Basically, it shows users pages about neighborhoods in cities, so they can decide where they want to stay when they visit.

You can read the full Q&A here, but here’s the part where they explain why they ultimately went with Memcached over a SQL database or DynamoDB:

At first, it seemed we wanted a SQL database, as our data had relations. However, this was ruled out based on the need for mass updates. Next, we looked at an in-house NoSQL solution that we call Dyson. Dyson seemed to give us the flexibility we needed with writes and updates, so we tried it. For reference, Dyson is backed by Amazon’s DynamoDB, a reliable, but limited, managed, NoSQL solution. In essence, if we put the data right into DynamoDB, then Dyson can serve it. This led to the creation of a DynamoDB cascading tap. Countless timeouts, headaches and late nights later, we had a working solution.

However, there was a problem, namely DynamoDB’s 65KB storage limit. When you’re storing uncompressed JSON, that’s a pretty easy target to reach. As a band-aid, we engineered a solution involving pages of tuples. To say this solution was sub-optimal is putting it mildly, and the performance was even worse.

With launch quickly approaching, brilliant words saved the day: “You don’t need a database, you need a [expletive deleted] cache” 1. So that’s what we did, we traded our database for a cache. Specifically, we switched from Dyson to Memcached.

Here’s a look at the Neighborhoods admin tool:

[via GigaOm]

Idera CEO Rick Pleczko says, “Idera has made a commitment to providing free tools and solutions that help both IT and database administrators better manage their servers. It’s our way of paying back the success that the community has helped us achieve.”

“Idera’s Server Backup Free delivers a free copy of their leading high performance server backup product,” the company says in an announcement. “Idera’s SQL backup status reporter and SQL permissions extractor allows DBAs to quickly and easily ensure that databases have been backed up and copy permissions across servers. All of these tools are designed to help administrators better manage the growing number of servers in the enterprise.”

Server Backup Free has all of the features of the Enterprise version, except it’s for a single server. Features include the abiliy to backup physical and virtual servers in just minutes (as opposed to hours), the ability to backup to any disk-based storage (second hard disk, NAS, SAN, etc.), the ability to restore files in seconds with Disk Safe technology, and “easy” installation.

Backup Status Reporter lets DBAs view a graphical representation of backups across their SQL Server environment. Features include: the ability to identify databases that haven’t had backups, the ability to view backup history (including backup date and type), a simplified grid view for easy sorting and navigation, and the ability to identify full and differential backups for one or many databases.

SQL Permissions Extractor lets DBAs copy and reassign permissions from one server to another without having to write any script. It can generate T-SQL scripts for copying of user permissions to other servers, and enables the editing, saving and execution of permissions scripts. It also lets users include object level permissions for selected databases.

Google has increased the amount of available storage to 100GB, which is ten times more than before. They’ve also increased the maximum size of instances to 16GB RAM, which is four times more data users can cache. Additionally, on the speed front, they’ve added functionality for optional asynchronous replication, giving users “the write performance of a non-replicated database, “but the availability of a replicated one,” as Google puts it.

“You want your applications to be fast, even with millions of users,” says product manager Joe Faith. “Anytime your user tries to retrieve information from the app or update settings, it should happen instantly. For the best performance, you need faster, larger databases – especially if you have a growing user base to serve.”

“Google App Engine is designed to scale,” he adds. “And now Google Cloud SQL—a MySQL database that lives in Google’s cloud—has new features to meet the demand for faster access to more data.”

Users can also now choose to store data and run their Cloud SQL database instance in either Google’s US or EU data centers. There is also new integration with Google Apps Script. You can publish and share data with Google Sheets, add data to Google Sites page or create Google Forms without the hosting or server configuration concerns.

Finally, Google announced that there is a new six-month free trial offer for Cloud SQL, effective until June 1, 2013.

Microsoft recently detailed the major updates that hit the Windows Azure SQL Database. The updates add four new features in the areas of Linked Server support, recursive triggers and other goodies.

First up, it was revealed that it’s now possible to add a Windows Azure SQL Database as a Linked Server, then it can used with Distributed Queries across both local and cloud databases. The new feature allows users to write queries that utilizes data from local networks as well as cloud data. This functionality was available in Windows Azure before, but it relied on a method that was not very good for performance. Here’s an example of how to connect to the Windows Azure SQL Database through Distributed Queries:

Another new feature is expanded support for recursive triggers. Microsoft notes that triggers will now call themselves recursively by default, but it can be turned on on or off at the user’s discretion. Check out the documentation for more finformation.

The SQL database also features support for DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS. This allows users to see the current query optimization statistics. Users can then estimate the “cardinality or number of rows in the query result.” From there, it creates a high quality query plan. You can check out the documentation here.

Finally, Microsoft has added the ability to configure SQL database firewall rules at the database level. It’s a step up from the previous firewall management tools that only allowed users to set the rules at the server level. Implementation at the database level allows users to set different rules for different databases. You can check out the documentation here.

Programming languages are tools. Programs take data and manipulate it a way to create new, more valuable data. Thus, databases are vital to the success of a given program, as it is the core of the programming storing both the data to be manipulate and the resulting new information. (The only exception to this rule would be if you were using a database for logging purposes, which provides little benefit over a straight file logging system.)

Thus, shifting the debate between SQL and NoSQL to programming languages is like debating over a knife or spoon when choosing crunchy versus creamy peanut butter in a PB&J sandwhich. It’s irrelevant what tool we use to construct our sandwhich, assuming both tools can get the job done. The real questions revolve around the peanut butter, jelly, and bread to use (crunchy, grape, and toasted wheat, obviously).

Jeff actually does an ample job of demonstrating that the programming language really doesn’t matter. All mature programming languages have had ample time to make a variety of excellent SQL libraries. In fact, infant programming languages would be doomed to fail without adequate SQL libraries. So the inherit advantage goes to SQL, but even that advantage is minute. As a given NoSQL database grows in popularity, so will its available libraries.

Mr. Cogswell chose the absolute worst NoSQL example for his argument. MongoDB is one of the hottest NoSQL databases, and thus libraries for the popular database have been sprouting up with more frequency as it continues to gain popularity. The programming language argument would have been better suited to look at less popular NoSQL databases, like Neo4j, which only has official libraries for Ruby and Java. The programming examples Cogswell used were in node.js and C# – so he would have had to use unofficial libraries and/or the REST API of Neo4j.

The SQL vs. NoSQL debate will always be alive at the independent project level. Because of the CAP Theorem, a given NoSQL or SQL database will never be a one-size-fits all solution. The growing popularity of NoSQL databases are a result of new problems and new data models that traditional relational databases fall short of properly representing. Relational databases will always have a place in a majority of applications, but as developers become more aware of what NoSQL options are available and where each of these databases shine, the appropriate mix of both SQL and NoSQL will surface.

The Bing Maps team has released two separate slide shows, unfortunately powered by Silverlight, that detail how a developer can leverage Bing maps to their advantage. The first is just more or less a normal introductory course in Bing Maps development. The second gets a little more advanced by showing developers how to use SQL server spatial data in their Bing Maps applications.

The introductory course explains the benefits of using Bing Maps while showing you how to get started on development. The rest of the slides are dedicated to the AJAX7 Control method in Bing Maps alongside the REST interfaces that you will be using. It even has a test at the end to make sure you were paying attention.

Bing Maps Learning Snack
by
Snack Owner

The second explains how SQL server spacial data works together with Bing Maps to create advanced data applications. It then spends some time on explaining the finer points of working with data in SQL Server 2012. Finally, it will show you how to combine the two to create great Bing Maps applications.

Bing Maps and SQL Server Spatial Data
by
Snack Owner

Charlie Bell, Vice President, Amazon Web Services, states, “Amazon RDS now supports three of the most popular relational database engines, giving businesses the flexibility to launch a managed Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or MySQL database based on the needs of their application. With Amazon RDS, customers no longer have to become experts in database set-up and management and can shift their focus to building and improving the capabilities of their applications. We’re excited to give Windows and ASP.Net developers new options for taking advantage of AWS to quickly deploy and easily manage their databases and applications in the cloud.”

Some might see this as a tactic to lure users away from Microsoft’s own Azure cloud environment. After all, the two compete – soon after Amazon launched its CloudSearch, Microsoft turned around and adapted Bing search to Azure.

In related news, a different sector under the Amazonian umbrella just beat out Netflix in a customer satisfaction survey, indicative of possible things to come, as Amazon delves further into the business of streaming content.

SELECT * FROM tableA INTO OUTFILE '/path/to/file.txt'

might result in a file.txt file like this:

Cash,Johnny,2-26-1932
Jagger,Michael,7-26-1943
Presley,Elvis,1-8-1935

This is straightforward, and useful for a majority of implementations. There are a few additional options, depending on your SQL implementation. For example, check out MySQL’s SELECT … INTO page

A major problem with SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE comes when your application exists on one server, while your database server is running on another. Many web hosting/application scenarios will run into this, as separating your database and application/web layers is a vital to improving performance. Since the outfile path is local to the database machine, and not the application machine, this SQL function becomes quite useless. Even if your database user had access to the path you supplied, it’s unlikely your application user has access to that path on a remote machine. Granting access in either case is unnecessary and sloppy security protocol. Instead, add a few lines to your code and program the identical functionality.

TL;DR – you can’t use SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE remotely. Sorry. Below is a PHP solution – look in comments for other language specific solutions.

Here’s a example in PHP that will accomplish the same thing:

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM tableA");
$fh = fopen("/path/to/file.txt", "w+");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($result)) {
   fputs($fh, implode(',', $row)."\n");
}
fclose ($fh);

Be wary not to use PHP’s fputcsv(), as it will enclose the entire CSV row in quotes, and IS NOT identical to the output generated by SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE.

Post alternatives in your language of choice in the comments.

This awesome infographic from Silicon Angle shows the how far we have come from the first programming language to where we are now.

Before we ever reached the intellectual machines beating men at Jeopardy, programming had simple roots. It began in 1954 with Fortran, a programming language created by IBM that was used for computational mathematics.

Things got even more awesome with the creation of BASIC in 1964 and SQL in 1975. I personally owe a lot to C++ which emerged in 1983. If not for that particular programming language, games on the Nintendo Entertainment System might not have been as awesome.

1995 saw the rise of Java and Javascript which are used to this day from open source applications to custom versions of it powering your smartphones.

What is going to come next? Nobody knows, but I’m sure we’ll one day invent programming that allows machines to write programming for us. The dawn of robot supremacy will be caused by our awesome programming skills.

What do you think the next big break in programming will be? Let us know in the comments.

Via: ServicesANGLE

Today, Yahoo announced a new feature for YQL, and that is the Insert/Update/Delete feature. A spokesperson for Yahoo tells WebProNews this extends the platform by adding “write" capability to its capabilities, including YQL Open Data Tables and Execute."

If you’re interested in seeing some examples of how the new feature can be utilized, Yahoo has a blog post up about it that shows some things it can do.

One thing it can be used for is to bring some Twitter integration to your blog. "This enables YQL’s Open Data Tables to insert new Twitter status messages, not just list them; to add new comments to a blog, as well as read them; to store data in a remote database; to INSERT INTO internet," says Jonathan Trevor of the YQL Team.

"If you’ve developed some Open Data Tables already and the source supports some type of update, you might want to take this opportunity to go back and add the capability in," he says.

Documentation is available here for developers. To get a better understanding of what you can do, keep an eye on Yahoo’s developer blog. Besides the aforementioned post, Trevor says more examples and demos will be covered in the coming weeks.