Ask Database Guru Brian Aker

Brian Aker is Director of Architecture for MySQL AB. He has also worked on the code (and database) that runs Slashdot, and is well-known in both Apache and Perl circles. Outside of the arcane world of open source "back-end" programming, though, hardly anyone has heard of him. This is your chance to ask Brian (hopefully after looking at his blog and Wikipedia listing) about anything you like, from Perl to database architecture to open source philosophy to upcoming events in Seattle. We'll send Brian 10 of the highest-moderated questions approximately 24 hours after this post appears. His (verbatim) answers will appear late this week or early next week.

Comments

Re:Data Truncation

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I wish I had mod poi

Questions? Oh boy...

[fyngyrz]

• If you're not responsible, please forward to the appropriate person. Thank you.
• Would you support custom mods to MySQL to fix slashdot's pernicious anonymous moderation problem?(*)
• If MySQL can't be made to work, would you support a move to PostgreSQL?
• If neither of those can be made to work, would you consider ritual suicide in atonement?
• Thank you for your kind attention to this matter.

(*) This problem manifests as many inappropriately moderated (and unmoderated) posts in each slashdot discussion, making it absolutely impossible to read any discussion unless your threshold is set to -1 or you are willing to put up with a disjointed set of posts, apparently unrelated to each other (and sometimes the subject at hand), while also knowing with absolute certainly you're missing many good, on-topic or otherwise high quality posts. One presumes that at this late date, with absolutely no attention from those people running slashdot, that the problem must be something they don't understand about the site (such as the complex and very difficult to understand idea that working moderation would help the userbase), and so devolves upon a technical person.