I'd rather play golf

Routinely, application developers trade off serializable transaction semantics in favour of better execution time performance by limiting the potential for lock contention. Few and far between are applications that execute at ISO/ANSI SQL isolation level 3, SERIALIZABLE. Indeed, the SQL Anywhere default isolation level is zero – READ UNCOMMITTED – except for JDBC applications, where [...]

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This week my kids are attending Engineering Science Quest, a super-successful, week-long summer camp program at the University of Waterloo. They’ve been to ESQ before, but this year they’re attending the Tesla technology camp, exposing them to Computer Science rather than the physical sciences as in previous years. The UW undergraduate students who lead the [...]

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This past Monday I listened to Tim Brecht of the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo as he presented a paper entitled Our Troubles with Linux and Why You Should Care, a paper [1] co-authored by Tim, Peter Buhr and Ashif Harji which will be presented this coming Monday, 11 July 2011, [...]

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This past Monday I listened to Shivnath Babu of Duke University present a lecture entitled “MADDER and Self-tuning data analytics on Hadoop with Starfish“. In a nutshell, the Starfish project is about the development of self-tuning and self-managing technology for Hadoop systems, and many of the same challenges that exist in self-managing relational database systems, [...]

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