Word of the release of an exciting new project from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Thomson Reuters. From the Berkman Center Site: Researching the nature of news, and media information flows, has always faced a difficult challenge: there is so much produced by so many outlets that...

What happened to Hot Standby?. Hot Standby (the ability to have read-only replication slaves) has been dropped from PostgreSQL 8.4 and is now scheduled for 8.5. “Making hard decisions to postpone features which aren’t quite ready is how PostgreSQL makes sure that our DBMS is �bulletproof“ an...

Remember a month or so ago, when we asked whether Oracle’s critical patch updates (CPU) were all that critical? The answer from many (outside of Oracle) was no. In fact, many DBAs considered it too much trouble. Responses ranged from “security ‘experts’ drumming up business t...

The vogue for several years in the major commercial legal publishing houses has been to offer data through “global platforms” that give the customer a single point of access to all of their proprietary and licensed content. A global platform enables the publisher to “leverage”...

I didn’t know anything about Objective-C so it is a challenging experience to go back to the C world, but I’m starting to find it very exciting. After I had read Cocoa Fundamentals and the iPhone Application Programming Guide (very boring stuff, but hardly avoidable), after having gone through â...

Our own Matt Asay can’t talk about this (he’s an executive with one of the players) but Ingres and Alfresco think they can build a real competitor to SharePoint. (The original image lives at Wikimedia.) Matt has been writing about SharePoint “lock-in” for years. Partnering ...

SQL is ubiquitous, but it’s hard to use. “It’s complicated, confusing, and error prone — much more so, I venture to suggest, than its apologists would have you believe,” says C.J. Date. “In order to have any hope of writing SQL code that you can be sure is accurat...

Last night TechCrunch announced that Coghead, a startup that built an online database, is going out of business.  Personally, I’m sorry to hear about it.  I’ve met some of the Coghead team and they are a smart, entreprenuerial team.   This is an important class of applications and the...

Have you ever ran into database tables with a field which is used to mark if a row has been 'deleted' ? Probably. These fields are used to implement 'soft-deletes'. For the soft-delete impaired, a quick introduction. Soft-deletes are row deletes which are not really happening: instead of removing th...

I had the pleasure of addressing a crowd of over 1,000+ people yesterday, at the Sun Tech Days event in Hyderabad. I think this might as well be the biggest number of attendees at a talk that I’ve given. I spoke on MySQL: The Database for Web 2.0, and the notes for this talk are largely indexe...