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We've just booked the first European venue for the Understanding Storage Masterclass. I will be presenting the Masterclass on April 24/25 2012 at Prospero House in London, tickets are available HERE. I'm pretty excited to host this training session in my home country, and I hope to see you there!

We've just booked the first European venue for the Understanding Storage Masterclass. I will be presenting the Masterclass on April 24/25 2012 at Prospero House in London, tickets are available HERE. I'm pretty excited to host this training session in my home country, and I hope to see you there!

This is a post about the importance of appropriately simplistic architectures. I frequently get involved with the creation of full-stack architectures, and in particular the architecture of the database platform. There are some golden rules when designing such systems, but one of the most important ones is to keep the design as simple as possible. [...]

Wow, it’s been a while since I wrote a post, sorry about that! I thought that I would take a brief break from the technical postings and espouse some opinion on something that has been bothering me for a while – ‘Best Practices.’

Best Practices have been around a long time, and started with very good intentions. In fact, one could easily claim that they are still produced with good intentions: To communicate methods that the hardware and software vendors recommend. However, the application of Best Practices has become increasingly abused in the field to the point where they have become more like prescriptions of how systems should be built. This has gone too far, and needs to be challenged.

Welcome back for the concluding part of this series of blogs.
In the last part I went through a brief primer about code execution and stack frames in preparation for this posting. I hope that wasn’t too boring for everyone – I think it’s really important to make sure all the preliminary knowledge is covered and not make too many assumptions about the reader. In this part I will finally get to the point, and talk about some alternative techniques for determining the reasons for poor performance for our example user session.

OK, here it is, the ‘first part of the last part’, though the topics discussed in these articles will be discussed more over time in my blog and in Tanel’s. I’ve split it into two subparts, because it was just getting insanely long as single posting.

Yep, another post with the word ‘latency’ written all over it.

I’ve talked a lot about latency, and how it is more often than not completely immutable. So, if the latency cannot be improved upon because of some pesky law of physics, what can be done to reduce that wasted time? Just three things, actually:

1. Don’t do it.
2. Do it less often.
3. Be productive with the otherwise wasted time.

The first option is constantly overlooked – do you really need to be doing this task that makes you wait around? The second option is the classic ‘do things in bigger lumps between the latency’ – making less roundtrips being the classic example. This post is about the third option, which is technically referred to as latency hiding.

Everybody knows what latency hiding is, but most don’t realise it. Here’s a classic example:

I need some salad to go with the chicken I am about to roast. Do I:

(a) go to the supermarket immediately and buy the salad, then worry about cooking the chicken?

OR

(b) get the chicken in the oven right away, then go to the supermarket?

Unless the time required to buy the salad is much longer than the chicken’s cook-time, the answer is always going to be (b), right? That’s latency hiding, also known as Asynchronous Processing. Let’s look at the numbers:

Variable definitions:

Supermarket Trip=1800s

Chicken Cook-Time=4800s

Calculations:

Option (a)=1800s+4800s=6600s (oh man, nearly two hours until dinner!)

Option (b)=4800s (with 1800s supermarket time hidden within it)

Here’s another example: You have a big code compile to do, and an empty stomach to fill. In which order do you execute those tasks? Hit ‘make’, then grab a sandwich, right?