O'Reilly News & Commentary

Four short links: 4 November 2009 - Electronics Hacking FAQs, Speech-To-Text Democracy, Open Source Column Database, Massive Online Analysis

By Nat Torkington
November 4, 2009

Democracy Live -- BBC launch searchable coverage of parliamentary discussion, using speech-to-text. One aspect we're particularly proud of is that we've managed to deliver good results for speech-to-text in Welsh, which, we're told, is unique. I think of this as the start of a They Work For You for video coverage. I'd love to be able to scale this to local government coverage, which is disappearing as local newspapers turn into delivery mechanisms for real estate advertisements. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Four short links: 18 August 2009 - iPhone App Backstory, Cookie Resurrection, The Entrepreneuralism Lickmus test, and An Interesting Database

By Nat Torkington
August 18, 2009

The Making of the NPR News iPhone App -- interesting behind-the-scenes look, with sketches and all. Station streams, however, presented a larger challenge. To begin with, NPR didn't have direct stream links for any of its stations, so we built a Web spider that identified and captured more than 300 iPhone-compatible station streams. After that first pass, we worked with our station representatives to manually test each stream. In the process they found enough new streams to double our database. All of these streams are delivered to the app from NPR's Station Finder API. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Four short links: 5 August 2009 - Ancient Language, NoSQL, Molecular Gastronomy, SQL Weirdness

By Nat Torkington
August 6, 2009

Computers Unlock More Secrets of the Indus Valley Script -- The University of Washington News reports that a team led by a university researcher has used computers to extract patterns in ancient Indus symbols created by an urban civilization from four thousand years in the past. UWN describes that the study shows "distinct patterns in the symbols' placement in sequences and creates a statistical model for the unknown language." This and more in Four Short Links.

Relational databases as reality sandwiches: thoughts about C.J. Date's "SQL and Relational Theory"

By Andy Oram
July 16, 2009

I recently returned to SQL and Relational Theory: How to Write Accurate SQL Code by C.J. Date, a leading researcher in the field of relational databases, as I learned more about some of the alternative forms of data storage that are becoming popular for Web-based or text-heavy repositories.

MySQL faster, better, and still unified: notes about Sun, Monty Widenius, Percona, and Drizzle

By Andy Oram
May 22, 2009

It might have seemed last week, with the announcement of the Open Database Alliance, that MySQL is forking. The ODA promises a "central clearinghouse for MySQL development" and claims to improve on areas where criticism has historically been aimed at MySQL AB/Sun: bug-fixing, performance, and community responsiveness. But what's going on behind the scenes is much more subtle and promises a much better outcome for MySQL.

MySQL 2009 conference wrap-up: news flash about Flash and other notes from the experts

By Andy Oram
April 24, 2009

MySQL conference wrap-up: Flash, cloud computing, managing large installations, the value of community, and how to fumble your way to winning the presidency.

MySQL conference begins: the resurgence of InnoDB and other current events

By Andy Oram
April 23, 2009

I sense a bigger enterprise theme at the MySQL conference this year. The pride of putting up a PHP- or Rails-backed web site lies in the past; now people are concerned with scaling into the clouds (figuratively and literally) and ensuring absolute reliability.

XProc: XML Pipelines and RESTful Services

By Kurt Cagle
March 11, 2009

Anyone who has used languages such as XSLT should have a pretty fair idea about the complexities involved in treating XML as a programming language itself - it's verbose, forces thinking into a declarative model that can be at odds with the C-based languages currently used by most programmers, can be difficult to read, and as a syntax it doesn't always fit well with the requirements in establishing parameter signatures and related structures.

Analysis 2009: XForms and XML-enabled clients gain traction with XQuery databases

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

I'm beginning to despair about XForms, which is perhaps a good sign. XForms is perhaps the oldest of the W3C technologies that has yet to either die completely or really dramatically take off, and for all that it has...

New MySQL Query Analyzer for enterprise customers

By Andy Oram
November 19, 2008

MySQL AB (now Sun's Database group) established a multi-pronged business model long ago: support contracts, dual licensing, and proprietary add-ons all play a role in making them one of the biggest success stories in the area of open source business. Today their MySQL Query Analyzer adds another brick to that edifice. The analyzer can do simple things such as tell you how long a recent query took and how the optimizer handled it (the results of EXPLAIN statements). But it can also give historical information such as how the current runs of a query compare to earlier runs.

Considerations in Building Web Applications for the Amazon Cloud

By George Reese
October 18, 2008

I have been helping several clients lately migrate part or all of their infrastructure over into the Amazon Cloud. The biggest concern I am seeing relates to whether or not their existing web applications will work OK in the cloud. You need to consider some things.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008: Oracle Database Update

By Robert Stackowiak
September 27, 2008

Oracle highlighted a number of new database features and related topics at OpenWorld 2008. This entry provides just a quick description of some of the topics you might want to explore further. The big news item of the week was...

Neo4J: A Different Database (+ Expect More Bad Java News)

By Timothy M. O'Brien
July 12, 2008

Foocamp attendees, beware, we're covering you from afar. Peter Neubauer twittered about Neo4J this morning and it caught my eye. "Neo is a graph database. It is an embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than in tables." Is this to be believed? Something interesting happening in Java?

Optimization, Backups, Replication, and more

By O'Reilly Media
June 25, 2008

High Performance MySQL, Second Edition is the definitive guide to building fast, reliable systems with MySQL. Written by noted experts with years of real-world experience building very large systems, this book covers every aspect of MySQL performance in detail, and focuses on robustness, security, and data integrity. Learn advanced techniques in depth so you can bring out MySQL's full power. The second edition is completely revised and greatly expanded, with deeper coverage in all areas. Learn more.

Mapping Python to Databases

By O'Reilly Media
June 13, 2008

Essential SQLAlchemy introduces a high-level open-source code library that makes it easier for Python programmers to access relational databases such as Oracle, DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. SQLAlchemy has become increasingly popular since its release, but it still lacks good documentation. This practical book fills the gap, and because a developer wrote it, you get an objective look at SQLAlchemy's tools rather than an advocate's description of all the "cool" features. Learn more.

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