One thing I learned fairly early in my DBA career was that if I was ever going to excel in managing the databases under my care, I needed to do one thing: smartly automate as much of my job as I could. This became particularly important in my last full-time DBA spot where one other guy and I had responsibility for about 120 Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2 databases. A lot of these databases ran critical applications with lots of users, so we were rarely bored at work. To keep our heads above water, we needed to do something to ensure we always had our finger on the pulse of all our servers, plus we needed to make sure that any performance issue was recognized as early as possible.

I ended up writing an in-house monitoring and capacity planning system that had a Web front end with a lot of moving parts under the covers. It worked pretty well for what we needed, with me even providing an end user dashboard where users could go to check on their applications before ever calling me (probably one of the smartest things I did in the system…) The problem was that as we grew, I ended up spending more and more time enhancing the home-grown monitoring solution, plus I became aware that there were shortcomings in the system that I couldn’t really overcome on my own. This, unfortunately, is the normal life cycle of home-grown help aids.

For many years, MySQL professionals have had to travel down this path or massage limited free offerings to meet the needs of their IT infrastructure. As I’ve traveled and spoken to many MySQL customers, I’ve heard about the pains they have with doing such things, even in very technically-savvy shops. In addition, I’ve fielded the complaint that the MySQL server can sometimes be too much of a “black box” when it comes to knowing if the server is running well or not. Basically, DBAs need to be able to easily tell if MySQL is responsible for a perceived slowdown in overall performance, or if the problem exists somewhere else (e.g. the network, etc.)

If you are already using Eclipse now you have to add to your toolbox JSEclipse, the new eclipse plugin for JavaScript development. JSEclipse helps developers code JavaScript faster and with no errors, you can complete a variety of tasks, from editing small sections of code to working with the next big AJAX library or developing plug-ins for a product that embeds JavaScript snippets. If you don't have eclipse yet, maybe it's time to give it a try and for PHP developers you might also check the Eclipse PHP Development Tool. JSEclipse features announced in this release :

   MyBic 0.7.0 have just been released, and in 15 days from now if no bugs or major issues come up MyBic will officially go to version 1.0 which means that MyBic is ready for desktop style AJAX applications, according to Jim. You can get the latest MyBic from Sourceforge project's page or visit MyBic home page for more information about the project.

  The goal is to provide a bug free, memory leak free package that gives you all the ajax tools you need. This is for you to develop normal AJAX apps but also desktop like AJAX applications where the app might be in a kiosk type situation where you do not have access to the server.

Zend Dev Zone have a new tutorial on how to create an AJAX Chat application using the Zend Framework. Following the step by step tutorial you can create a lightweight chat application using XML as a storage medium. The tutorial try to focus more on the aspect of using the Zend Framework, Javascript and Prototype libraries in order to create a simple elegant solution. The source code is available for download to try it on your own server.

    This tutorial is a step by step introduction to creating a lightweight chat application using XML as a storage medium. As personal motivation, I develop PHP games as a hobby. In pursuit of that hobby I've found that offering a flat threadless forum in such games tends to result in heavy usage as players attempt to use it as a chat room. The reason is that even with the advent of irc and instant messengers, users continue see an alternative web based solution as attractive for a number of reasons whether its limited access to instant messengers through a corporate proxy or simply for convenience sake.