Seeking to address some misconceptions on the subject of deduplication, Joerg Moellenkamp's blog "To dedup or not to dedup - that results in a lot of questions" provides a primer on the process. There are two major ways to deduplicate, he writes: synchronous and asynchronous. The synchronous variant does the deduplication while writing to the disks, so duplicates aren't written to disk; the asynchronous variant writes every block to the disk and later on it deletes duplicated blocks by searching possible candidates.

The MySQL Conference & Expo is set for April 12-15, 2010, in Santa Clara, Calif. Chief Corporate Architect at Oracle Edward Screven is set to speak along with Kaj Arno, VP of the MySQL Community; Johan Andersson, a senior manager with MySQL; and a number of other industry professionals. To save $250 off the conference plus tutorials price, register before March 15, 2010.

RFID has found an application other than merchandise tracking. Now, major financial institutions such as Wells Fargo and Bank of America are using RFID as an asset control technology to track their IT equipment. Responding to the needs of its customers, Sun has begun installing RFID tags in the products it markets at the point of manufacture, reports Mary Catherine O'Connor in RFID Journal.