Pending acts of god, I will be

• at the MariaDB Dev Meeting in Lisbon, PT, arriving 2011-03-11 (Thu) late, and leaving 2011-03-14 (Mon) around noon
• at O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara between 2011-04-12 and 2011-04-15. I will arrive in SFO late 2011-04-08.

In early Oct 2010, GenieDB was invited to speak at Oracle Open World. We presented our ideas on why we used Oracle BDB as our back-end database layer. It’s a database jungle out there, and it’s been a vital design decision in our architecture to have a reliable and flexible persistent database. Fundamentally, using Oracle BDB we built in a replication layer and a consistency layer, which were essential to provide a fully replicated multi-master database with immediate consistency. GenieDB for MySQL offers a MySQL storage engine for MySQL that allows users to query the NoSQL storage engine via rich MySQL query capabilities.

Below is a high level, in-a-nutshell overview of the GenieDB’s software Architecture!

There’s been a recent rise in interest in “in-memory databases”. The reasoning given is that the cost of synching commits to disk is high, and this is the bottleneck in write operations; ACID databases require that a commit is confirmed written to disk – which often actually requires two or more disk writes, each with a seek penalty of a few milliseconds. Therefore, on-disk databases struggle to commit more than a few hundred updates per second, unless you invest in very expensively large RAID stripe sets.

Reads aren’t an issue, as every disk-based database does caching in memory. If your database is large enough to fit in memory, or access to it is mainly concentrated on a subset that’s small enough to fit in memory, reads are just as fast as any in-memory database. It’s writes that are the issue, and an in-memory database can update records very
quickly indeed.

However, in-memory databases suffer a downside: …

« Post 3 | This is the 4th post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series

“When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of ‘gossip.’ She held a feather pillow and said, ‘If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That’s how it is when you spread mean things about people.’ For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia.” — John Seigenthaler Sr.

So the future pulled up in her shiny big metaphor and we got in. In the beginning, our road trip made sense, all well-ordered highways and wholesome roadside attractions. Somewhere along the way, we hit bat country and the …

Gerv, Frank, Mark and I have been discussing ideas around how people can turn open source experience into an asset for their resume. We’ve got some of our own ideas, but we want yours as well. Please blog, comment, email or ‘dent any one of us, or catch up with Gerv and Mark at FOSDEM.

My top three tips for making the best of your open source participation are:

1. Free your work and free yourself. Turn software into a platform for your career by contributing to free and open projects and by releasing your own work under free software and open source licenses. In addition to the well-understood collaborative benefits, you get to keep using …

• Two days in Frankfurt, two days in Munderkingen and two days in Heidelberg between December 5th and 17th. Mostly just ordinary working and travel days.
• Visited Sandro Groganz of Init Marketing in Munderkingen. Worked from Sandro's house after a nice dinner on Sunday.
• Caught up with (and was interviewed by) Rory MacDonald of Init Marketing while he was vacationing near Ulm. The interview was focused on Mozilla and should go online in the new year on http://www.initmarketing.tv
• Visited Georg Richter of …

The official MySQL Drink. How to make it:
Continue reading "Salmiakki - the official MySQL Drink"

My thinking was that the topic is already dead, but people have strange ideas off and on again. Have a look at the S9Y boards where you'll find someone who wants to have a storage backend "LDAP" for S9Y. This is sick and wrong! Let me explain why.


Continue reading "LDAP is not relational"

At the end of next month (July 2007), this blog (and actually the entire site) will go offline.

About eight months ago, I announced that I discontinued my work related to patent policy, but that I would keep this blog online for some more time as an archive of former postings. In the meantime, I became involved with football policy and confirmed that fact in this blog. Other than that, I have not made any new postings.

I am glad to see that there was still a significant number of downloads of my electronic book as well as visits to this blog. However, if a blog ceases to deliver news, it becomes somewhat pointless after a while, and that’s why this site will be taken off the net within a little more than month. There will be no further announcements: at some point around the end of July (or maybe in early August), the site will simply be inaccessible.

There is no particular reason for this decision. The date is related …