Jeremy Zawodny's blog

MySQL's MaxDB (formerly SAP DB)

The MySQL/SAP alliance is starting to take shape. The press release and Kaj's mailing list announcement explain more, saying things like:

First, the main consequence of the SAP partnership is the same as when we announced it in the first place: you'll see the development of MySQL speed up further. The SAP partnership provides MySQL AB with resources that enables us to develop new features faster.

Second, if you need features which MySQL still lacks, we suggest that you take a look at MaxDB. You'll probably find them there. MySQL AB will offer databases that meet a wide range of application needs, whether you like your database fast, stable and easy to use (as in MySQL), or whether you like it enterprise-grade and feature-packed (as in MaxDB).

Third, it will now be easier for you to obtain approval from your management and customers to use MySQL in mission-critical projects. SAP is trusting MySQL AB with their database needs, so why shouldn't everyone?

Here's some of the really cool stuff:

MaxDB 7.5 will be able to communicate using the MySQL protocol, which means that you can use the MySQL clients on it. A primary goal is to be able to easily mysqldump data from MaxDB and pipe it into a mysql client as input to MySQL -- as well as to mysqldump data from MySQL and pipe it into a mysql client as input to MaxDB.

MaxDB 7.5 also aims at supporting MySQL replication. You can then use MaxDB either as a master or as a slave to MySQL, by hooking it onto the MySQL replication mechanism.

Interesting times, eh?

To rate or not to rate?

Every time I send DVDs back to Netflix (which is a great service, BTW), they e-mail me to say something like "We've received $some_movie, rate it today!" They're trying to get me to rate it so that they can better recommend movies in the future.

This isn't new. Amazon has been using customer product ratings and purchase behavior for a long time, and they're done quite a good job at at. The rating takes me about 10 seconds. But for some reason I can't seem to bring myself to bother rating Netflix movies. And I'm not really sure why.

I guess I feel like it really won't matter. I rarely browse Netflix in the way that I do on Amazon. When I go to Netflix, I usually know what I'm looking for.

Am I the only one? Do my fellow Netflix subscribers actually rate all their flix?

It's interesting to note that I only fill out the Yahoo! Shopping merchant ratings about half the time too, but for different reasons. I have a half-written "Why I shop on Amazon instead of Yahoo" entry that I haven't managed to finish yet. But hey, it's only been 2 months. :-)

After the Dentist...

Whenever I come back from a dental cleaning (like this morning), I always feel guilty about eating anything sweet for the rest of the day. And if I do manage to eat something "bad" I must immediately brush my teeth.

Seriously. It's some sort of short-term obsessive compulsive sort of thing.

It's too bad this doesn't last more than one day. And it's really too bad it never kicked in when I was younger. It would have saved countless dental procedures and lots of insurance money over the years.

On the plus side, I've been taking much much better care of my teeth in the last 4 years. I really should have listened to my grandparent's advice about not taking my teeth for granted, because when they're gone they're gone. You only get one set.

Anyway, don't mess around with your teeth.

Floss. Get an electric toothbrush. Use fluoride rinse. Repeat.

Downtime

You see the little red stuff below Toledo, Ohio in the radar image to the right (click to zoom)?

Looks nasty, huh?

It was nasty enough to knock my servers off-line--well, the ones in Ohio, at least. There's a minor problem with a dead UPS that's being replaced. One of them came (friends.zawodny.com) back up just fine. The other one (family.zawodny.com), which one that hosts my domains, email, cvs, and whatnot, did not.

And I blame Murphy. You see, this had to happen just an hour after I announced a new mytop release on my blog, freshmeat, the mailing list, and so on. Now nobody can get it.

Grr.

The good news is that friends machine backs up family. It has copies of all the data, config files, etc. The backup stuff (rsync) runs every 3 hours, so I knew I hadn't lost much. Three hours at most. But I did face a dilemma. Do I got thru the process of configuring everything on friends and getting it running? Or wait until the next morning when someone will be on-site to check it out?

I had no idea how long that process might take, so I decided to wait. And I was sorta thinking that family was just being dumb. Maybe it wasn't configured to auto-restart when the power comes back on. I know that friends is (obviously) configured right and that litterbox (my west coast machine) is too. But I suspected that family was not. Either that, or something went wrong with lilo or the boot-time fsck of the root filesystem (the only one that's not a journaling filesystem).

So I wanted until this morning to get someone hands on. And it turns out that I was right.

+++
NO CARRIER