TempoDB’s timely DBaaS for the Internet of Things. ScaleBase 2.0. And more

For 451 Research clients: TempoDB has timely database service for the Internet of Things bit.ly/YcQuqA

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) February 13, 2013

For 451 Research clients: ScaleBase provides centralized management of distributed MySQL databases bit.ly/YcQTcs

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) February 13, 2013

For 451 Research clients: XtremeData turns its attention to cloud-based data warehousing bit.ly/XB7MLY

— Matt Aslett (@maslett)

DataStax and VoltDB launch their version 3.0s. And more

For 451 Research clients: DataStax adds security and manageability to distributed NoSQL database bit.ly/Vb1IiT

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) January 18, 2013

For 451 clients: LogiXML serves up fresh cut of BI stack with an eye to more embedded analytics deals bit.ly/SppzsH By Krishna Roy

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) January 21, 2013

Inside H-P’s Missed Chance To Avoid a Disastrous Deal – WSJ.com on.wsj.com/Td7wrh via @

Read the original article at Cloud Operations Interview

What does a cloud computing expert need to know? How do you hire a cloud computing expert? Competition for operations & DBAs is fierce, so you’ll want to know how to find the best.

If you’re a systems administrator or ops guy, you may want to prepare for an interview for such a position. Meanwhile, if you’re a director of it or operations, a recruiter or manager in HR, you’ll want to have some idea how to find the right candidate.

Here’s my guide to do just that. You may

I feel a sense of pride when I think that I was involved in the development and maintenance of what was probably the first piece of software accepted into Debian which then had and still has direct up-stream support from Microsoft. The world is a better place for having Microsoft in it. The first operating system I ever ran on an 08086-based CPU was MS-DOS 2.x. I remember how thrilled I was when we got to see how my friend’s 80286 system ran BBS software that would cause a modem to dial a local system and display the application as if it were running on a local machine. Totally sweet.

When we were living at 6162 NE Middle in the nine-eight 292, we got an 80386 which ran Doom. Yeah, the original one, not the fancy new one with the double barrel shotgun, but it would probably run that one, too.

Amazon announced high I/O instances today. This is huge for anyone with a database larger than available memory, as it’s been a complete nightmare dealing with EBS up till now. Now your Cassandra, MongoDB, MySQL, or whatever your using should be able to perform well without requiring keeping your entire dataset in memory.

With each instance you get 2x1TB of disk. In this tutorial I’ll be setting it up as a RAID0 to get a single 2TB disk which should deliver excellent performance.

Before you get started, make sure you’ve got mdadm installed:

apt-get install mdadm

To begin, check fdisk and make sure your 1TB drives are mounted.

root@ip-10-140-128-232:~# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/xvda1: 8589 MB, 8589934592 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1044

My first computer program was written almost quarter a century ago on a BK-0010 computer.  It was very simple: the program asked the user to enter their name and then greeted the user using the entered name, like “Hello, Artem!”.  I was fascinated.  A couple of lines written in Vilnius BASIC transformed a piece of metal and silicon into a considerate thing that cared about a person’s name enough to remember it :-).  Of course, the first experience doesn’t represent the day-to-day routine of software development, but the moments when I see a couple of lines making an amazing transformation still enchant me, and remind me why I’ve been writing code all this time.

I’ve just experienced this very same first-time feeling as we’ve released

Read the original article at $1000 per hour Servers, Anyone?

Amazon's spot market for computing power is set up as an open market for surplus servers. The price is dynamic and depends on demand. So when demand is low, you can get computing instances for rock bottom prices. When you do that you normally set a range of prices you're willing to pay. If it goes over your top end, your instances get killed and re-provisioned for someone else. Obviously this wouldn't work for all applications, like a website that has to be up all the time, but for computing power, say to run some huge hedge fund analytics, it might fit perfectly.

A recent post on SEO MOZ alerted us to an interesting story where spot instances spiked to

When I spoke at Percona Live (video here) on running an E-commerce database in Amazon EC2, I briefly talked about using RAID 10 for additional performance and fault tolerance when using EBS volumes. At first, this seems counter intuitive. Amazon has a robust infrastructure, EBS volumes run on RAIDed hardware, and are mirrored in multiple availability zones. So, why bother? Today, I was reminded of just how important it is. Please note that all my performance statistics are based on direct experience running a MySQL database on a m2.4xlarge instance and not on some random bonnie or orion benchmark. I have those graphs floating around on my hard drive in glorious 3D and, while interesting, they do not necessarily reflect real-life

In the press in the last two days has been the reported outage of Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in just one North Virginia data center. This has affected many large website includes FourSquare, Hootsuite, Reddit and Quora. A detailed list can be found at ec2disabled.com.

For these popular websites was this avoidable? Absolutely.

Basic scalability principles if deployed in these systems architecture would have averted the significant downtime regardless of your development stack. While I work primarily in MySQL these principles are not new, nor are they complicated, however they are fundamental concepts in scalability that apply to any technology

Openworld 2010, despite the supposedly lagging economy, had record attendance again this year.  No doubt this was the result of Oracle acquiring something like fourteen companies since last year, including Sun in 2009.  The crowds were thick, divided about evenly between geeks in badly-fitting vendor t-shirts and slick sales-side hustlers with dress pants and shiny shoes.  I landed somewhere in the middle of the two (badly-fitting dress shirt, comfortable jeans and loafers), proudly sporting a long dangling codpiece of ribbons from my attendee badge:

My OOW2010 Codpiece

Oracle made a number of important announcements this year at OpenWorld, including a the Exalogic machine, and support for Amazon EC2, which I blogged

We use nginx and its features a lot in Scribd. Many times in the last year we needed some pretty interesting, but not supported feature – we wanted nginx X-Accel-Redirect functionality to work with remote URLs. Out of the box nginx supports this functionality for local URIs only. In this short post I want to explain how did we make nginx serve remote content via X-Accel-Redirect.

First of all, here is why you may need this feature. Let’s imagine you have a file storage on Amazon S3 where you store tons of content. And you have an application where you have some content downloading functionality that you want to be available for logged-in/paying/premium users and/or you want to keep track of downloads your

I guess they got tired of people sending angry emails about data transfer fees:

“Amazon provides an online calculator to help customers decide whether it makes financial sense to ship data via mail rather than uploading over the Internet. You plug in the number of terabytes, devices, average file size, return shipping information and other factors, and find out how much the data transfer would cost via mail compared to standard Internet uploads.

For example, transferring data from a single device containing 2TB would require 26 hours of data loading time and cost $144.74. Uploading the same amount of data over the Internet would cost $204.80. The calculator does not show how long the Internet transfer would take.”