Tag Archives | MySQL

Linux Certification

By Ted Roche on December 19, 2005 in Linux, OpenSource

Over at Linux Watch, Stephen J. Vaughn-Nicholls opines “You don’t have to have a Linux certification to get a job working with Linux, but it can’t hurt.” I’m a big fan of certification, as I think eventually the vendor- and industry-level certification will be viewed as Continuing Education requirements for Licensed Software Practitioners. I’ve lectured about this years ago. I’ve also practiced what I’ve preached, earning a Novell CNA, Microsoft Certified Professional, Certified Solution Developer, Certified System Engineer and MySQL Core Certification through the years. I also worked as one of the lead authors for Microsoft’s Visual FoxPro 6.0 Distributed Applications exam, so I appreciate the difficulty of creating a legitimate certification.

Like a diploma, some certificates may just be an attendance report crossed with a good deal of bulk memorization, but it also shows a willingness to work within the system. A four-year degree generally indicates a bit of patience, too. But on the flip side, remember what they call they guy who graduates at the bottom of his class in med school: “Doctor”

Certification can be what you make of it. An educational opportunity, a means of self-evaluation, and a chance to distinguish yourself in the marketplace.

Nut-Graph: visualize blackouts

By Ted Roche on December 13, 2005 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Security, Technology

And once you have NUT monitoring your UPS serving multiple servers, consider adding Nut-Graph to give you a visual display of incoming voltage, load and battery status. Requires NUT, mod_php, MySQL 4.1 and Perl and jpgraph. Very slick!

Time for a new toolset?

By Ted Roche on November 10, 2005 in Technology

Listening to the Gilmor Gang podcast yesterday (great discussions on Windows Live, conversation with Robert Scoble, and Doc Searls nails it once again), one of the panelists mentioned Eric Von Hippel’s work on “user-driven innovation” that had been featured in a podcast of Michael Tiemann’s presentation at the last MySQL conference. Michael also mentions Von Hippel’s work and his HBR article (May 2002, if memory serves) in his presentation on “The Open Source Triple Play.”

It’s a vast simplification to summarize Von Hippel’s work as “give the users the tools and they will solve the problem” but much of the work on Von Hippel’s site (including video tutorials, two books under the Creative Commons license, and articles – bravo!) points towards that theme. Well worth a look.

FoxPro developers can recognize similar patterns in our ability to embed tools such as Stonefield Query and FireFox! inside our applications, allowing the users to develop the complex reports that lets them run their business and extend the reach of the application. Gilmor Gang members were speaking more of Web Services and AJAX and extending services such as Google Search, Maps, Yahoo! and Microsoft offerings. The scale changes when you move from offering tools in a proprietary application to exposing these tools to the entire World-Wide Web.

Provide users with easy-to-use tools and they will build the solutions they need. Isn’t that what fired up the PC Revolution in the 80s? Isn’t that what real innovation has always been about?

“Man is a tool-using Animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools;
without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.” — Thomas Carlyle

“A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed,
it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead

Exciting times.

MySQL 5.0 released for production use

By Ted Roche on October 24, 2005 in LAMP, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology

The Latest Updates from MySQL AB RSS Feed notes MySQL 5.0 Now Available for Production Use. “MySQL AB today announced the general availability of MySQL 5.0, the most significant product upgrade in the company’s ten-year history. The major new version delivers advanced SQL standard-compliant features such as stored procedures, triggers, views & new pluggable storage engines. Over 30 enterprise platform and tool vendors have also expressed enthusiastic support for the new release of the world’s most popular open source database.”

Ubuntu 5.10 Server Released

By Ted Roche on October 20, 2005 in OpenSource, Technology

OSNews notes Ubuntu 5.10 Server Released. “The Ubuntu team is proud to announce Ubuntu 5.10 Server, the first release of Ubuntu designed especially for server environments. Like the standard desktop Ubuntu, it occupies a single CD. However, it is distinguished by the following features: Includes server-oriented kernels with out-of-the-box automatic support for multiprocessor systems; Includes a wide variety of popular server applications such as apache, mysql, postgresql, php, zope, openldap, bind, samba, and more.” Visit the OSNews site for links to download the CD image for PowerPC, i386 and AMD64.

Ubuntu has taken the world by storm, recently highlighted as the Desktop OS of choice in Linux Journal poll. I’ve been impressed with the Debian-based distribution. It will be interesting to see what innovations they bring to their server version.

Oracle acquires InnoBase

By Ted Roche on October 12, 2005 in LAMP, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology

Jeremy Zawody blogs “Oracle buys Innobase. MySQL between rock and hard place?”

Ow. InnoBase is currently the data storage engine of choice when using the MySQL engine. (Unlike most RDBMSes, MySQL can plug into several storage engines, like MyISAM, Cluster and Archive, to provide performance and features tuned for the application.) While Oracle can’t “take away” the Gnu Public Licensed code in current use, they can negotiate difficult terms for MySQL AB to continue offering commercial products. It’s time for the MySQL AB team to look for a new storage engine.

The Motley Fool’s analysis: “Oracle Goes for the Kill.” Red Herring sees “Oracle Acquires Innobase” as just the 11th acquisition this year, and possibly for a low-end entry-level tool for the Oracle DB. It will be interesting to see how Oracle proceeds.

MySQL announces Application and Partner of the Year

By Ted Roche on September 15, 2005 in LAMP, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology

The Latest Updates from MySQL AB feed reports MySQL Announces Application and Partner of the Year Award Winners. “In his morning Keynote presentation at the MySQL Users Conference, company CEO Marten Mickos announced the winners of the 2005 Application of the Year and Partner of the Year awards.”

Impressive. This should continue to dispel the myth that MySQL is for “little” or “simple” applications. These are world-class high-performance sites.

MySQL Web Seminars online

By Ted Roche on August 31, 2005 in LAMP, MySQL, Technology

Yesterday, I “attended” a web seminar put on by the MySQL folks titled “MySQL for DBAs:
How to be Successful as a Scale-Out MySQL DBA” It was an excellent overview of the many ways in which MySQL can be configured with different data engines, settings, configurations, replication or clusters for various High Availability (HA) situations using OnLine Transaction Processing (OLTP) or Data Warehousing scenarios. The web seminar was put on using WebEx, which gave the presenters the opportunity to maintain a Q&A and Chat off to the side during the presentation. WebEx supports Java clients in most browsers: I used Safari on my iMac. Audio, though, isn’t streamed, but rather delivered via a toll-free telephone connection. Overall, it was a good use of an hour of my time, getting me some good information and pointers on where to learn more. Sort of like a vendor presentation at a user group, but without the hours of driving on either end.

MySQL archives these presentations and makes them available at http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/

What’s the point of IT Certifications?

By Ted Roche on August 29, 2005 in Technology

Slashdot posts What’s the Point of IT Certifications?. erica_ann asks: “Fact: You can have the knowledge without having to pay to be Certified when it comes to computers. Another fact: Just because you have the certification does not mean you actually know the material as well as someone who is not certified. You might just be good at taking tests. So what is the point of getting IT Certifications? To have a piece of paper?”

Always a good question. A couple easy answers come to mind:

1. Marketing: for SMB, having a logo on your business card or website implies *something*. That you made the effort to show your abilities. That you want to be recognized for your achievements. Or that you’re trying to bluff your way into something you’re not qualified to do.

2. Self-education. As I mentioned, I pass the MySQL Core Certification last week. As part of six or eight weeks of evening studying for the exam, I ran across little niches of information about MySQL I hadn’t had a need to learn up to that point. So I know more now.

3. Passing the HR filter: As some posters in the Slashdot article mention, there are HR departments that separate resumes into degreed/certified and not. The “not” basket is circular. I’m not saying this is the right thing to do (I don’t think it is in most cases), but it is the reality of the business.

4. Qualifications: Some day, legislators are going to get sick of IS screw-ups and require licensing of computer professionals (maybe). Engineers, lawyers, doctors, plumbers, electricians, beauticians and automobile drivers all have to get licensed. A computer professional with a string of certs is more likely to get grandfathered in or earn some sort of partial credit for the credentials. I hope.

A number of folks seem to react over-defensively to testing, and there are a lot of good reasons to do so. Any program can be corrupted. Some people test more poorly than others, but may be very skilled at their jobs. Most tests test how well you can take a test, and only reflect to some extent how well you can do the job the test is supposedly for. Certificates should be viewed as only one aspect of many in determining the competence of a professional. Remember, “What do they call the guy who graduates at the bottom of his med school class?”

“Doctor.”

Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL

By Ted Roche on August 22, 2005 in MySQL, OpenSource, Technology

On the MySQL developer’s support site, Mike Hillyar has an article on hierarchies in relational databases. “Most users at one time or another have dealt with hierarchical data in a SQL database and no doubt learned that the management of hierarchical data is not what a relational database is intended for. The tables of a relational database are not hierarchical (like XML), but are simply a flat list. Hierarchical data has a parent-child relationship that is not naturally represented in a relational database table.”

As I pointed out last week in Chris Date’s interview, it may not be intuitively obvious that flat files linked with relations are appropriate for structures like this, but in fact this is what they were made for. Relational databases excel at storing complex structures, as long as the designer understands the structure they are trying to represent. Despite a questionable start, Mike goes on to write an interesting and insightful article.

Older posts Newer posts

Navigation