151–160 of 160 posts
I remember Doc Martens. They're back. I remember gumby haircut. Its back. I remember ripped jean...also back.
Technology follows this cyclical trend as well, we just give it fancy names like Big Data, Cloud and Anything-as-a-Service.
Oracle writes shitty 'enterprise apps' (god I hate that phrase) that they sell to big companies, because their salesmen/women wear great attire and are good at mirroring dumb ceos/cios, like the ones that run several companies I have worked for. Will someone please end this nonsense? At what point does usability/stability/utility become factors?
This is a viewpoint that I hear a lot, mostly from people who are not in the room when these grand enterprise implementation decisions are made. While it's true that a good salesperson can make a difference in winning a deal vs. another vendor, salespeople almost never convince a company that they need a big enterprise software platform. 95% of the time, the company has already decided that the current way they do X…
More than often the underlying issue is lack of discipline and human behavior (or in Enterprise case, "organizational behavior") problems that we incorrectly label as "technology problem".
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I don't have a problem with relational databases. Or rather, I don't have a problem with relational data modelling. I do have a problem with Oracle. Even the Oracle experts at my former job could barely get Oracle to do something sensible, and running it on my own computer was basically a death sentence for getting anything done. I have a problem with MySQL, from a sysadmin perspective. When I had it installed, MySQL…
Have to agree with the above. The problem with relational databases isn't the relational model, per se, but the complexity and cost of maintaining a relational database. Typically, they require specialized database administrators whose primary job is to tune the database and keep it running. Many businesses, even of moderate size, reach point where they will need to purchase expensive hardware (million dollar RamSans…
This whole "specialized database administrator" point just seems moot considering the equivalent for that are the so-called Big Data developers.
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No. NoSQL lets you say nothing about the schema, and so it becomes a problem for the application layer, above the DB, to handle. In fact, this is much what happens with most "solutions" NoSQL presents to SQL database problems: Let's not implement it, then it's not a problem. What happens when you push problems up the stack? Do they get solved automatically? No? Will they get solved? Perhaps, if really needed. And, fo…
"Let's not implement it, then it's not a problem." Its interesting that culturally more than a decade ago, when mysql tried this strategy with transactions, namely, not having them until roughly the turn of the century, it was reviled mostly by people who don't know what transactions are nor did they need them, but were nonetheless very unhappy about mysql not having that checkbox get checked. Now its culturally seen…
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So you won't allow logfiles to happen again?
LOL, no, not as a primary store of data, no never again. Plain text logs are a great place to funnel all "unable to connect to database" type of errors for dbas / sysadmins to ponder, however. I've implemented quite a few systems where data changes are logged into a log table, all fully rationalized, so various reports can be generated about discrepancies and access rates and stuff like that. This is also cool for en…
Can you give me a concrete example of how you would use this?
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LOL, no, not as a primary store of data, no never again. Plain text logs are a great place to funnel all "unable to connect to database" type of errors for dbas / sysadmins to ponder, however. I've implemented quite a few systems where data changes are logged into a log table, all fully rationalized, so various reports can be generated about discrepancies and access rates and stuff like that. This is also cool for en…
> using logs that can be JOINed to actual data tables as necessary is pretty easy Can you give me a concrete example of how you would use this?
Security audit trail type stuff "Why is this salesguy apparently manually by hand downloading the entire master customer list alphabetically?".
This isn't all doom and gloom stuff either... "You're spending three weeks collecting the city/state of every customer so a marketing intern can plot an artsy graph by hand of 10000 customers using photoshop? OMG no, watch what I can do with google maps/earth and about 10 lines of perl in about 15 minutes" Or at least I can run a sql select that saves them about 50000 mouse clicks in about 2 minutes of work. Most "suit" types don't get the concept of a database and see it as a big expensive Excel where any query more complicated than select * is best done by a peon by hand. I've caught people manually alphabetizing database data in Word for example.
Another thing that comes up a lot in automation is treating a device differently WRT monitoring and alerting tools if a change was logged within the last 3 days. So your email alert for a monitored device reads contains a line something like "the last config change made was X hours ago by ...". Most of the time when X=0 or X=1 the alert is because ... screwed up, and when it isn't a short phone call to ... is problem isolation step #1.
This was all normal daily operations business use cases, aside from the usual theoretical data mining type stuff, like a user in A/B marketing test area "B" tends to update data table Q ten times more often than marketing test area "A" or whatever correlation seems reasonable (or not).
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In more ad-hoc, constantly changing, "ops this didn't work because of unknown factor X" type of projects, schemas are a pain. Such a pain: ALTER TABLE foo DROP COLUMN bar; ALTER TABLE foo ADD COLUMN baz varchar(64); From what I've seen, a significant chunk of the desire to use schemaless NoSQL hipster DBs is simply a desire to avoid learning SQL as if it were a real programming language. The only real use case I've e…
I've worked on systems where changing a single column meant that we'd have to take four hours of downtime while MySQL slowly...did whatever it does.
Or, if by change a column, you mean something like an "update table blah set x=x+1;", and the x column was part of an index, that used to really work the indexing system hard, one individual row at a time. I think that issue was optimized out a long time ago. I believe there was a sneaky way to optimize around it other than the index drop and create trick, by doing all 10 million increments as part of a transaction such that it would do all 10 million increments, close out the transaction, then recalculate the index. Now there was something sneaky to the sneaky that you couldn't do a transaction on one update so you updated all the "prikey is even" and then updated all the "prikey is odd" or something like that as a two part transaction. I didn't exactly do this last week so if I misremember a detail...
Even if the data isn't big, there can be a benefit from the Hadoop infrastructure. Say you have just 86,400 rows of data but each row takes 1 second. That adds up to 24 hours of elapsed time, and waiting for that run can be painful, especially if you are trying to experiment, iterate. With HDFS/MapReduce you can distribute that work across N machines and divide the elapsed time by N, speeding up the pace of iteration…
Even if the data isn't big, there can be a benefit from the Hadoop infrastructure. Say you have just 86,400 rows of data but each row takes 1 second. That adds up to 24 hours of elapsed time, and waiting for that run can be painful, especially if you are trying to experiment, iterate. With HDFS/MapReduce you can distribute that work across N machines and divide the elapsed time by N, speeding up the pace of iteration…
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> using logs that can be JOINed to actual data tables as necessary is pretty easy Can you give me a concrete example of how you would use this?
If by concrete you mean business case example, it comes up a lot in "the last three people to modify this record were..." Security audit trail type stuff "Why is this salesguy apparently manually by hand downloading the entire master customer list alphabetically?". This isn't all doom and gloom stuff either... "You're spending three weeks collecting the city/state of every customer so a marketing intern can plot an a…
Using your approach, I guess it would be a table like
create table logs (
tableName varchar,
oldValue text,
newValue text,
userID int,
when datetime
);