Following a link from the High Scalability blog, I found this really great article about scalability practices, as told by Randy Shoup at eBay. Randy is very good at explaining some of the more technical aspects in more or less plain English, and it even helped me find some wording I was looking for to…
Category: Database
Multisourced Production Infrastructure: History, and a stab at the Future
Startups are pretty fascinating. I work for a startup, and one of my good friends works for another startup. I’ve also worked for 2 other startups, one during the first “bubble”, and another one a few years later. Oh my, how the world of web startups has changed in that time! 1999: You must have…
A Couple of MySQL Performance Tips
If you’re an advanced MySQL person, you might already know these, in which case, please read anyway, because I still have some questions. On the other hand, f you’re someone who launched an application without a lot of database background, thinking “MySQL Just Works”, you’ll eventually figure out that it doesn’t, and in that case,…
Is this thing on?
Since the recovery from my recent outage, I’ve noticed that none of the normal feed sites where my posts normally show up caught the last post, so this is a test post to see what’s going on, if it was a temporary glitch, or what. If you didn’t see the post linked above, please read…
Need a new web host
Ok, this blog is currently hosted by 1and1.com, and I think that needs to change, which is sad, because up until recently, I’ve been pretty happy with the performance. However, I recently had an issue, and some things came to light about my package that I wasn’t aware of. First of all, the maximum time…
Diving into Django
Yeah, so… Doug said if I was looking to make friends with Python for anything other than systems work, I should probably have a look at Django. Then I found this install on OS X guide the other day, and went ahead and downloaded Django. About 15 minutes later, I was looking at the “It…
Python Magazine February Issue Available
Go grab your copy now! If you’re not a subscriber, get the PDF or Print+PDF subscription now! This month there’s a really cool article about how to take data from a spreadsheet and use it to plot points on Live Maps to provide a useful service to employees in the field. I also chimed in…
Hadoop introductory video
This is a great talk with the head of Yahoo’s grid team that talks about the open source project Hadoop, which is an open source distributed file system and MapReduce implementation. The video is long and interspersed with Yahoo! specifics you might not care about – but keep watching, because they swing back to talking…
Sun Acquires MySQL
I’m pretty sure I’m not pleased about this, but I guess only time will tell. Maybe now my boss will let me move to PostgreSQL 😀 See the news release here Blogged with Flock
Identifying Database Badness
I started my career on the database end of the technological landscape, as a consulting database reporting specialist, then later as a consulting DBA for Sybase. It was there that I discovered that the real fun was in system administration, but I still have a deep love for data organization, modeling, and management, even though…