Right now, mainland Britain has got almost enough wind and solar power to meet our electricity demand. Add in the power from nuclear and a small dash of gas (used solely to maintain enough mechanical inertia to stabilise the grid) and we are having to export 4.4GW to neighbouring countries. The need for that safety inertia will fall away with new renewable sites like Dogger Bank, whose inverters are capable of ‘grid forming’ as opposed to merely grid following…
https://grid.iamkate.com

Two different approaches to debugging a software problem:

The Sudoku approach: stare at the limited set of clues you have, and think harder and harder about them until you find a way to deduce something useful.

The Minesweeper approach: don't even try to figure out the solution from only the clues you have right now. Instead, focus on finding a way to acquire another clue, and then using that to get another, and so on. Eventually you've collected so many clues that the answer is obvious.

Sometimes the Sudoku approach is necessary, because you've got all the clues you're ever going to get. But I think my new motto is "Never Sudoku a problem when you can Minesweeper it."

MySQL Ndb Cluster 8.4 security features include :
- Encrypted data in motion : mTLS for all distributed communication https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/mysql-cluster-tls.html
- Encrypted data at rest :
- Transparent Data Encryption for Ndb checkpoints, Redo logs, tablespaces, Undo logs https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/mysql-cluster.html
- Encrypted Backups https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/mysql-cluster-backup-using-management-client.html

Plus all the usual MySQL Server security features :
- Pluggable authentication, roles, policies
- [m]TLS
- TDE for InnoDB tablespaces, logs
- Encrypted Binlogs
- Audit plugin
...

#MySQL #NdbCluster #DistributedSQL

I think it’s cute that my employer still expects me to take Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) training this year.

It all feels so old-fashioned, somehow.

the only honest SaaS comparison chart

30 years of MySQL, the database that changed the world. #MySQL

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/06/30_years_mysql/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Coding is Living @coding-is-living-mobileatom

The distributed core of MySQL [Ndb] Cluster was originally developed at Ericsson, and inherits their expertise in high performance reliable software development.

Ndb stands for 'Network DataBase', where 'network' is a telecoms core network such as 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G cores.

After the 2001 telecoms crash, Ericsson spun the project out as an independent company called Alzato.

Alzato was purchased by the startup MySQL AB, where it was integrated with MySQL Server and marketed as 'MySQL Cluster', first released in MySQL 4.1.3 in June 2004.

Since then the product has been continuously improved, scaled, optimised and extended.

Over that time the value of distributed scale-out, NoSQL + SQL, built-in HA, online upgrades, online schema changes etc has been recognised, with well marketed NoSQL + distributed SQL startups finding customers and success in this area.

June 2024 marked 20 years of MySQL [Ndb] Cluster being freely available open source, providing HA, high throughput, low latency, distributed SQL to everyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL_Cluster

#DistributedSQL #NdbCluster #MySQL

A bunch of tech CEOs are talking about being “AI-first”, the latest in a series of CEO fads like “return to office”, “founder mode” and “pivot to full fascism”. This one’s weird, though, because it only makes sense if… none of their workers are great at their jobs. https://www.anildash.com//2025/04/19/ai-first-is-the-new-return-to-office/

The 40th anniversary of ARM seems a good excuse to repost this funny, humble + inspirational story of the software development for the first ARM based machine.

https://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/PaulFellows/

Open Source software has often been chosen to minimise costs, with relatively few users taking advantage of having access to the source code.

However, access to source code can help mitigate the effects of unilateral changes coming from large corporations, cloud providers and foreign or domestic governments.

That might be useful when dealing with new problems such as cloud service 'platform decay' (ensh12n), cloud vendor lock-in and more serious issues.

MySQL Ndb Cluster quarterly releases are out.
9.0 Innovation : 9.4.3 https://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql-cluster/9.3/en/
8.4 LTS : 8.4.5 https://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql-cluster/8.4/en/news-8-4-5.html
8.0 : 8.0.42 https://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql-cluster/8.0/en/news-8-0-42.html
7.6 : 7.6.34 https://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql-cluster/7.6/en/news-7-6-34.html

#MySQL #DistributedSQL #NdbCluster

It turns out that the conman who defrauded a children's cancer charity, had 6 bankruptcies and a fraudulent university is an economic disaster.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

April Fool's Day isn't funny when the fools are in charge.

OLTP on Bare Metal promoted by PlanetScale this week.
https://planetscale.com/metal

'Cloud architecture' suggests that all scale-out systems should deploy on top of a convenient (+expensive, slow, flaky) shared network filesystem.
Physics, economics and computer system architecture disagrees.

Good to see some push back, hopefully more will follow from others.

Nice writeup of Raft vs Quorum consensus vs 'Reconfiguration' based systems from Alex Miller.

https://transactional.blog/talk/enough-with-all-the-raft

This covers ground he previously discussed here :
https://transactional.blog/blog/2024-data-replication-design-spectrum

For DML and query processing, #MySQL Ndb Cluster is a 'Reconfiguration' design, with properties as described in his blogs and similar to CRAQ.

When node failures are detected Ndb uses a built-in quorum mechanism to ensure safety and consensus for Reconfiguration, rather than relying on a separate system like etcd.

#DistributedSQL #Ndb

Turns out Zelenskyy is good at standing up against dictators.

I've been disappointed and frustrated by the silence of tech company leadership in countering the messages coming out of the Trump administration and DOGE. It's absolutely essential that credible, compelling voices speak up now in favor of truth and fairness.

I'm just one guy, but I'm in a position to do that where many others aren't. And I used to do some of this when I was running Cloudera and Sleepycat.

So I'm launching Not A Tech Bro as my platform.

https://not-a-tech-bro.ghost.io/the-genesis-post/