I was happily snowboarding and skiing (the latter for the first time in two decades) last week, so here comes the year-end review a week late. Last year, I harped on Facebook's closed nature, and over the the year they've tried to open more of the users' data over to the Internet. Still, there are no decent APIs for a user to pull out everything they've posted to Facebook to have their own copy, though. That doesn't seem to stop them from dominating the Internet for the time being, though, so good for them.

I'm trying to think of what would have surprised me over the year, but given I failed to make many accurate predictions myself, things just seemed to happen in pretty natural direction. …

As our data warehousing process grows and the workflows get more complex, we've revisited the question of what tools to use in this process. Out of curiosity, I had a look at basing such a process on Hadoop/Hive for scalability reasons, but the lack of mature tools and the sacrifices on efficiency that would entail meant we're better off using something else as long as a distributed processing platform is the only thing that can get the job done. I'm also curious about the transition to continuous integration, a model I noticed showing up a couple of years ago and now getting some air under its wings as CEP, IBM's …

Completed my MySQL Conference presentation 45 minutes ago. Seemed to go over ok, got some followup questions. Trouble is, I got hit by amazing jetlag half an hour before the session, and almost fell asleep myself during the presentation. Fortunately, survived that anyway, and as far as I could see, was the only one having problems staying awake. Below is an embedded version of the slides, which should also appear on the conference proceedings site later. Now for a beer at the expo. Will blog with more description of the stuff later (update: see this follow-up article).

Mining for …

I'm going to be talking in MySQL Conf 2009 about our business intelligence and data warehousing solutions for Habbo. Since this blog is syndicated on Planet MySQL, and I presume many of the people going to the conference read it, here's a question: would you like to hear about the why's of our technology selection (eg, IT management level questions), the techniques we use for analysis (for the BI analyst or startup technologist), or about the nuts and bolts of the database implementation itself (for the DBAs in the crowd)? I'm going to be touching on all three aspects, perhaps more, but can and will focus on one of the areas in more detail.

2008 is nearly over, and it's time to take a look at what happened over the year, as well as to take a peek at the the coming 2009. A year ago I made a guess that social networking services would open up and start sharing their profiles – well, practically everyone but Facebook are doing some of that, and Facebook is trying to get everyone to depend on them – not that “create dependency” isn't a part of Google's and MySpace's plan, too. Unfortunately, we haven't yet found a meaningful way for Habbo to participate in this festival, due to differences in demographies, interest areas, and the priority of running a profitable business, instead. Still looking for that solution, though.

So, I mentioned earlier that I was looking at Infobright's Brighthouse technology as a storage backend for heaps and heaps of traffic and user data from Habbo. Turns out it works fine (now that it's in V3 and supports more of the SQL semantics), and we took it into use. Been pretty happy with that, and I expect to talk more about the challenge and our solution at the next MySQL Conference in April 2009.

However, our DWH team needs extra help. If you're interested in solving business analytics problems by processing lots of data and the idea of working in a company that leads the virtual worlds industry excites you, …

BusinessWeek reports MySQL continuing with their IPO preparations. As a long-time user (about ten years now), and almost as long-time customer (in many companies, obviously currently and most significantly Sulake and Habbo), I wish you guys the best of luck on that road. Don't lose your sight of the ballgame while doing that -- we need you to continue to do better with the product itself while the distractions of investor communications will be great.

I'm sure we can all name a few nuisances in every software product we use, and I certainly have a few of those of the MySQL database, but what I really admire the guys for is their approach to innovating in the sales …