Pythian Group

Persistence Smoothie: Blending NoSQL and SQL – see user feedback and comments at http://joind.in/talk/view/1332.

Michael Bleigh from Intridea, high-end Ruby and Ruby on Rails consultants, build apps from start to finish, making it scalable. He’s written a lot of stuff, available at http://github.com/intridea. @mbleigh on twitter

NoSQL is a new way to think about persistence. Most NoSQL systems are not ACID compliant (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability).

Generally, most NoSQL systems have:
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Here are the slides from my presentation at RMOUG 2010.

I am not sure how much sense all this will make without my comments. We may do it in a webinar if there is sufficient interest. Regardless I will probably be doing it again at some point in the future.

Today we continue looking at various aspects of how the Oracle GoldenGate extract process works.

One of the follow up questions to part I was about the way the Extract process reads from ASM storage. I’ve provided the answer, however, today we’re going get a detailed look at how the Extract process interacts with an ASM instance and what kind of implications may result.

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OpenSQLCamp was a huge success! I took videos of most of the sessions (we only had 3 video cameras, and 4 rooms, and 2 sessions were not recorded). Unfortunately, I was busy doing administrative stuff for opensqlcamp for the opening keynote and first 15 minutes of the session organizing, and when I got to the planning board, it was already full….so I was not able to give a session.

• Comparing Non-Relational Databases: MongoDB, Tokyo Tyrant, CouchDB by Igal Koshevoy of Pragmaticraft
• Drizzle Client Rewrite – Clark Boylan leads the requirements and design discussion for rewriting the Drizzle Client
• Drizzle Plugin Hacking
• Drizzle is Not MySQL with Changes – Brian Aker gives a talk on Drizzle, and how Drizzle is not MySQL.
• Fractal Trees – by Bradley Kuszmaul of Tokutek
• Geographic Operators in SQL (PostGIS) by Webb Sprague
• Goal-Driven Performance – Peter Zaitsev speaks about how to achieve goal-driven performance.
• Graph Engine for MySQL – by Antony Curtis
• Intro to Cassandra
• An Intro to CouchDB: What caught Ubuntu’s eye by Mike Miller (Cloudant)
• Maria – MySQL founder Monty Widenius talks about Maria, and the past, present and future of MySQL.

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At the July MySQL User Group, Eric Day and Patrick Galbraith spoke about Drizzle, a lightweight, microkernel, open source database for high-performance scale-out applications, and Gearman, an open source, distributed job queuing system.

The slides can be downloaded from http://www.oddments.org/notes/DrizzleGearmanBoston2009.pdf.

The first hour of video, where Eric and Patrick talk about Drizzle, is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi4cGzFlcuU, and below:
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I just filed a very annoying bug when trying to compile with plugin engines using the 5.1.xx source tarball.

Description

I am trying to test SphinxSE as a plugin instead of getting it statically linked and came across an annoying bug. When using the configure --with-plugins option only once, the engine is statically linked. When using it twice, the first engine is created as a plugin, and the 2nd one is linked statically. Here are a couple of examples:
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About six months ago, the question of storing images in a database came up. This is one of my favorite topics, and has many database-agnostic parts.

Personally, I think “tell me about storing images in a database” is actually a great interview question, because you will be able to see the difference between someone who has just memorized “what’s right” versus someone who is really thinking. It also helps you see how someone will communicate — if they just say “NEVER do it, it’s as bad as crossing the streams!” then they are a type of person that gives you a short answer, without much explanation, and without many nuances. (That may be what you are looking for, but usually you want someone who gives reasons for why they strongly feel one way or another).

Consider the following cases:
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I am passing this along — I am not sure if most folks reading this can make it, as it is last-minute and in the Boston area, but I figured I’d let people know that the New England Database Society exists. It’s free, sponsored by Sun (and has been for years, long before Sun bought MySQL), and is hosted by my college database professor, Mitch Cherniack. (To that end, I should probably make sure to promote the Boston User Group here more often! I keep forgetting…)

You can find information on how to be a part of the mailing list at http://www.cs.brown.edu/sites/neds/

Christian S. Jensen
Center for Data-Intensive Systems
Department of Computer Science
Aalborg University
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This topic has been raised again and again and quite a few people have asked me how to configure RAC on VMware Fusions on Mac. This warrants a blog post, especially, that Mac is definitely the way to go for an Oracle DBA — a Unix desktop OS that just works. What can be better? Sorry, I digress without even starting!

Before I go any further, I should say that this is not a complete guide on the Oracle RAC install with VMware Fusion but just the hints on setting up shared storage for Oracle RAC using Mac as host for VMWare Fusion virtual machines (VM’s). The reader is assumed to understand how to setup Oracle RAC and has general understanding of VMware itself. There are plenty of guides on the Internet on how to setup Oracle RAC including VMware but they usually refer to VMware Server on Linux or Windows. Please note that I’m writing it largely by memory so if you hit any issue — please leave a comment.

Disclaimers are over — moving on!

The root of the problem is that VMware Fusion doesn’t support shared disks unlike VMware Server on Windows and Linux. If you try to update the .vmx file manually to enable shared disk, you get the error message “Clustering is not supported for VMware Fusion – this setting will be ignored”. Fear not — you are running the best desktop OS anyway! ;-)
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In about 15 minutes, Giuseppe Maxia will begin a webinar in which the main focus is a presentation on “How to have a good presentation”. Talk about meta!

Giuseppe posted how to join the free webinar.

The slides can be found at http://datacharmer.org/downloads/2009_03_Presentation.pdf.