On using bitmap encoding per column to make databases (such as Mongo and Vertica) faster.

[[ These new technologies are "challenging our Constitutional categories in really dramatic ways," says George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen. "And what's so striking is that none of the existing amendments give clear answers to the most basic questions we're having today." ]]

"The joint operation, dubbed Operation Safe Pilot, fed in the names of 45,000 pilots in Northern California, cross-referenced them with the names of those who got any Social Security benefits, and came up with some 3,200 violators." Apparently this is probably but not certainly illegal in the US. I assume the UK's Data Protection Act would forbid this, but I'm not sure. One to watch.

"The Python SDK's datastore implementation operates by storing the entire contents of your development datastore in memory." "The new local datastore implementation fixes both these issues by rewriting the datastore stub to use SQLite as a backend." Try the beta now. (docent's memory usage when running a local copy of the full DB was... painful.)

Alec Jeffreys calls for the DNA database to be cut down to size. I wonder if the headline was deliberately playing on SQL's syntax, though.

This seems to be a consistent source of App Engine criticism; basically, "I don't see the point of giving up my RDBMS just for (alleged) scalability". The comments do a good job of pointing out that, actually, RDBMSes just leave you with the pain of partitioning later. Mind you, my perspective's a bit odd, given how rarely I use persistent local data. (He's right about background tasks though.)

"Use it to collect and share bookmarks, notes, videos and other content. Twine organizes your content, learns as you use it and recommends new things to check out."

Sign me up for the database-using faked message queue. While we're at it, can we have one built in to a web app framework please? Also, one that ran on a simple DB might be nice (rather than needing MySQL).

There was a lightning talk at the London Python meeting yesterday touching on couchdb (another non-relational data store) and cherry.py, but the most impressive bit was Futon, the web-based front end to couchdb. However, if its web presence is this bad, no wonder I'd not heard of it.

Does what it says in the title, giving you a mechanism for migrating Gears data from one schema to another.

"It addresses a common problem in Django development: if you change a model after creating the database tables for it with syncdb, how do you reflect those changes in your database tables without blowing away your existing data and starting again from scratch?" This is one approach.

This is, er, something. Using jQuery and an HTML table to write something that works basically the same as SQL. Clientside.

What it says on the tin: "A JavaScript shim for HTML 5's offline API and manifest format, implemented using Google Gears under the cover." Useful now there's an HTML5 storage API supporting browser out there.

"Throw away your screen scraper: BART has official schedules, fares and other data in the open Google Transit™ Feed Specification (GTFS)." Great news for those in SF.

A response to Jon Udell's post about "data friction" and scraping databases, looking deeper, at whether (relational) DBs are part of the problem. (See also: API joins?)

On screen scraping. "So somebody got paid to write software to turn the database into web pages, and now you’re getting paid to write software that turns those web pages back into a database?" Shame about the (tiny) MS plug, maybe.

Further thinking on "iTunes as spreadsheet", contrasting that to what a music-playing database would look like, and more generally on the growth of easily embeddable DBs.

Erlang? Interesting. It does seem very lightweight; not so much a database as a toolkit for storing data and building tools around it.

The Amazon API/service computing juggernaut rumbles on with a RESTian database API. Not sure it makes sense for people already relying on RDBMSes, but it's certainly interesting.

Every time they update this it gets better. CSS editing and SQLite local database inspection? Yes please. It's now getting to the point where a comparison with Firebug has both with missing features.

Rev Dan Catt posts to Flickr Ideas about Greasemonkey and scaling. I'd also note that it's a lot easier to build a little GM script than a standalone app, and also easier to drive adoption. (I was going to post about this once. Sigh.)

Google's blog import format uses Atom/XML, like the Alastair Rankine proposal.

"will transform MySQL into a scalable media server capable of streaming pictures, films, MP3 files and other binary and text objects directly in and out of the database."

An alternative storage engine for MySQL. Useful for big BLOBs?

"Have you ever wished that you could access information stored in MS SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL? Now you can!" This might have been useful, ten years ago.

"Richard Hipp's database is used by some of the biggest names in IT - but he has not made a penny from it" SQLite isn't merely open source, it's public domain. Half of the 250KB limit is tests. It beats SQL Server in some scenarios. A good article.

"Both Flickr and Twitter make it somewhat difficult to move through giant lists [while] the databases quietly running these services are wildly denormalized and indexed like crazy, making it possible to generate these lists" Have to read this properly.

Lots of good writeups from the MySQL conference; the Flickr, YouTube and Google ones are all interesting.

Interesting thoughts on CMSes

Saved unread so that davorg can see it.

I'm not sure if using MT as a database is a genius idea or the most insane thing ever.

Do you really need a database? Is Web 2.0 another iteration of "worse is better"? And when did I turn into a YAML advocate anyway?

Launching a "Free Our Data" campaign to get the UK (and EU?) to open up the data Government bodies/quangoes collect, like most US national agencies.

If Tom's scared I'm scared. Having said that, what Brad says makes sense to me. Down with UUIDs!

I hope this does what it says on the tin, but I'd prefer DBD::iTunes

Gracenote leave a really bad taste in my mouth, for closing their DBs. Yay for MB and FreeDB.

Gracenote leave a really bad taste in my mouth, for closing their DBs. Yay for MB and FreeDB.

Free remote GUI SQL client. Fairly nifty

Somewhere between CocoaMySQL, Filemaker and Access?