Elsewhere: NewsBits – Redis 5 RC 5

I’ve been doing my usual Friday news gathering for the day job and that means here is todays NewsBits…. Here’s what’s in it:

• Redis 5.0 gets a new release candidate and controversy.
• Updates for older MongoDB versions.
• A guide to analyzing slow MongoDB queries.
• Making MySQL‘s shell shine.
• Google open up Dataset Search.
• Firefox 62 lands, as does the new ESR release.
• HTTP2 support no longer experimental in Node 10.10.
• VS Code gets a new Settings UI.
• Checkout pull requests with the latest Atom.
• Where to get Java support in the future?
• And whats it like migrating to Java 11?
• And finally an SQL puzzler…

Click here to read Compose’s NewsBits (be meeeee!) for this week

Elsewhere – NewsBits (end of August Edition)

In the most recent NewsBits (NewsBits at Compose.com’s Articles) there’s some minor DB and driver updating, a DB that branches like git, a fresh Vault, what happens to SSDs when they meet database write loads, the new Go 1.11 (and 2 drafts) and… oh yeah who wants to see round corners?

(Apologies for the lateness… I’ve been playing with MicroPython, CircuitPython, ESP32s, ESP8266s and a selection of tiny light emitting things…. more on that soon… promise)

Heartbleed, MongoDB 2.6, Easier BeagleBone Black – Snippets

Heartbleeds out: So the Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability is out and about and everyone is checking their systems and updating to OpenSSL 1.0.1g (go straight to the (http://www.openssl.org/source/) or wait for your OS distribution to update – it won’t be long and if it is long, consider another distribution). It’s tempting to use the various Heartbleed test sites out there, it is much safer and trustable to test for it yourself. There’s lot to look at in the bug – this diagnosis offers some insight and reminds us, yet again, how bad people are at managing memory.

MongoDB 2.6: Leading light of the NoSQL world, MongoDB has been updated to version 2.6. The release notes cover the details – updated aggregation, newly integrated text search, various order preserving changes to insert and update, a write protocol with support for bulk operations, an enhanced query engine with index intersection support and much more. A big update with lots to take in, lots to test if you are upgrading before going to production and a lot more being added to MongoDB Inc’s proprietary enterprise layer.

Easier BeagleBone Black: Setting up a BeagleBone Black (BBB) immerses you in the full gamut of configuring device trees and more. So it’s good to see a project like beaglebone-univeral-io – it’s scripts and files that configure the BBB so that all the pins (that aren’t being used to drive the HDMI and other built in components) can be used easily. Of course, there’s still more configuration that needs to be done to set what the remaining pins do so the appearance of BB Universal IO Configurator which is a GUI application to help with that. A short video shows it in action. The BBB is a great little board but needs more tools like this to help people really get to grips with it. Think of it as more than the compute power of a Raspberry Pi with much more GPIO. Meanwhile, I just got some Beaglebone collars which make it easier to locate those pins.

ElasticSearch 1.0, TokuMX 1.4, Plan 9 GPLv2’d and Python 3.4RC1 – Snippets

ElasticSearch 1.0 springs out: The search-oriented NoSQL database, built upon Lucene, ElasticSearch has hit version 1.0. It’s a big release with a lot of changes and a lot of new features – an API for selective snapshot/restore, federated search, aggregation, distributed percolation and software “circuit breakers” to stop some more dangerous actions from overwhelming the system. An interesting post from Found.no on ElasticSearch sums up the pros and cons (like no authentication or authorisation) places ElasticSearch in the domain of “secondary store” to be used alongside a primary database.

TokuMX 1.4: Tokutek’s “MongoDB-with-Toku-engine”, TokuMX, has hit version 1.4 and is addressing the performance of sharding and replication. Toku’s engine is reputed to be very good for particular use cases and it’s interesting to see alternative storage engines under the MongoDB infrastructure.

Plan 9 goes GPL2: It’s been a long time under a open source (but unblessed-by-the-FSF) licence, but the venerable and inspiring Plan 9 has not been relicensed (mostly) under the GPLv2. In an announcement. It can be downloaded from the Akaros project (or cloned from the GitHub repo) which seems to be breeding Inferno/Plan 9 with their own many-core large-smp research.

Python 3.4 on final approach: Out of beta and hitting release candidate a few days ago, Python 3.4 is now imminent. It’s expected to land just over a month from now on March 16. Check back to our coverage of the last beta for more details of what’s coming.

JavaFX on phones, Java blocks in Firefox, Amazon audio and extras – Snippets

• JavaFX on Android and iOS: One of Oracle’s ongoing projects is getting JavaFX onto the two big smartphone platforms. An update from Richard Bair (Chief Architect Client Java at Oracle) says the work is now at “a good prototype stage”. There’s “funky” code swapping JavaFX text fields for native components and the plan is to build a more layered system for better native look and feel without Swing style theming. But Bair also notes that currently its all hands on deck for Java 8. If you are wondering about whether there’s a JVM on iOS, things point towards the open source RoboVM which compiles Java bytecode the ARM or x86.

• Firefox’s Java Blackout: And if you are having trouble (or your users are) with Java applications that work with Firefox, then the short story is that Mozilla have marked the Java plugin as unsafe by default. You’ll find the bug and angry comments in the Mozilla Bugzilla and you’ll want to refer to “How to enable Java if it’s been blocked“. Unfortunately, Mozilla’s security UI design is “special” and so you’ll need to look at the red “lego brick” icon in the address bar to allow Java to run. And remember to UPDATE YOUR JAVA now – Latest versions is Java 7 update 45. And if you don’t use applets or Web Start, leave it disabled. Mozilla’s policy good, fire^h^h^h^h Mozilla’s communication skills bad.
• Amazon Audio Transcode: Amazon’s Elastic Transcoder now does audio as well as video. Save content up on S3, select presets, let rip and let the results land back on the S3 storage service. The free AWS tier gives you the ability to transcode 20 minutes a month for free, though this does appear to be a little mean – for video you get 20 minutes of SD content a month which, paid for in the EU data centre, costs $0.017 per minute, while audio costs $0.00522 per minute. Still, equine dental hygiene inspection is unbecoming and they do support transcoding audio to AAC, MP3 and Vorbis.

• Extra snippings: Fun with internal Java classes and NetBeans, translate SQL to MongoDB with QueryMongo, why you should support only Android 4.0 and above and how to make an iBeacon using a Raspberry Pi and a Bluetooth dongle.