Archive For July 17, 2008
Going boating: http://mvdirona.com/ so I’ll be taking a break from blogging until mid-august when I’m back and caught back up. Enjoy, –jrh James Hamilton, Data Center FuturesBldg 99/2428, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052 W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | JamesRH@microsoft.com H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh | blog:http://perspectives.mvdirona.com
I’ve been collecting scaling stories for some time now and last week I came across the following run down on Fliker scaling: Federation at Flickr: Doing Billions of Queries Per Day by Dathan Vance Pattishall, the Flickr database guy. The Flickr DB Architecture is sharded with a PHP access layer to maintain consistency. Flickr users…
I just got back from O’Reilly’s Foo Camp. Foo is an interesting conference format in that there is no set agenda. It’s basically self organized as a open space-type event but that’s not what makes it special. What makes Foo a very cool conference is the people. Lots of conferences invite good people but few…
Last week the Facebook Data team released Cassandra as open source. Cassandra is an structured store with write ahead logging and indexing. Jeff Hammerbacher, who leads the Facebook Data team described Cassandra as a BigTable data model running on a Dynamo-like infrastructure. Google Code for Cassandra (Apache 2.0 License): http://code.google.com/p/the-cassandra-project/. Avinash Lakshman, Prashant Malik, and…
What follows is a guest posting from Phil Bernstein on the Google Megastore presentation by Jonas Karlsson, Philip Zeyliger at SIGMOD 2008: Megastore is a transactional indexed record manager built by Google on top of BigTable. It is rumored to be the store behind Google AppEngine but this was not confirmed (or denied) at the…
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 proposal. TeraSort is essentially a sequential I/O benchmark and the best way to get lots…
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 production is often longer than the early estimates but these results look important. Back in 2006, Jim Gray argued in Tape is Dead, Disk is Tape, Flash is Disk, & Ram…
Updated below with additional implementation details. Last week Spansion made an interesting announcement: EcoRAM, a NOR Flash based storage part in a Dual In-line Memory Module (DIMM) package. NOR Flash technology growth has been fueled by the NOR support for Execute in Place (XIP). Unlike the NAND Flash interface, where entire memory pages need to…