entirely upon Wordpress, the map is also one of the largest implementations of open source and open data in government to date.

Importantly, the data behind the map shows that despite an increase in broadband adoption to 68%, a digital divide persists between citizens who have full access to the rich media of the 2011 Internet and those who are limited by geography or means.

The launch of a national map of broadband Internet access fulfills a Congressional mandate created by the 2009 federal stimulus, which …

MySQL keeps many different files, some contain real data, some contain meta data. Witch ones are important? Witch can your throw away?

This is my attempt to create a quick reference of all the files used by MySQL, whats in them, what can you do if they are missing, what can you do with them.

When I was working for Dell doing Linux support my first words to a customer where “DO YOU HAVE COMPLETE AND VERIFIED BACKUP?” Make one now before you think about doing anything I suggest here.

You should always try to manage your data through a MySQL client.  If things have gone very bad this may not be possible. MySQL may not start. If your file system get corrupt you may have missing files. Sometimes people create other files in the MySQL directory (BAD).  This should help you understand what is safe to remove.

Before you try to work with one of these files make sure you have the file permissions set …