I'd rather play golf

On Friday 11 June I attended the first ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, an ACM-sponsored workshop co-located with the ACM SIGMOD conference held in Indianapolis. General chair Joe Hellerstein of UC Berkeley, along with PC co-chairs Surajit Chaudhuri of Microsoft Research and Mendel Rosenblum of Stanford University put together an interesting, thought-provoking program. In this [...]

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Many commercial and open-source database management systems, including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL (with InnoDB or Falcon storage engines), PostgreSQL, Firebird, H2, Interbase, Sybase IQ, and SQL Anywhere support multi-version concurrency control, abbreviated as MVCC and often referred to as snapshot isolation. Why is support for snapshot isolation so important? Well, snapshot isolation provides another [...]

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A recent (August 2008) VMware study of Oracle scalability with VMWare ESX illustrates the point: by consolidating multiple, lightly-loaded Oracle servers on a single physical machine, one can combine multiple Oracle instances together on a single hardware platform, yet continue to achieve adequate performance. Indeed, virtualization technology is becoming increasingly compelling. Want to install a [...]

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With the widespread adoption of virtualization within data centers, and the anticipated growth of virtualized data centers (to the tune of 10K nodes, if one believes Irfan Amad of VMWare) it is pretty clear that in addition to the scalability issues, two additional problems need to be solved: The first, mentioned to me by my [...]

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One of Hibernate’s strengths is its ability to work with a wide variety of database systems. One of the ways in which it is able to do so is including a Java layer that customizes the SQL statements being sent to the underlying DBMS to match the dialect and feature set of that particular system. [...]

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Transaction semantics (ACIDity) and concurrency control are critical to both application correctness and application performance. But before I discuss Hibernate in these areas, a personal story. About three years ago I had the experience of withdrawing money from my chequing account through an ATM when the ATM crashed. At the point the ATM crashed, I [...]

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Hibernate offers the object-oriented programmer persistent objects, in an attempt to maintain the object-oriented programming paradigm (nested iteration) over a relational database model. This nested-iteration paradigm is contrary to set-oriented query processing: minimize the total number of requests, perform as many operations as possible on the server, FETCH only those attributes (and rows) actually required. [...]

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In a previous post I stated that I do not believe that many firms go to the trouble of detailed performance tuning, for parameters such as buffer pool configuration, simply because it is too labour-intensive: static tuning analysis requires a workload that is (1) known and (2) fairly constant. Doing this manual performance tuning was [...]

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