I'd rather play golf

Monday’s DBTEST 2010 Workshop at the 2010 ACM SIGMODconference in Indianapolis concluded with an interesting panel discussion that included keynote speaker Phyllis Frankl (Polytechnic Institute of NYU), Leo Giakoumakis (Microsoft), Harumi Kuno (Hewlett-Packard Laboratories), Ken Salem (University of Waterloo) and Florian Waas (Greenplum). Each panelist discussed what they thought the “Grand Challenges” of database and [...]

[Read more →]

This past Thursday I had the opportunity to listen to Peter F. Sweeney of the IBM T. J. Watson Research Laboratory as he spoke on “The Poor State of Experimental Evaluation of Software and Systems in Computer Science” during a lecture at the University of Waterloo. Here’s Peter’s abstract: As hardware and software continues to [...]

[Read more →]

Raghunath Nambiar of HP Labs sent an email to me this morning about the forthcoming Second TPC Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking, which will be co-located with the 2010 VLDB Conference in Singapore this September. This is the second TPCTC workshop, that follows a successful 2009 workshop in France last summer. The papers [...]

[Read more →]

In the past few weeks I’ve witnessed a number of published performance analyses, both with and without SQL Anywhere. By and large these “benchmarks” have been exceedingly simplistic, which is unsurprising since a simple benchmark requires significantly less development effort than a complex one. Performance analyses I see frequently, for example, involve (simply) inserting a [...]

[Read more →]

This past Saturday, ORM toolkit provider X-tensive.com announced ORMBattle.Net, “The ORM Tool Shootout”. What X-tensive has done is they’ve created a “benchmark” to test the efficiency of various ORM toolkit implementations, and then published the results, comparing Microsoft’s Entity Framework, Lightspeed, LLBLGenPro, NHibernate, OpenAccess, and Subsonic with X-tensive’s own ORM toolkit, DataObjects.Net. Unsurprisingly, the performance [...]

[Read more →]

Good books on database API programming are hard to find. That’s why I was pleased to discover The Data Access Handbook [1] on amazon.com, and I recommend this book to those of you who are either writing .Net, ODBC or JDBC applications directly, or who are DBAs responsible for such applications. The authors, John Goodson [...]

[Read more →]

In our whitepaper on capacity planning with SQL Anywhere, Ivan Bowman and I stress the importance and difficulty in properly scaling a production database to create a representative test instance: Because constructing synthetic databases can take a significant degree of effort, often a representative production system is used as the test workload database. While such [...]

[Read more →]

The Transaction Processing Council (TPC) has secured a workshop to be held in conjunction with VLDB 2009 in Lyon, France, in August. The workshop, the First TPC Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation & Benchmarking, will be held on August 24. The workshop chair is Raghu Nambiar of Hewlett-Packard, with the keynote speaker just confirmed as [...]

[Read more →]

For more than a decade we at iAnywhere have been arguing that schema and query complexity is largely uncorrelated to the size of the database instance, or the characteristics of the hardware platform: In our experience, there is little correlation between application or schema complexity, and the database size or deployment platform. Developers tend to [...]

[Read more →]

A reminder that I’ll be presenting the last of the SQL Anywhere 11 webinar series, on Capacity Planning with SQL Anywhere, this coming Thursday 20 November 2008 at 11am EST. Here is a link to the Sybase registration page for the series; if at all possible please register beforehand. In the talk, I’ll outline a [...]

[Read more →]