Scott Yang's Playground

Amazon SimpleDB — released last week that provides access to a scalable storage of structured data via a REST API, which runs along side with EC2 and S3 to provide the “scalable backend” for online applications. Comments over the weekend have ranged from “it sucks” to “who needs Oracle/MSSQL/DB2?”. I personally won’t be using it. [...]

Office 2.0 Database, i.e. a directory of every Web 2.0 office applications under the sun, written by Ismael Ghalimi of IT Redux. Here is his own setup, which covers everything from bookmarking, calendar, contact, CRM, database, desktop, document manager, presentation, spreadsheet, word processor and more. Everything running inside your browser.

Paul Beach of IBPhoenix responded to Forrester’s “research report” on Firebird, and released a white paper on how FB has been used in enterprise.

There has been a series of acqusitions amongst database companies. Oracle bought InnoBase Oy and Sleepycat, two makers of transactional storage engine for MySQL. MySQL AB has then acquired Netfrastructure, a web aplication development framework. However, what MySQL AB actually acquired is not just the company + its software, but the main brain behind it. [...]

What to expect in 2006 for Firebird database. Looks like next year will be an interesting year for this open source RDBMS. 2.0 (query optimisation, removing annoying limitations) and Vulcan (fine grain locking + SMP) in Q1, and 3.0 in Q3 (merge of a few independent branches). Yum.

Via lesscode. Alex Bunardzic, who might have recently found himself hated by many ‘database geeks’, quoted this interview with David Heinemeier Hansson and wrote another article on the myth of data integrity, where he debunked the ‘sacred cows’ of the corporate IT practices — the data integrity of the relational database. His main points were: [...]

Now everyone should know that Oracle, the big commercial RDBMS vendor, has recently acquired Innobase Oy, the development house behind InnoDB, one of the data storage backend for MySQL that provides ACID compliant transaction support, row-level locking and foreign key constraint. Jeremy Zawodny has this story well covered. You know you are doomed, when your [...]

Donncha shared his simple MySQL backup script that backs up individual WordPress tables into separate .sql.gz files, and keeps a week worth of them just in case something horrible happens. This is exactly what I did this morning! Write a simple Bash script that loops through 20+ databases, and create .sql.gz files per database. I [...]

My day-time job involves software development using Firebird database (which happens to be 20 years old this month). While it’s a great little database that is easy to deploy and scales well, there still lacks documentation for developers (unless you go and buy the book). There might be some commercial desktop development/administration applications, but few [...]

Firebird SQL RDBMS has released some information regarding to features in the next few major versions. Looks very interesting. Even though I am still frustrated that I cannot use stored procedure in a SELECT field.

PostgreSQL 8.0 is now beta, and it surely has many new features that make it one of (if not the most) favourite relational database engine amongst open source developers. Remember the good old days when FOCUS website was powered with PostgreSQL 6.5. Well, it was not that good back then, and that was why I [...]

Jeremy Zawodny cursed the death of abstract database API because it is never easy to migrate anyway. Whole heartly agree. How many times that I would love to use features unique in Firebird, but was hindered by our potential database backend migration, which has never happened. But how can you speed up the DB access [...]

Yesterday afternoon at work I was stressed in trying to tune some SQL queries, as clients complained Firebird taking up all the CPU time after our software upgrades. At the end, I figured out the issue lies in how Firebird 1.0 and Firebird 1.5 prepare the plan for the exact same query. General performance wise, [...]

From the Firebird website, Release 1.5 of the Firebird database has just been released over the weekend. From the CVS log of the “WhatsNew” file, it seems the final release is the same as RC9 released a week ago. I just back up a database from Firebird 1.0.3, restore it on the new 1.5, and [...]

I have been having difficulty searching for reference documentations on the Firebird database. As I have mentioned in a previous entry, openly available documentation on Firebird is outrageously lacking, comparing to other open source databases. The only useful reference that I can lay my hands on is the much out-dated Interbase 6 Beta manuals in [...]