Please ping me if one of your comments doesn’t appear
I just found two comments that went to Akismet spam wrongly, one because the author (Marcin Zukowski) pinged me, and one because I searched my spam folder on “Netezza” and there it was.
If one of your comments doesn’t go up, please ping me, and also suggest a keyword I could search on to find it.
I’m sorry for any inconvenience!
| Categories: About this blog | Leave a Comment |
Oops, I didn’t have caching turned on
My blogs, especially this one, haven’t been very robust in the face of increasing traffic volume. A few minutes ago DBMS2 was down again, and my hosting company called me out for being a resource hog and asked me to optimize.
It turns out that while I’d installed and activated the WP-Cache plug-in, I’d never actually turned caching on. This is now changed. But that means you may see cached pages instead of live ones, e.g. missing responses to your comments. The cache is currently configured to flush every 10 minutes, but that setting could of course change. I plan to make the same change on all five blogs.
Anyhow, please let me know if you have any problems that seem related to caching. (Also, if anybody has any experience differentiating between WP-Super Cache (the other main option) and WP-Cache, I’d love to hear about it.
Thanks! And thanks also for causing these query volume problems in the first place! 🙂
| Categories: About this blog | 1 Comment |
My current customer list among the analytic DBMS specialists
(This is an updated version of an August, 2008 post.)
One of my favorite pages on the Monash Research website is the list of many current and a few notable past customers. (Another favorite page is the one for testimonials.) For a variety of reasons, I won’t undertake to be more precise about my current customer list than that. But I don’t think it would hurt anything to list the analytic/data warehouse DBMS/appliance specialists in the group. They are:
- Aster Data
- Greenplum
- Infobright
- Kickfire
- Kognitio
- Microsoft
- Netezza (my biggest client this year, probably, because of all the Enzee Universe appearances)
- Sybase
- Teradata
- Vertica
- Attivio, which may or may not be construed as being in the analytic DBMS business
- Clearpace, ditto
All of those are Monash Advantage members.
If you care about all this, you may also be interested in the rest of my standards and disclosures.
| Categories: About this blog, Aster Data, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Infobright, Kickfire, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Netezza, Sybase, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 4 Comments |
There always seems to be a fire drill around MapReduce news
Last August I flew out to see my new clients at Greenplum. They told me they planned to roll out MapReduce in a few weeks, and asked for my help in publicizing it. From their offices I went to dinner with non-clients Aster Data, who told me they’d gotten wind of a Greenplum MapReduce announcement and planned to come out ahead of it. A couple of hours later, Aster signed up as a client. In something of a pickle — but not one of my own making — I knocked heads, and persuaded both vendors to announce MapReduce at the same time, namely the following Monday. Lots of publicity ensued for both vendors, and everybody was reasonably satisfied. Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Greenplum, MapReduce, Michael Stonebraker, Vertica Systems | 1 Comment |
Oracle Exadata article — up at last
I’d been promising Intelligent Enterprise editor Doug Henschen an article on Oracle Exadata for months. It’s finally up. For a variety of reasons, it was a lot more work than one might at first guess. One such reason is that it spawned four related blog posts over the past few days.
As I post this, there are two glitches in the article. One is that em dashes are appearing as quote marks — and as you know, I use a lot of em dashes. The other is that one sentence on in-database data mining seems unclear to me, and I’ve asked for a small edit to make it clearer what I’m talking about. No doubt both will be cleared up soon. Edit: Doug indeed fixed all that within minutes.
This is an edited article. Other than columns, it may be my first such since the Upside Magazine cover story on AOL over a decade ago. But it was edited with a light and skillful touch. Please don’t hold me responsible for every minor subtlety of emphasis or grammatical nuance. But otherwise I stand behind the opinions, for they are indeed mine.
| Categories: About this blog, Data warehouse appliances, Exadata, Oracle | 1 Comment |
I’ll be answering e-mail again soon
I’ll be answering e-mail again soon, from clients, PR folks, and my mother alike. Ditto blog comments and Twitter direct messages. And I’ll close out on the inessential deadlines I missed for TDWI. I’ve been a little busy, as you may be gathering.
Now just put those pitchforks down gently, and back away slowly …
| Categories: About this blog | 1 Comment |
My current customer list among the data warehouse specialists
One of my favorite pages on the Monash Research website is the list of many current and a few notable past customers. (Another favorite page is the one for testimonials.) For a variety of reasons, I won’t undertake to be more precise about my current customer list than that. But I don’t think it would hurt anything to list the data warehouse DBMS/appliance specialists in the group. They are:
- Aster Data
- Calpont
- DATAllegro
- Greenplum
- Infobright
- Netezza
- ParAccel
- Teradata
- Vertica
All of those are Monash Advantage members.
If you care about all this, you may also be interested in the rest of my standards and disclosures.
| Categories: About this blog, Aster Data, Calpont, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Greenplum, Infobright, Netezza, ParAccel, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 3 Comments |
Optimizing WordPress database usage
There’s an amazingly long comment thread on Coding Horror about WordPress optimization. Key points and debates include:
- WordPress makes scads of database calls on every page. (20 is the supposed default number. That sounds a little high to me, but not wholly incredible.)
- Therefore one should use a caching plug-in. WP-Cache is the preferred one. WP-Super-Cache gets some votes as perhaps being even better.
- In theory the database cache should handle most of the problem. (After all, many of those database queries are the same for every page.) In practice, it often doesn’t, even if you use dedicated (as opposed to shared) web hosting.
- LAMP vs. Microsoft stack (uh-oh).
- Drupal vs. WordPress vs. Movable Type vs. Joomla vs. do-it-yourself (uh-oh too).
Another theme is — well, it’s WordPress “theme” design. Do you really need all those calls? The most dramatic example I can think of one I experienced soon after I started this blog. Some themes have the cool feature that, in the category list on the sidebar, there’s a count of the number of posts in the category. Each category. I love that feature, but its performance consequences are not pretty.
As previously noted, we’ll be doing an emergency site upgrade ASAP. Once we’re upgraded to WordPress 2.5, I hope to deploy a rich set of back-end plug-ins. One of the caching ones will be among them.
| Categories: About this blog, Application areas, Cache | 1 Comment |
All should be functioning again
The server move has completed. The brief outage is behind us. Comments have been turned back on. All SHOULD be well.
I plan to write a little more soon about web hosting over on the Monash Report, if for no other reason than that what’s there is not wholly accurate and needs updating.
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Comments off Friday night
I’m moving servers again. In connection with that, I’m turning comments off for a few hours.
Everything SHOULD be fine again by Saturday.
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