An 8 day, 3228 mile long road trip

We did an 8 day, 3228 mile long road trip from the Bay Area to Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and back via Los Angeles. A proper road trip with just a rough idea of our route, no prior hotel bookings, a rental car and friends.



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Until next time!

Some interesting talks from Camelone, Eurocon, HadoopWorld, distributed joins and more

Apache Camel, if you haven't used or even heard about this lovely little integration framework then I highly recommend watching this video by one of its founders. It's best described as a mini-ESB, an implementation of the Enterprise Application Integration Patterns (EAI) with API/programmatic access, a zillion connectors and a delight to use.

Also worth watching is the EAI intro video by Gregor Hohpe at Camelone 2011.

Some interesting HadoopWorld 2011 slides:

• Hadoop World 2011 Presentation Slides: Advanced HBase Schema Design - Lars George, Cloudera
• Hadoop World 2011 Presentation Slides: Replacing RDB/DW with Hadoop and Hive for Telco Big Data - Jason Han, NexR
• Hadoop World 2011: Hadoop and Graph Data Management: Challenges and Opportunities

 Apache Eurocon 2011 slides, worth reading - Lucene at Twitter.
Joins - the Achilles heel of NoSql, distributed systems. Possible, but difficult and not always feasible. Yet, several solutions are available being offered in addition to the big data warehouse vendors and do-it-yourselfers.

• 70x Faster Joins with AQL in MySQL Cluster 7.2 DMR
• 25x: MySQL Cluster and pushdown joins (in pursuit of the holy grail)
• Hadapt is moving forward

More lessons on IO - Disk I/O abstraction layer X-rays.

You thought System.nanoTime() was fast than using System.currentTimeMills() for profiling? Well.. it's all relative.

The old JCache API seems to have been revived - JSR107: The new Caching Standard. It's also going to be a part of the next JEE spec. More signs of commoditization - a good sign of progress.

Until next time!

Garbage collection, memory, IO and other scary stories

Happy Halloween! Want to read some scary, low-level, systems related stuff? Here's a short list of very useful articles I read recently:

• What Every Data Programmer Needs to Know about Disks
• Linux IO Scheduler
• Do You Really Get Memory?
• Quake 2 Source Code Review
• The Architecture of Open Source Applications
• Understanding Memory
• Playing with Virtual Memory
• Other links I've mentioned previously

SQL anti-patterns.

GC horror stories in the .Net world.

Still not scared? How about some math and statistics:

• Ranking data at LinkedIn
• Some more math stuff and other useful miscellaneous Java articles 
• Basic R/statistics every programmer should know
  

Boo!
Ashwin.