I hope that within Sun we will get resources to change our current polices, priorities and in some ways the whole engineering organization to make the development model much friendlier to outside participants. It should be as easy for an outsider to get a patch into the MySQL server as someone working for MySQL. This is one of the things I would like to spend my time on inside of Sun!
Everyday, I hear new stories about running Hadoop on EC2. For example, The New York Times used 100 Amazon EC2 instances and a Hadoop application to process 4TB of raw image TIFF data (stored in S3) into 1.1 million finished PDFs in the space of 24 hours at a computation cost of just $240.Pretty breathtaking...
http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/02/20/overcoming-data-friction/
It's snowing in New York. How do I know? Because I'm in New York, instead of New Delhi, India. I wish it were a long story, but it was only a long plane ride.
After leaving London on a 7:30 am flight after not sleeping the night before (the taxi came at 4:30 am), I arrived in Helsinki at noon, then hung around the tidy airport for an hour until called to queue for my flight to New Delhi. I handed over my boarding card and passport, and watched with half a mind (my mode of concentration up to this
point) until the Finn Air employee told me that I didn't seem to have a visa. "Oh, I don't need a visa for India," I said.
Some clickety-clacks on the computer and a phone call later, I was told, with ruthless Scandinavian efficiency, that indeed I did need a visa, and while the plane was going to New Delhi, I was not. Americans, it seems, are not welcome without reservation the world over. Americans who can't be bothered to check visa requirements doubly so...
It was Saturday, all offices closed until Monday, usual 10-day wait for visas. For a microsecond I toyed for with the idea of a wintertime vacation in Helsinki, but then looking out the window at the 2;30pm sunset, I decided to go home.
That's when I began to get very acquainted with the high cost of bad planning. From 2:30 pm Helsinki time on Sunday, this was my path.
1. Exit (forlornly) the Helsinki departure lounge.
2. Haggle with Finn Air to get a ticket back to London. They eventually gave me my return leg from Helsinki without charge.
3. Back through security
4. 6 pm flight to London, arrive 8-ish. Wait an hour for my bag, which with ruthless Scandinavian efficiency Finn Air told me I had to check (1 kg. overweight)
5. Hie myself to American Airlines, get there just before the ticket desk closed. Of course I had just missed the last flight, but could take another flight the next day ($200 change fee).
6. A night of purgatory at the Comfort Inn Heathrow, only 1/2 hour away and "cheap" at 75 pounds ($150). Hot water worked fine, but no cold water. No washcloth either, but I managed with the corner of a towel and a decent time to let the water cool. I could have gone into London, but that's a long trip and friend Peter was away at a
conference and I'd thrown his keys through the mail slot. And I was ashamed.
7. Back to Heathrow and "has your luggage been with you at all times?" (Yes, for the last week.)
8. Arrive New York Sunday night.
During this time I told just one person what had happened, the guy I was supposed to meet the next morning in New Delhi.
No harm done; the schmoozing that I was to do in India has been re- scheduled back here in the States, but I feel like a fool. Since then, I've told a few other people, citing "family reasons."
http://blogs.sun.com/richgreen/entry/on_snowglobes_xvm_and_freedom
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2008/02/cloud-computing-oy-enough-already.html
http://gigaom.com/2008/02/06/data-property-rights-not-portability/
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?11,195569,195569#msg-195569
This provides application designers with the flexibility of not predefining different data types for their attributes, but rather changing them dynamically, as the application requires. A good example of why this flexibility is useful is “1984” – should it be treated as an integer, a title of a book, or a date? What happens if the application decides to store it as an integer, only to later realize that it was meant to be the title of a book and should be treated as a string? Amazon SimpleDB provides the flexibility of storing all data in one format, allowing developers to make data type decisions in the application layer without the data store enforcing constraints.Some of the consequences are pretty stunning, especially when you're working with numbers.
The first step for representing the number ranges is to ensure that every number in the dataset is positive. This can be easily achieved by choosing an offset, such that it is larger than the module of the smallest expected negative number in your dataset. For example, if the smallest expected number in your dataset is -12,000, choosing offset = 100,000 may be safe.Then they follow with an example:
Then there is zero-padding:
- Original dataset:
{654, -12000, 3610, 0, -23}- Negative number offset:
100,000- Dataset with offset applied:
{100654, 88000, 103610, 100000, 99977}
Simple, right?Once all the numbers in the dataset are positive, there is another step necessary to ensure that values are properly represented for lexicographical comparisons. For example, number 2 and 10, if converted directly into strings "2" and "10" will not compare properly, as "10" comes before "2" in lexicographical order. However, if we zero-pad number 2 to be represented as "02", the comparison will execute as expected. But what happens if we decide to add number 200 to the dataset at a later point? Zero-padding with a single "0" will not work anymore. Therefore, application designers may follow the next steps for zero-padding:
- Determine the largest possible number in your dataset. Remember, that if you are using offsetting to take care of the negative number conversions, you have to take that into account as well by ensuring that your largest possible number is determined after you have added the offset to all the values.
- Based on the largest possible number, determine the maximum number of digits before the decimal point that you may have in your dataset.
- Convert all the numbers in your dataset to the proper string representation by appending as many "0" as necessary in front of each number to ensure that the total number of characters, representing the portion of the number before the decimal point, matches the maximum number of digits determined in Step 2 above.
Example:
- Original dataset:
{14.58, -12536.791, 20071109, 655378.34, -23}- Negative number offset:
100,000- Dataset with offset applied:
{100014.58, 87463.209, 20171109, 755378.34, 99977}- Zero-padded dataset representation:
{00100014.58, 00087463.209, 20171109, 00755378.34, 00099977}- Original query:
['attribute' > '500']- Converted query:
['attribute' > '00100500']
http://kiggavik.typepad.com/the_house_other_arctic_mu/2008/02/-40.html
The sign of a good embedded database system is not who’s running it, but rather who doesn’t know they’re running it! The ideal database is one that sits there in the background, working hard, and never raising a peep nor complaining. That’s Apache Derby!
Our software has been deployed by tens of thousands of organizations ranging from small schools all the way up to prestigious academic organizations and corporate banks. Although we offer the option to choose other external databases, the majority stick with Apache Derby as the embedded default. Many PaperCut NG installations handle thousands of print transactions a day and host datasets in the millions of rows. Apache Derby has proven that an embedded zero-administration database can be robust and scalable in a range of environments and operating systems.
I'm currently using derby for a distributed client architecture. I've tested with 3~5 million records that need to be keep in sync through all the clients. Derby has worked beautifully, selects, inserts all very fast. And I've even seen several searches with the same indexes run faster on Derby than Oracle.
We use derby in our search engine project which is in beta stage. Having tried alternatives (mysql , postgre , oralce ) derby provieded us unmatched performence over large datasets our current dataset is around 30GB for each server we read more than a million rows at a time and insert around 300 records per second we are confident that derby will not let us down along the way. we are planning to hit over 100GB mark for both of our servers during the next couple of months
The NetBeans Innovators Grant is a process to provide grants to developers or teams of developers to work on an open source project. A total of 10 large projects will be chosen and awarded a grant of US$ 11,500 dollars. Another 10 smaller projects will be chosen and awarded a grant of US$ 2,000 dollars. Awards will only be awarded upon actual project completion. Projects that excel may receive one of two possible gold awards of US$ 11,000 dollars or two possible silver awards of US$ 5,000 dollars.
http://blogs.sun.com/kah/entry/derby_documentation_quick_search_in
... obese people and smokers cost less to treat. Of course they do. They die sooner. Healthy people are expensive ... Economists have an interesting way of looking at things
http://whattoeatbook.com/2008/02/05/healthy-people-are-too-expensive-for-society/
