YesSQL, JVMs that need to be NUMA aware & other stories

Here's a whole bunch of fascinating reading material I've accumulated these past few months. You can tell there's a lot of love going on for SQL/RDBMS. Then some crazy JVM deployments that make you sit up and wonder. There's also quite a bit of performance related articles on UI/browser technologies. 

Data tier:

• Using Arrays as Materialized Paths in Postgres
• The Etsy Shard Architecture: Starts With S and Ends With Hard
• Under the Hood: Automated backups
• Databus: LinkedIn's low latency change data capture system
• WAL internals of PostgreSQL
• SQL on SSDs: Hot and Crazy Love
• Sharding & IDs at Instagram
• Counting Triangles Faster

 JVM:

• How much memory objects take on JVMs
• NUMA-Aware Java Heaps for in-memory databases (Watch for the line that says "heaps approaching 1TB" in size! Of course they mean using DirectBuffers but still..)

Here's a nice tool that I've filed for later. Esp useful if you find yourself doing production/support calls - Your logs are your data: logstash + elasticsearch. Sort of a poor man's Splunk. 

UI (mostly beating the life out of HTTP and JavaScript):

• Faster Websites: Crash Course on Web Performance
• How browsers work
• WebKit in Your Living Room
• Building the Netflix UI for Wii U
• High Performance Networking in Google Chrome
• Talks To Help You Become A Better Front-End Engineer In 2013 (There are some good ones there)

After covering all 3 tiers - DBs, JVMs and UIs, why stop there when you can finish it off by learning something about QA/unit testing? Here are some relatively new JUnit features (they've finally caught up with TestNG):

JUnit:

• Rules
• Parameterized tests and its better description here
• Assumptions
• Theories and its nicer description here
• Matchers

That should keep you busy for several days. Until next time!