Karmona Pragmatic Blog

Yahoo have released the Y!OS (Yahoo Open Strategy) 1.0 platform.

This is a cool set of simple APIs that can give you access to everything you ever wanted in Y! but was afraid to ask for…

Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP)
// The Yahoo Social Platform is a set of RESTful APIs for Profiles, Connections, Updates, Contacts and Status.

Yahoo! Query Language (YQL)
// The Yahoo Query Language is a web service that functions much like SQL (see example below)

OAuth Authentication
// OAuth is the authentication and authorization standard Yahoo has decided to use when giving third parties access to Yahoo user data.

Yahoo! Applications Platform (YAP)
// Currently very limited and in a restricted sandbox.

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Example: How to use YQL APIs to access MyBlogLog profiles?

Simply ask for all the community members of MyBlogLog community with this YQL:

select * from mybloglog.members.find where community_id in (select id from mybloglog.community.find where name=”Karmona Pragmatic Blog”)

And once you have the IDs you can ask for my personal profile by:

select * from mybloglog.member where member_id =”2008070609482910″

Well… together with the existing BOSS API, this set of APIs is a powerful enablers to the Y! development network and I am sure some cool stuff are going to emerge from this innovative move…

Amazing!!!

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* You can have more YQL experiments using the YQL Console

** Boss Hack Day is coming to Tel-Aviv | November 6, 2008 @ Feature (!!!)

5 intriguing facts on SSD

The 1st  modern SSD was developed by StorageTek in 1978 (which was acquired 27 years later by Sun for US$4.1 billion)

Google plan to use Intel’s SSD in Production Search Systems in Q2 2008 - The company’s adoption of solid state drives will save energy, speed search, and potentially lead to a shortage of 16-GB and 32-GB NAND flash chips…

Prices for SSD drives are expected to halve every ~9 months (!!!)

In the future everything will be on SSD ;)

We have bought a simple OCZ 128GB - SATA II 2.5 SSD for benchmarking and we are not too happy with it yet.

…

“We have used MySQL far more than anyone expected. We went from experimental to mission-critical in a couple of months.” - Jeremy Zawodny, MySQL Database Expert, Yahoo! Finance

Did you know that YouTube, Flickr, Linden Labs, Technorati, Facebook, FeedBurner, StumbleUpon, Wikipedia, Digg, LiveJournal, del.icio.us, Yahoo (Finance) and many others have all selected MySQL as a database backend for their web operations?

e.g. Flickr is using MySQL to store ~2 Pb (1 Petabyte = 1024 Terabyte); storing more than ~470M photos with more than 4 billion queries per day…!

Coming from an enterprise software company delivering products which only integrate with the highest-end (perceived) commercial databases, I didn’t have the pleasure to try MySQL but recently I do… I am still in the very beginning of my learning curve and until now it have been a real pleasant surprise – mainly due to the database’s speed and ability to easily “scale-out” on low-cost hardware (sharding).

MySQL have the disruptive technology “smell” all over it and my premonition is that it will increasingly evolved to be “good enough” for a larger and larger segment of the market…