At the March 2009 Boston MySQL User Group meeting, Jacob Nikom of MITs Lincoln Laboratory presented Optimizing Concurrent Storage and Retrieval Operations for Real-Time Surveillance Applications. In the middle of the talk, Jacob said he sometimes calls what he did in this application as real-time data warehousing, which was so accurate I decided to give that title to this blog post. The slides can be downloaded in PDF format (1.3 Mb) at http://www.technocation.org/files/doc/Concurrent_database_performance_02.pdf. This talk discussed how to do real-time retrieval operations while doing concurrent high volume insertion, including: * How to keep up with 1.5 Mb/second per server incoming data stream * * server hardware comparison between a multi-core AMD Opteron and a multi core Intel Xeon * MySQL/Postgres comparison * schema design * design of the storage/retrieval benchmark *  []

Starring Sakila: Data Warehousing Explained, Illustrated, and Subtitled Roland Bouman (XCDSQL Solutions / Strukton Rail), Matt Casters (Pentaho Corp.) Slides are at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Starring_Sakila_-_A_Data_Warehouse_Mini-Tutorial From the official conference description at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/7016 MySQL is increasingly being adopted for Business Intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DWH) purposes. Although the technology as such is far from new, there is still quite noticeable confusion and misunderstanding among MySQL Developers and DBAs surrounding key BI/DWH concepts such as denormalization, dimensional modeling, ETL, and OLAP. Even if the concepts are clear, it is still not clear what the purpose is of a datawarehouse, and what problems it can solve. The Sakila database is a simple, publicly available sample database of a DVD rental business,  []