Opinions, Expertise, Passion.

Tonight over discussion was Android and what is Google’s ultimate direction. Have they lost their way, or are they just planning to explode with so many new things that will revolutionize what and how we do things. With $475,000 first price for Android, they certainly have the money available to invest in new directions.

I arrive home, and find email discussion on The Google Browser - Chrome.

Inquisitive, I take a look, to find the great teaser, nothing by a comic, come back tomorrow for the download link. Is that clever to leak information, have everybody write about it and check back tomorrow?

I will be speaking on July 29th in New York at an Entrepreneurs Forum on A Free Panel on Cloud Computing. With a number of experts including Hank Williams of KloudShare, Mike Nolet of AppNexus, and Hans Zaunere of New York PHP fame is should be a great event.

The focus of my presentation will be on “Extending existing applications to leverage the cloud” where I will be discussing both the advantages of the cloud, and the complexities and issues that you will encounter such as data management, data consistency, loss of control, security and latency for example.

Using traditional MySQL based applications I’ll be providing an approach that can lead to your application gaining greater power of cloud computing.

About the Author

Ronald Bradford provides Consulting and Advisory Services in Data Architecture, Performance and Scalability for MySQL Solutions. An IT industry professional for two decades with extensive database experience in MySQL, Oracle and Ingres his expertise covers data architecture, software development, migration, performance analysis and production system implementations. His knowledge from 10 years of consulting across many industry sectors, technologies and countries has provided unique insight into being able to provide solutions to problems. For more information Contact Ronald.

I came across a wicked cool tool at wondle.net. I wanted to create a word cloud for the back of a business card, now I know how.

I had need to visit a particular store in New York on Sunday on referral by a friend. I knew they had two locations. Like all tech savvy people I googled sports authority new york. I even visited the website from the link of the top result (with map). I typed in the address into my iPhone as listed by the map, why somebody hasn’t invented a means to point and click that I don’t know (it probably does exist, but finding it and knowing about it is a completely more complex problem). I even clicked on the map and zoomed in for nearest subway stop.

I got on the NY subway and headed into Manhattan. What resulted was me scratching my head when I could not find the intended store. In fact, the store never existed at 57 W 57th St. Even trying the phone number as per Google resulted in a no answer. Fortunately the trusty iPhone with Internet access and viewing the store locator on the official Sports Authority website enabled me to find the closest store, over a mile away.

I have often joked about the reliance on online information and the assumption of accurate information from even trusted sites. I’ve used this example previously, I know 1 mile is approximately 1.6 kilometers, and if you put in “convert 1 mile to kilometer” Google gives you an answer of “1 mile = 1.609344 kilometer”. What if that was indeed wrong, and it was 1.659344 for example.

Where are the safeguards for verifying information? Could it even be possible?
The benefit of information available readily does not equate to good information, indeed today searching for something can provide too much information and not exactly what you are seeking.

One wonders!

Yesterday I took a more serious look at Google App Engine, I got a developer account some weeks ago.

After going though the getting started demo some time ago, I chose an idea for a FaceBook Application and started in true eXtreme Programming (XP) style (i.e. What’s the bare minimum required for first iteration). I taught myself some Python and within just a few minutes had some working data being randomly generated totally within the development SDK environment On my MacBook. I was not able to deploy initially via the big blue deploy button, the catch is you have to register the application manually online.

Then it all worked, and hey presto I’ve got my application up at provided domain hosting at appspot.com

Having coming from a truly relational environment, most notably MySQL of recent years I found the Datastore API different in a number of ways.

• There is no means of Sequences/Auto Increment. There is an internal Unique Key, but it’s a String, not an integer, not enabling me to re-use it.
• The ListProperty enables the use of Lists in Python (like Arrays) to be easily stored.
• The ReferenceProperty is used as a foreign key relationship, and then can be more reference within an object hierarchy
• I really missed an interactive interface. You have no abililty to look at your data, specifically for me I wanted to seek some data, then I wanted to delete some data, but I had to do all this via code.

Having developed a skelaton FaceBook application before in PHP, I figured a Python version would not be that much more work, but here is where I good stumped Information at Hosting a Facebook Application on Google AppEngine leveraging the PyFacebook project didn’t enable me to integrate Google App Engine with FaceBook just yet.

This had me thinking I need to resort to a standalone simply Python Facebook application to confirm the PyFacebook usage. Now my problems started. Under Mac it’s a lot more complex to install and configure Python/Django etc then under Linux. I tried to do it on my dedicated server, but drat Python is at 2.3.4, and it seems 2.5.x is needed.

Still it was a valuable exercise, I dropped the FaceBook goal and just worked on more Google App Engine stuff. Still early days, but it was productive to try out this new technology.

What I need to work on now is how to hold state within Python infrastructure so I can manage a user login and storing and retrieving user data for my sample app.

April 25^th, 2008 - by Ronald Bradford

Welcome to the 94^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of the database blogsphere. Adding to the list of usual database suspects, I have some more alternative considerations for our readers this week.

We start with Conferences

Still some discussion from last weeks’ 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo.

Baron “xarpb” Schwartz calls it correct in Like it or not, it is the MySQL Conference and Expo. Matt Assay of c|net gives us some of his opinions in three posts Two great posts on MySQL, Back to the future for MySQL and Between two consenting corporations… in followup to last week’s active slashdot discussion. Many others have also commented if you have not been following the news released before opening keynotes.

If you didn’t get a hard copy, Sheeri Kritzer Cabral has published the Pythian EXPLAIN Cheatsheet many attendees received.

Also last week was Collaborate 08 - Technology and Applications IOUG forum for the Oracle Community.

This week we also see the Web 2.0 San Francisco in action, and excitement is also brewing for the PGCon - PostgreSQL Conference for Users and Developers happening in under a month as Robert Treat has Plane tickets booked for PGCon. Postgres was also visible at the MySQL Conference & Expo if you were looking with a prominent consulting team downing the blue elephant during the event. Wish I’d taken a photo now!

Still more news from Adam Machanic of the Pythian group with SQLTeach Toronto: Almost Here.

Common threads

The 2008 Google Summer of Code announced this week showcases the Open Source databases MySQL (14 projects) and PostgreSQL (6 projects). Kaj Arnö talks more in Fourteen Summer of Code projects accepted 2008. The company PrimeBase Technologies also features strongly with two projects for the Blob Streaming storage engine for MySQL as I detail in Media Blob Streaming getting a Google boost.

MySQL

DTrace Integration with MySQL 5.0 - Chime demo in MySQL Users Conference 2008 by Jenny Chen is an example of Sun’s Open Source contribution to MySQL which I saw as a physical demo last week. Unfortunately, due to the imbalance in actually getting new functionality into Community contributions (actually non existence in current or next mysql version :-(), this functionality is only really for show. Dtrace with MySQL 6.0.5 - on a Mac describes some of this work actually making it into the next, next version. It seems this next Falcon Preview is available but not announced by MySQL generally as I note in Continued confusion in MySQL/Sun release policy.

MySQL Gurus Mark Callaghan and Brian Aker comment respectively here and here on MySQL Heap (Memory) Engine - Dynamic Row Format Support. Work submitted by Igor Chernyshev of eBay Kernel Team (whom I’ve met previously and was most impressed with his ability to submit MySQL patch work, with little previous MySQL kernel knowledge, but extensive C++ knowledge). This work also contributed to eBay Wins Application of the Year at MySQL Conference & Expo.

Mark also mentions in his post “How do users get it? There is no community branch into which people can submit changes with a GPL license.“. A topic your’s truly has also mentioned regarding the Community contributions, development and release. Perhaps a sign of more benefit to the community soon as Monty mentions.

Baron Schwartz comments on Keith “a.k.a Kevin” Murphy’s work in Spring 2008 issue of MySQL Magazine. With a quick plug also for his upcoming book “High Performance MySQL - Version 2″ (me giving it a plug also now), Baron also has the best published anti-spam sniffer email I’ve seen, and recently updated to his new employer. Check his blog and let me know.

Postgres

Joshus Drake of Command Prompt Inc. The Postgres Company gets excited in Is that performance I smell? Ext2 vs Ext3 on 50 spindles, testing for PostgreSQL and gives us some insight into different settings of two popular file system types. It would be great to see a follow up with a few more different filesystems types.

Pabloj “so many trails … so little time” extends his MySQL example to Postgres in Loading data from files. And on Postgres Online Journal, we get An Almost Idiot’s Guide to PostgreSQL YUM giving you a step by step guide of PostgreSQL setup, including the all important “Backing up Old Version”.

Oracle

We get a detailed book chapter from Keith Lake of Oracle OLAP The most powerful, open Analytic Engine in his extensive post on Tuning Guidance for OLAP 10g. David Litchfield brings attention in A New Class of Vulnerability in Oracle: Lateral SQL Injection. The title is sufficient for all Oracle DBA’s to review.

Don Seiler gives his experience in Bind Variables and Parallel Queries Do Not Mix when an Oracle Bug is discovered the database to 64-bit H/W..
Matching LOB Indexes and Segments by Michael McLaughlin gives us a good CASE/REGEX SQL example exam question, and simple output to monitor the growth of LOBs in your Oracle database.
Additional readings for Oracle folks can be found with Kenneth Downs writing Advanced Table Design: Resolutions and Dan Norris’ Collaborate 08 thoughts gives a concise review of a largely attended Oracle event.

SQL Server

B Esakkiappan’s SQL Thoughts gives us a throughout lesson on SQL Server 2005 Database Transaction logs with Know the Transaction LOG - Part - 1, Part - 2, Part - 3 and Part -4 Restoring Data.

Paul S. Randal of SQL Skills adds Conference Questions Pot-Pourri: How to create Agent alerts to his writings following many requests after a recent workshop.

In Scalability features I would like to have in SQL Server Michael Zilberstein lists 3 key features including “Active-Active cluster”, “Indexes per partition” and “Bitmap indexes and function based indexes”.

Ingres, Times Ten, Google App Engine and more

Some movement in the Ingres world with Deb Woods of Ingres Technology Blog discussing in Inside the Community - Ingres style…. the Ingres Engineering Summit occurring this week. Attendees included newbies to a 24 year Ingres veteran. That beats my experience in Ingres which now extends 19 years.

We get another very detailed installation description, this time for Times Ten in Install Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database 7.0.4 on Linux.

Just a few weeks ago, a new database offering hit the market with the Google App Engine. News this week includes
Google App Engine Hack-a-thons! being announced with events in New York on May 7th and San Francisco on May 16th. As a developer with an account and an excuse to use it more, I can’t win, being in the right towns on the wrong dates.

OakLeaf Systems this week writes Comparing Google App Engine, Amazon SimpleDB and Microsoft SQL Server Data Services. Another good read just for comparison.

Not in a blog, but in discussion in at the recent MySQL, was msql. It was interesting to find out that PHP was originally developed for msql first, and only used MySQL as the preferred database after some functionality requirement. Interesting what could have been?

In Conclusion

Thanks Dave for the opportunity to contribute to the week in review. Until my chance to charm the readers next time.

I leave you with a photo, and challenge our readers to find another person who would be capable of wearing a t-shirt that states “My free software runs your company”. Michael Widenius- Founder and original developer of MySQL can, and my thanks to you for MySQL, and the Vodka shots at the Conference last week.

Happy Earth Day 2008!

The 2008 Google Summer of Code MySQL Projects are now available. MySQL has 14 listed projects, one of the ~190 different Open Source products listed. Unfortunately there is no summary to see the total number of projects being sponsored across all products.

Media Blob Streaming actually has the luxury of two approved projects, so they have plenty of mentoring work at PrimeBase Technologies.

Raj Kissu Rajandran will be working on BLOB Streaming Support for phpMyAdmin and KishoreKumar Bairi on Streaming Enabled MySQL Driver for PHP. Welcome to world of open source for your respective projects.

I got my registration for Google App Engine this morning after being Waitlisted previously.

Between flying for about 15 hrs tomorrow and then the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo where I’m presenting and running an Exhibitors booth, fat chance I’ll get to look into this much over the next week.

Pity!

TechCrunch announced Google Jumps Head First Into Web Services With Google App Engine so I jumped over to http://code.google.com/appengine to register, but I’ve been added to a waitlist. Reading more I see only 10,000 developers were initially allowed to register, I wonder how long that took to fill up.

There has been plenty of press this week regarding Microsoft making a bid for Yahoo. This week the Wall Street Journal Article From Uncertain Future To Leading Yahoo Bid has prompted me to the following observations. I quote several points:

The bid, he said on the call, is “the next major milestone in Microsoft’s companywide transformation” to incorporate online services.

as Microsoft pushes the bid and, if successful, tries to meld Yahoo with Microsoft.

Microsoft had been negotiating to buy online ad company DoubleClick Inc. but lost that deal to Google, which paid $3.1 billion. Microsoft in May countered, spending $6 billion on online ad company aQuantive Inc.

While Microsoft should continue investing in its own online services, it needed to speed things up through acquisitions.

Once a company had a critical mass of buyers and sellers on its online-ad system, it could hold sway over much of the industry. In computers, Microsoft achieved that position with its Windows operating system. But on the Internet, Google was quickly taking on that role.

The Alexa Ratings has Yahoo as the number 1 real-estate property, outstripping Google. What’s important to realize that Yahoo along with many top traffic websites not only use Open Source, but their business is run on Open Source. At the database, there is MySQL powering Yahoo, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, Fotolog and Flickr for example. Google also uses MySQL within critical components (not the search engine).

One can only hope that if such a bid is successful, much like the Sun acquisition of MySQL , that strong components of the Open Source ideal infects the much larger host.

I was thinking of taking this popular Tux & Microsoft Office image and badging Tux with a Yahoo logo, or perhaps he needs to be planting a big neon sign in the center.

So checking Google Maps in the past few days and I see yet another new button, this one [Terrain]

If you didn’t spot it Google Maps - Street View had a Halloween icon. You can see it clearly below as I dragged it over a clear space.

This is an image I took yesterday of a billboard “The algorithm is banned in China.”. I don’t get it. This one has “Ask” in the bottom of the image.

I remember a few months ago seeing “The algorithm killed Jeeves”, and it had no reference to “Ask” on it, so I assumed it was some reference to Google Killing askjeeves.com. Need to find that photo.

Found it. I took this photo below on Apr 20, 2007. Note: there is no Ask logo like the one above.

Google Van is one of the sites now sporting images found as part of Google Street View which has been on line for about a month now.

What is the world coming to!

There has been plenty of news about Google Maps Street View that I blogged about recently.

I wanted to know how they do it, well here is how they do it.
Google Maps zoom: here’s the device and vehicle behind it.

There has been plenty of news this week, images of tunnels in New York, which is apparently a security risk, a guy attempting to climb over a fence in front of an apartment block, a guy leaving a known sex shop.

Some articles I found interesting were Google Zooms In Too Close for Some and All-seeing Google Street View prompts privacy fears.