Spider and vertical partition engines with new goodies

The Spider storage engine should be already known to the community. Its version 2.5 has recently been released, with new features, the most important of which is that you can execute remote SQL statements in the backend servers. The method is quite simple. Together with Spider, you also get an UDF that executes SQL code in a remote server. You send a query with parameters saying how to connect to the server, and check the result (1 for success, 0 for failure). If the SQL involves a SELECT, the result can be sent to a temporary table. Simple and effective.

In addition to the Spider engine, Kentoku SHIBA has also created the vertical partitioning engine. Instead of splitting tables by record, you split them by columns. You can define a table with column A and column B, with primary key K, and another table with column C and column D, with primary key K. The vertical partition engine allows you to define a table with columns K, A, B, C, D, which looks to the user like a regular column. The backend tables can be of any engine.
There is a MySQL University session about the Spider and VP engines on November 26th at 15:00 CEST. Free attendance!
The slides are online: Sharding for the masses

Introduction to Gearman at the Italian Research Council

I was invited to contribute some technological views at the Italian National Research Center, during the Internet Governance Forum. My contribution was ahigh level introduction to Gearman, which sparked a debate about the impact of the cloud on the future of open source. Indeed, cloud computing technologies have the potential of harming open source adoption. If this is a threat and how much it can affect the future of open source depends on the business model behind the cloud.

More interesting topics were discussed both during the scheduled sessions and in open gathering. During dinner, for example, I got some disturbing statistics on database teaching in Italian universities. It's very common to require MS Access and .NET as supporting technologies for most of the IT related exams, with little or no room for open alternatives like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Seeing a newsstand inside the compound of the NRC makes me think that progress slow in the institution that is supposed to be the guide of the Italian technology. The same thought crossed my mind seeing that the conference hall, a beautiful 200 seat hall well equipped for multimedia has only one power socket, but it was off limits for users.