Jim Gray proposed the original sort benchmark back in his famous Anon et al paper A Measure of Transaction Processing Power originally published in Datamation April 1, 1985. TeraSort is one of the benchmarks that Jim evolved from this original ...
Jim Gray Tribute
Earlier today Microsoft, held an internal tribute to Jim Gray, celebrating his contributions to the industry and to each of us personally. It’s been just over a year since Jim last sailed out of San Francisco Harbor in Tenacious. He’s been ...
2019 SIGMOD Systems Award
At SIGMOD 2019 in Amsterdam last month it was announced that the Amazon Aurora service has been awarded the 2019 SIGMOD Systems Award. From the awards committee: The SIGMOD Systems Award is awarded to an individual or set of individuals to ...
Everspan Optical Cold Storage
Optical Archive Inc. was a startup founded by Frank Frankovsky and Gio Coglitore. I first met Frank many years ago when he was Director of the Dell Data Center Solutions team. DCS was part of the massive Dell Computer company but they still ran ...
Solar at Scale: How Big is a Solar Array of 9MW Average Output?
I frequently get asked “why not just put solar panels on data center roofs and run them on that.” The short answer is datacenter roofs are just way too small. In a previous article (I Love Solar But…) I did a quick back of envelope calculation ...
High Availability for Cloud Computing Database Systems
While at Microsoft I hosted a weekly talk series called the Enterprise Computing Series (ECS) where I mostly scheduled technical talks on server and high-scale service topics. I said “mostly” because the series occasionally roamed as far afield ...
Fe-NAND Flash: 10x Durability, 30% Programming Voltage, & 2 Additional Feature Reductions
Recently results from two academic researchers in Japan will be significant to the NAND Flash market: http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/Article.aspx?liArticleID=44028&PrinterFriendly=true. Clearly the trip from laboratory to volume ...
The Next Big Thing
The article below is a restricted version of what I view to be the next big thing. If I was doing a start-up today, it would be data analysis and optimization as a service. The ability to run real time optimization over an understandable ...