Pythian Group

If you do not know what International Women’s Day is: http://www.internationalwomensday.com/

Start planning your blog posts for Ada Lovelace day now (March 24th, http://findingada.com/ Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.)

To that end, I would like to point out all the women currently in science and tech fields that I admire and think are doing great things. I think it would be great if everyone, male or female, made a list like this:
Read the rest of this entry . . .

RMOUG Training Days 2010 are in the full swing today with the University classes ongoing and that’s also the day most of my friends arriving here at Hyatt and when all the fun begins. Now that my stomach is full and Debra is off to her hotel room and Lisa is sleeping, I can finally do a quick blog post.

The flight Ottawa-Denver was quite enjoyable as it’s one of the rare direct flights from Ottawa. RMOUG volunteers pick up their guest speakers personally, which is a very nice touch, and with all this my travel to Denver feels just like a short drive to work. And that’s important if you know what we are up for tonight…

Few Oracle ACEs divers are going to jump into the pool with sharks at Denver Aquarium and show them who’s the boss. I’ll pretend to be a diving ACE as well (sh-h-h-h… don’t tell anybody I’m not). Unfortunately, it does mean that we will be late to the RMOUG speakers reception but we have to sacrifice something.

I’m sure you are dying to know what happens to us and if anybody gets eaten. If so, join us tomorrow, Wednesday 17-Feb, at the Read the rest of this entry . . .

The all new OPN Specialized Program was officially launched on the 2nd of December, 2009. The very next day, we became one of the first OPN Specialized Platinum level partners. Maybe the very first!

This achievement took us lots of efforts before the launch to get recognized as one of the first platinum level partners but we’ve made it through. Now, we are working on updating all of our specialization areas. It’s still a bit cloudy on how to navigate in the new OPN Specialized interface but I guess in these days of cloud computing cloudiness is becoming a norm, especially early on!

The OPN Specialized Program was designed as the result of numerous acquisitions completed recently and over time the old Oracle Partners Network structure couldn’t accommodate all the different kinds of partnerships that Oracle inherited. The Oracle/Sun merger was going to make a tough situation untenable, and as a result Oracle designed OPN Specialized to simplify the search of a partner for Oracle internal staff and Oracle customers on one hand while it also lets partners distinguish themselves amongst the rest by technical areas and types of services and products. Congratulations and good job to the OPN group at Oracle for what we at Pythian believe is a much improved vision and structure for partnering with the vibrant Oracle ecosystem.

Our VP, Biz Dev and Strategic Alliances, Peter Ling, should take all blame for this as he’s been working on this non-stop. Well done Pete — you are a rock star, indeed

More details to come as we go through available options and build our profile so stay tuned — lots to learn still.

That’s right — get your free 10-day trial! All the information I know is here:

http://bit.ly/37E9ld

But the basics are: No access to Rough Cuts or Downloads, for new subscribers only. It’s one of those “sign up and if you do not cancel after 10 days, we bill you” — and at $42.99 a month, that’s not a mistake you want to make. Must sign up by Nov. 24th.

To sign up now: https://ssl.safaribooksonline.com/tryitfree

I was asked to send this information along, so I am…Now’s your chance to skim High Performance MySQL, among other high quality books!

For very personal reasons that don’t belong in this article, I decided a few weeks ago that it’s time for me to move on. The year and a half that I worked for Pythian have been a wonderful experience, and this is article is my tribute to this great company.

The MySQL Team

Being able to work side by side with two MySQL experts like Sheeri Cabral and Augusto Bott has been a great experience. I have learned a lot, not only about MySQL, but also about what a great DBA should be like. Both of them are recognized MySQL Community members and regular speakers at the MySQL Users Conference and other events. Sheeri has been named MySQL Community Member of the Year twice in a row. Both are a guarantee of excellent service.

My Predictions For Pythian

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Welcome to volume 3 of Blogrotate. This is a short one this week, which is mostly dominated by the release of Windows 7. I have not had a chance to use it as yet but intend to give it a once over as soon as I get a chance. So, without further ado, on to the roundup.

Operating Systems

The big story this week was obviously the release of Microsoft’s Windows 7.  There are a number of good articles we’ve seen that cover different aspects of the release.  Some of our favourites are below.

Emil Protalinski over at Ars Technica has a look at the things you should know about Windows 7 in his article Windows 7 is here including pricing information, editions available and upgrade vs. fresh install.

Andrew Binstock at InfoWorld has an interesting look at the changes made to the Windows 7 kernel, specifically with regards to multithreaded performance in Windows 7 on multicore: How much faster.

Do you want to know if your system will be able to run Windows 7? Read the rest of this entry . . .

This week the Log Buffer is a little more challenging for two reasons: a) Oracle Open World 2009 and b) the controversy around Monty Widenius‘ opposition to Oracle owning MySQL due to the Sun acquisition, so let’s go straight to the articles.

Oracle – Oracle Open World 2009

There is so much material about OOW09, that I’m giving a full subtitle to it.

Let’s start with a quick recap of the keynotes by Scott McNealy and Larry Elison in this article by Andrew Clarke: The return of The Scott And Larry Show. The recap suggests that the presentations aimed to show how Sun & Oracle (aka Team Red) would challenge IBM (aka Big Blue) head-on. Larry didn’t fail to mention Oracle’s intention to invest in MySQL.

Of course the conference wasn’t short on technical issues, and these articles prove it. Jason Arneil talks about 11 Things about 11gR2. Chen Shapira discusses one of the lessons she learned, and shares with us some Shell Script Tips.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

I regret to say, there is no Log Buffer this week, as we’ve all been busy preparing for the Big New Thing coming in a few days. The good news is, we have a Big New Thing coming in a few days. Stay tuned for that, you won’t want to miss it.

LB will be back in a week, with Gerry Narvaja at the helm. In the meantime, I invite you to leave a comment with your favourite DB blogs from this week — MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, Postgres, Ingres, or other relational/NoSQL databases.

Welcome to the 165^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Since they haven’t had any Log Buffer love for a couple weeks, let’s start this one with . . . 

PostgreSQL

Selena Marie Deckelmann was tending the garden and found a Snow Leopard amongst the Macintoshes. The result, her post Snow Leopard and PostgreSQL: installation help links.

Josh Berkus posts a poll on encrypted backup. he writes, “ . . . I realized it would be relatively simple to add a simple encryption option to pg_dump and pg_restore.  . . .  So that’s what I’m asking here: would an -e option actually be useful and make you more likely to encrypt your backups? If not, is there some other encrypted backup feature which would?”

The other Postgres Josh, Joshua Drake, reminds us, Everybody loves parties! (Pg Conference West in Seattle next week).

Tom Copeland, junior developer, shares his notes on upgrading PostgreSQL with pg_migrator.

Magnus Hagander loves 80 pages about PostgreSQL! “I was just told that the latest edition of GNU/Linux Magazine in France is dedicated to PostgreSQL.  . . .  A commenter says, “I wish PostgreSQL would get even a small amount of coverage in magazines, but it’s all MySQL or SQLite.”

Read the rest of this entry . . .

picture by Geophaps
Hey, that one in the sixth row…
Doesn’t he looks familiar?

So there I am, on my morning bus ride, reading my copy of The Definitive Guide to Catalyst (keep your eyes peeled for the upcoming review of the book in the Perl Review).

I’m near the end, in Chapter 11, Catalyst Cookbook. As it is with most tech books, the last chapters are the most engrossing, as the gloves finally come of and the writers throw at you all the wonderful, mind-bending stuff that the rest of the book prepares you for.

The section I’m at is about the development process. Specifically, it shows how you can put hooks in your versioning system to automatically screen commits to conform to Perl::Critic and Perl::Tidy policies. The given example script uses Git, which is just dandy with me as it is my current VCS of choice. But there’s something . . .  funny about that script. The way the utility functions are stashed at the end after a

### utility functions ##############################

line. The choice of variable names. The comments. It all feels oddly familiar. Read the rest of this entry . . .