I'd rather play golf

I don’t usually “re-tweet” someone else’s blog post. There are enough bits of information data flying through the Internet that I don’t need to duplicate any more of them. At least, no more than absolutely necessary. However, today I am going to make an exception and draw your attention to a recent post by Amazon [...]

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One of my personal highlights in attending last week’s ACM SIGMOD 2011 conference in Athens was to take in a tutorial [1] on Thursday morning entitled Data Management Over Flash Memory, presented by Ioannis Koltsidas of IBM Zurich and Stratis Viglas of the University of Edinburgh. Here was the abstract: Flash SSDs are quickly becoming [...]

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Today we published a whitepaper entitled “SQL Anywhere I/O Requirements for Windows and Linux”, authored by SQL Anywhere engineering. The whitepaper outlines in detail the I/O requirements of SQL Anywhere servers on Windows and Linux platforms to ensure database recovery in the event of media and/or power failure. Here is its abstract: Database servers need [...]

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FAST 2010 is the 8th Annual USENIX Conference on File And Storage Technologies, which begins next week in San Jose, California. The conference’s technical program lists a variety of interesting work from both industry and academe. The conference will also host two interesting keynote talks: one entitled “Technology for Developing Regions” to be given by [...]

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One thing that the sheer scale of the computing landscape has contributed to the field of Computer Science is the opportunity to study these systems statistically – and in particular to prove or disprove various aspects of hardware and software reliability. With respect to disk drives, several large studies of disk drive reliability [2,3,4,7] have [...]

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You have to admire the job Moshe Vardi has done as editor-in-chief of the newly-re-launched Communications of the ACM. Over the years I have read much of his work on dependency theory, and was pleased to see Dr. Vardi awarded the Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award at SIGMOD 2008 in Vancouver last summer. Dr. Vardi [...]

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As reported on Adam Leventhal’s blog yesterday, Sun is releasing Open Flash Modules (more later) and is also announcing support for Intel’s X-25E Extreme SSDs in various Sun configurations, including Galaxy X-64 servers, T-series machines, and Sun Blade servers. John Fowler, Executive VP of Sun Microsystems’ Systems Group, is quoted in this article by Tim [...]

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The weekend after New Years’ my wife and I decided we would treat our family to a weekend at the Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Falls. Several of my colleagues have raved about the hotel, so we thought we’d give it a try. Aside: I know what you’re thinking….This is supposed to be a blog [...]

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This month’s edition of Communications of the ACM (December 2008) contains a number of articles related to data management. One that I’ll point out is an interview with relational database pioneer and IBM Fellow Patricia Selinger (nee Griffiths) with James Hamilton (now a VP with Amazon Data Services, having recently left Microsoft). The second is [...]

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On 1 December Adam Leventhal of Sun Microsystems posted an article entitled “Casting the shadow of the hybrid storage pool”, where Adam explores the performance and cost-effectiveness of using flash-memory (SSD) devices as cache for primarily disk-based storage architectures: It’s easy to see why using flash as primary storage is attractive. Flash is faster than [...]

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