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Blogs ยป Archive for August, 2006
OSCON 2006: Big Bad PostgreSQL
Theo Schlossnagle is a principal at OmniTI Computer Consulting, working in the areas of scalable internet architectures, database replication, and e-mail infrastructure.
This talk was on converting a really large (over 3 terabytes, largest table is 1.8 billion rows) data warehouse database from Oracle 8i to PostgreSQL. The reason for the conversion was to save in licensing costs. They wanted to move their Oracle licenses over from the data warehouse DB to use them on the online transaction processing (OLTP) system.
The reason for choosing Postgres over MySQL was that Postgres has a much longer history with the kind of advanced features he needed. They needed (and were able to hack PostgreSQL to get) the following features:
1. Data partitioning (spreading tables over multiple drives)
2. Large selects (50-million-row return sets, over 100GB of data)
2. Incremental COMMITs for really, really long queries
3. Replication
The bottom line was that with some patience and creating thinking, they were able to migrate a really humongous database to PostgreSQL from Oracle, and ended up saving themselves $500,000 USD in licensing costs. A pretty good chunk of change.
Theo has put his slides up here.
OSCON 2006: Rails Guidebook
Dave Thomas runs The Pragmatic Programmers company with Andy Hunt. He and Hunt co-authored The Pragmatic Programmer and Programming Ruby (AKA ‘The Pickaxe Book’). Mike Clark is co-author of Agile Web Development with Rails, author of Pragmatic Project Automation, and co-teaches Pragmatic Studio: Ruby on Rails.
This tutorial was in one of the larger rooms, and was (predictably) very full. It was mostly just a solid, step-by-step intro to Rails — naturally including the standard Rails demo of rapidly building a basic application. Beyond the basic introduction of a Rails app structure (i.e., what files go where), and how to build a Rails app, they also went into a few other areas of Rails development that I found interesting:
Migrations
Migrations provide a procedural way (in Ruby code, natch) to create and modify your database schema. This is useful if you want a database-independent way to maintain your schema. They are also be helpful in keeping multiple developers in sync with structural changes to your database. Migrations are also reversible, so you can undo changes if you don’t like them.
Model finder methods
They demonstrated how to combine different arguments for find. Seeing some of the different …
A new blogger
Just thought I’d throw up a quick post to introduce myself. I’m Matthew Eernisse, and I’ll be blogging here at SitePoint occasionally — mostly on Web-related stuff like JavaScript, Ajax, Ruby, and PHP, and maybe a bit on design and open source. I’m the author of SitePoint’s Ajax book, and also have a personal Weblog over at www.fleegix.org. I work for the Open Source Applications Foundation.
Please participate in a benchmarking survey of web design/developer marketing practices
The good people at SitePoint have been kind enough to indulge my request to conduct a marketing benchmarking survey of SitePoint readers. It is not scientific, it is a bit biased, and it may not even be comprehensive — but it does have lots of great questions for your to compare yourself to others, and should be of interest to anyone reading this blog.
The link follows. I’d sure be grateful if everyone reading this can take a few moments to click the link below and complete the survey. Then I will compile results and report back to you. I’ll share my interpretations of the data, and you can share yours.
Thanks — and look for some results soon!
And thanks again to SitePoint for making this possible.
New Toys: Sandcastle CTP & July Atlas CTP
This week Microsoft has released two new CTPs. The first is the initial drop of Sandcastle, their .NET 2.0 documentation compilation tool. The second is yet another release of the ASP.NET Atlas framework.
This is the kind of website every web designer should design
I just signed up with www.carbonite.com, a web-based backup solution. The process meets almost every criteria I can think of for a positive web-based ecommerce service:
- First, I heard about the service from a respected colleague, so I was already predisposed to buy.
- The home page is simple yet glorious. In a single sentence it tells you what the service does and how much it costs. It also offers a free trial — one where they don’t even ask for your credit card. It even offers “unlimited” backups at a low price. I love home pages like this one.
- If you want more info, it is easy to click any of the links to learn more. They have audio clips, animated tutorials, and text.
- The whole thing is simple and focused on a compelling value proposition — save your files for only $5 per month.
- My experience so far has been excellent. It was easy to get started and the system is doing what it said it would do. There were no download issues. Everything was easy.
I hope you are designed websites that convey what your clients (or you) offer in the same simple, elegant, powerful way as …