Following on from a theme that Simon has been pursuing here is an interesting piece - How SimpleDB differs from a RDBMS. A thorough analysis of SimpleDB, but I think the extra value here is in the comments. I particularly liked Greg Jorgensen’s submission that programmers just don’t like RDBMS because they take some learning. Whilst I don’t have empirical evidence to back up this supposition I can say that most Java programmers I’ve come across go slightly green if you suggest that they can solve most problems with a SQL statement (and yes, that was meant to be read ironically).
If I can sum up the message of this post and it’s comments it is that we should be thankful for having different tools available to us, because this isn’t a one size fits all world. Where you’ve got a big list of simple things ™ tools like BigTable and SimpleDB work well. Where you’ve got large pieces of unstructured data (sometimes referred to as ‘documents’) you can use CouchDB, and where you have complex, structured data that has to adhere to certain validation and usage rules use a relational database. Each of these will store up to terabytes of information so let’s not even talk about (the myth of) scalability. Choose the right tool for the job and stop insisting that every problem is a nail.
So to answer my question from the title of this post - still around, and still kicking arse.
Whilst there has been a dearth of decent posts here recently I have been beavering away in the background. In the meantime, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.5 and installed the Twitter Tools plugin. This joins the wonderful worlds of Andrew Channels Dexter Pinion and Twitter into a value added multi media powerhouse.
Now instead of large amounts of peace and quiet you will be treated to a daily summary of my inane babbling here on the blog and in the feed. Who said technology was no good?
Inspired by Simon, I thought I’d follow the crowd;
andy47@Mort:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
187 cd
66 whoswho
46 svn
30 python
20 rm
16 ls
15 open
13 vi
13 grep
10 ipython
This Thursday, the 6th of March 2008 from 6:30pm there will be a social gathering of Sydney Python Users Group and any individuals interested in discussing Python, Web, Ruby, Perl etc.
Laptops, OLPC’s, code review, show and tell etc allowed and encouraged.
We meet in the ground floor area next to P.J. O’Briens Pub internal entrance in the;
Grace Hotel at the corner of York and King Street in Sydney, New South Wales 2000. See you there
I’m bringing back a long neglected feature, bad customer service. Although a quick search tells me I haven’t mentioned this as much on line as in real life, where friends and casual acquaintances who get me on a bad day are liable to receive a long and bitter tirade.
Back in September when I was last looking for a job in a moment of weakness I applied for a position at a global IT company that is rather fond of the colour blue. After the initial excitement of the application I waited.
And waited.
And forgot that I had applied to be honest, because I heard absolutely nothing. Until today, when reviewing the mails rejected by my spam filter I noticed this;
Dear Andrew
Thank you for your recent application to a large IT company*.
After careful consideration we regret to inform you that your skills and experience do not match
our current position requirements. If your skills match future vacancies we will contact you
again. Please let us know if your circumstances change, or if you do not wish us to continue to
hold your details.
Thank you again for your interest in a large IT company*.
Yours sincerely,
a large IT company* Australia Staffing Team
So by my calculations it has taken them five months to review my application and send a stock response. I was particularly impressed by the last line of the message which states;
This e-mail has been sent by a Service Machine. Please do not reply directly to this e-mail
using a Reply function.
Don’t you love the personal touch?
Update: I couldn’t resist and sent this reply;
Dear a large IT company*,
Thank you very much for taking five months to review my application. I do not wish you to retain
my details as I suspect that by the time you look at them again they will be woefully out of
date.
* Names have been changed to predict the gloriously incompetent.
Checking my calendar it would appear that one month of the new year already gone. Which must mean that this Thursday, the 7th of February, 2008 from 6:30pm, there will be a social gathering of Sydney Python Users Group and any individuals interested in discussing Python, Web, Ruby, Perl etc.
Laptops, code review, show and tell etc allowed and encouraged.
We meet in the ground floor area next to P.J. O’Briens Pub internal entrance in the Grace Hotel, at the corner of York and King Streets in Sydney, New South Wales. See you there.
I have packaged and released version 0.2.2 of gerald. You can find all of the details on the project page but in a nutshell the changes from the last release are;
- A serious bug in the packaging script has been fixed and the distributed archive is now complete and valid.
Bug reports, patches and test cases to the usual email address please. Or just a message to let me know you are using the code would be nice.
I started a new job a couple of months ago. Sadly the IT policies are a little restrictive, they won’t even let me use my own mouse with the company supplied computer. So I’ve gone rogue. I bought a new MacBook (black, naturally) in December and thanks to the power of VMWare I’m using it pretty much full time at work.
Which has had an interesting effect on my approach to the software I use. Over the past couple of years I’ve been finding myself using either web based applications or command line scripts I wrote myself. What with having a desktop machine at work, a laptop and a home machine all running different operating systems the web browser and the command line are the easiest ways to synchronise my data via common applications.
As I’m now using the same machine at home and work I’ve started to drift back to o/s specific desktop applications. Instead of Google Reader I’ve switched to NetNewsWire Lite, I’ve replaced the WordPress text area with MarsEdit and I’m trying out OmniFocus instead of some hacked up scripts for my to do list.
I’m not sure what this says about me or my choice of technology, other than that I’ll get a frosty reception from the Google posse at the next Sydney Python meeting. But add this to the fact that I gave back the company supplied Blackberry and I think I must be bucking some sort of trend here. Is it just me or is anyone else fighting back the tide of web apps?
Most of the country may be on holiday but some of us are working hard and we’re thirsty.
This Thursday, the 3rd of January, 2008 from 6:30pm, there will be a social gathering of the Sydney Python Users Group and any individuals interested in discussing Python, Web, Ruby, Perl etc.
Laptops, code review, show and tell etc allowed and encouraged.
We meet in the ground floor area next to P.J. O’Briens Pub internal entrance in the Grace Hotel, Cnr York and King Street, Sydney, New South Wales 2000
See you there.
I found this blog post via Reddit and was happy to see the positive benefits the author is getting from profiling his SQL and indexing his database. He could have avoided the slow running query in the first place by following Andy’s simple rules of indexing;
- If your database doesn’t do it automatically, add indexes to all of your primary key columns
- Add indexes to all of your natural key columns
- Add indexes to all of your foreign key columns
When primary or foreign keys are composites (i.e. contain more than one column) create an index containing all of the columns in the same order that they are defined in the corresponding constraint.
If none of this makes any sense and you are responsible for your application’s database give me a call, my consulting rates are very reasonable.