CPU evolution has been about getting faster.

Toss in new instructions that do the work of four old instructions, into one.

Gamble on the outcome, branch prediction.

More layers of caching.

When I cook I take the ingredients out of the fridge and place them on the counter where I will do the prep. From there they move to the flat area next to the stove.

I am caching so I can make food more quickly.

In computing we do a lot of caching today.

This came out of the specs from a user who I have been talking to:

"80 nodes, 640 cores... with 21 nodes in our Lustre cluster serving 65T... which we can sustain ~2.5GB/s to"

Problem was?

It was not fast enough for their needs. The system worked well enough for "containing the data", but for executing on the data it could not keep up.

…

Christine sent me this video today "A Vision of Students Today".

I had seen it before, but it stuck in my brain this time.

The comments that I found most striking were on how much time in a day is spent on projects, and what the total time required to finish a project was.

We humans multitask, we have to today.

Years ago I started commenting on "Buffy Features" or "Airplane Projects".

A "Buffy Feature" is a feature I worked on while watching TV. An Airplane Project happens when I am flying.

Buffy work tends to be code maintenance. I add small features, or I refactor projects.

Airplane work tends to be new efforts. libmemcached and mod_mp3 are like that. The thread work I did on mysqlimport in MySQL 5.1 was done on a Boston to Seattle flight.

An executive …

My e-mail was broken this morning: Thunderbird is choking with the number of e-mails I get. So, as an experiment, I tried to set up Gmail as my e-mail client. This turned out to be surprisingly easy:
* I used the the Mail Fetcher to configure Gmail to pull my e-mails via POP3.
* In Gmail's Settings > Accounts screen, I added my e-mail address as a "send e-mail as" e-mail.

With just these two settings, I am now receiving and sending e-mails as sichen AT opensourcestrategies DOT com with Gmail through its web interface. This is much better than having a desktop e-mail client for me, though I found the Gmail user interface to be a bit strange.

How Gmail Works

All the e-mail client I've ever used, including Eudora, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail, have the concept of a "folder." …

Of-course there are the crazies, but usually we have a good time over on ##pentaho IRC.

Yesterday we had our very first community event when Doug “Spanky” Moran hosted a dial-in to talk about what was up in the community.

Today, I learned about regular andresF his blog.

Internet Relay Chat is old technology that has existed for quite a while now, but to me it doesn’t lose it’s appeal. Over at FOSDEM I learned that there are companies like MySQL that have private channels to communicate “non-intrusively” with colleagues. “Maybe some developer can help me with this stupid problem. I’ll just drop a question on the channel.” It’s a good idea, we should consider it for Pentaho too.

Until next time,

Matt

Setting up master-master replication in MySQL is very similar to how we set up master/slave replication. You can read up about how to setup master/slave replication in my previous post: How to set up master/slave replication in MySQL. There is obviously pros and cons about using master/master replication. But this is not [...] …

Zmanda has introduced a new version of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) 2.1 which adds quite a few new capabilities for MySQL users. This version now includes enhanced snapshot support working with Linux LVM, Windows VSS, Solaris ZFS, NeApp SnapManager and Veritas VxFS. When they first told me about the performance on these systems I was blown away. I thought there must be some kind of a trick going on. The trick is to take advantage of the operating system's underlying snapshot capabilities to minimize locking on the database, typically less than one second. Robin, head of our product management group,... READ MORE

It's been close to 4 months since we released Cool Stack 1.2, so it's time to start thinking about the next release. Here's what we have planned so far and as always I'm looking for feedback from current and future users on what you'd like to see. Needless to say, that all currently known bugs will be fixed and the current patches will be rolled into the release. However, if you don't tell us about the problems you've run into, we won't be able to fix them. So, once again I'd like to encourage people to please post your problem/issue/tips etc. on the forum.

Here's a list of stuff we're currently looking at for Cool Stack 1.3 :

Welcome to the 86th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Let’s jump right in. MySQL This was the week in which Sun Microsystems’ acquisition of MySQL went through. Wow, that didn’t take long at all! Zack Urlocker reports on the celebration at MySQL AB when the deal was completed, and [...]

Tim Bowden published an interesting post earlier this week about the impact that the choice of open source license has on the potential valuation of an open source vendor. Taking the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases as an example, Bowden wrote:

“When it comes to takeovers and valuations, I think the role of GPL as a strategic weapon is often under appreciated. If you?re top vendor dog in a GPL project, other players have a very hard time unseating you. That may sound counter-intuitive given world + dog has the code, but I don?t believe it?s such an advantage for competitors as most assume. Your lesser competitors in the same space have to share their plum developments with you. Sure, the top dog has to share his plums too, but when you?ve got the top plum growers in your own yard (to push a metaphor too far), you get to go to market …