Author Archive
There are few things we do more important than interviewing and yet it’s done very unevenly across the company. Some are amazing interviewers and others, well, I guess they write good code or something else J. Fortunately, interviewing can be learned and, whatever you do and wherever you do it, interviewing with insight pays off….
Ted Wobber (msft Research) brought together the following short list of SSD performance data. Note the FusionIO part claiming 87,500 IOPS in a 640 GB package. I need to run a perf test against that part and see if it’s real. It looks perfect for very hot OLTP workloads. A directory of “fastest SSDs”: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-fastest.html…
Google has been hiring networking hardware folks so it’s been long speculated that they are building their own network switches. This remains speculation only but the evidence is mounting: From http://www.nyquistcapital.com/2007/11/16/googles-secret-10gbe-switch/ (Sent my way by James Depoy of the OEM team and Michael Nelson of SQL Server): Through conversations with multiple carrier, equipment, and component…
Last week I attended and presented at USENIX LISA (http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa07/) conference. I presented Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Applications and the slides are at: PowerPoint slides. I particularly enjoyed Andrew Hume’s (AT&T) talk where he talked about the storage sub-systems used at AT&T research and the data error rates he’s been seeing over the last several…
Three weeks ago I presented at HPTS (http://www.hpts.ws/index.html). HPTS is an invitational conference held every two years since 1985 in Asilomar California that brings together researchers, implementers, and users of high scale transaction processing systems. It’s one of my favorite conferences in that it attracts a very interesting group of people, is small enough that…
For the last year or so I’ve been collecting Scaling Web Site war stories and I’ve been posting them to my Microsoft internal blog. I collect them for two reasons: 1) scaling web site problems all center around persistent state management and I’m a database guy so the interest is natural, and 2) it’s amazing…
Earlier in the week Dr. Tachi Yamada of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation presented the work they are doing on health care in developing countries. Some years back Bill Gates gave a similar talk at Microsoft and it was an amazing presentation. Partly due to the depth and breadth of Bill’s understanding of the…
I wrote this back in March of 2003 when I lead the SQL Server WebData team but it’s applicability is beyond that team. What’s below, is a set of Professional Engineering principles that I’ve built up over the years. Many of the concepts below are incredibly simple and most are easy to implement but it’s…
Last week Hillary Clinton presented at Microsoft to a sold out crowd of roughly 2,000 people. Jennifer Hamilton attended and sent her notes my way. –jrh o About 2000 people o Speech similar to one given on Monday night with a bit more a technology focus · US has always been the “Innovation Nation”–a hallmark…
Shankar Pal of SQL Server went to VLDB this year and passed his notes my way. Find them here: http://www.mvdirona.com/jrh/perspectives/content/binary/ShakarPal_VLDB2007.docx. Key points from my perspective: · Werner Vogels o Amazon able to lose a data center without missing SLA (note that this would also allow them to bring a down data center for service and…
Jacek Becla of the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC http://www.slac.stanford.edu/) team held a 1 day workshop on October 25th focused on Extremely Large Databases (http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/xldb07/). The goal was to look at “practical issues related to extremely large databases that push beyond the current commercial state of the art”. SLAC has built some enormous DBs in the…
I love commodity parts and I like cars, so this one caught my interest. The Tesla Roadster (http://www.teslamotors.com/) battery pack is made up of many cells exactly the same as the IBM T60P that I’m typing this on. Laptop battery configurations differ dramatically, but most contain multiple 18650 form-factor batteries http://www.molienergy.bc.ca/specs/ICR18650G.pdf). The 18650 designator comes…
Update: I’m now with Amazon Web Services: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/12/14/JamesHamiltonJoinsAmazoncom.aspx. I’m an architect on the Microsoft Windows Live Platform team and maintain an internal blog called Perspectives. My postings focus on high scale services, data center operations, very large database, flash memory, service design principles, power efficiency and power management. I made that blog internal because it…
There are few things we do more important than interviewing and yet it’s done very unevenly across the company. Some are amazing interviewers and others, well, I guess they write good code or something else J. Fortunately, interviewing can be learned and, whatever you do and wherever you do it, interviewing with insight pays off….
Ted Wobber (msft Research) brought together the following short list of SSD performance data. Note the FusionIO part claiming 87,500 IOPS in a 640 GB package. I need to run a perf test against that part and see if it’s real. It looks perfect for very hot OLTP workloads. A directory of “fastest SSDs”: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-fastest.html…
Google has been hiring networking hardware folks so it’s been long speculated that they are building their own network switches. This remains speculation only but the evidence is mounting: From http://www.nyquistcapital.com/2007/11/16/googles-secret-10gbe-switch/ (Sent my way by James Depoy of the OEM team and Michael Nelson of SQL Server): Through conversations with multiple carrier, equipment, and component…
Last week I attended and presented at USENIX LISA (http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa07/) conference. I presented Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Applications and the slides are at: PowerPoint slides. I particularly enjoyed Andrew Hume’s (AT&T) talk where he talked about the storage sub-systems used at AT&T research and the data error rates he’s been seeing over the last several…
Three weeks ago I presented at HPTS (http://www.hpts.ws/index.html). HPTS is an invitational conference held every two years since 1985 in Asilomar California that brings together researchers, implementers, and users of high scale transaction processing systems. It’s one of my favorite conferences in that it attracts a very interesting group of people, is small enough that…
For the last year or so I’ve been collecting Scaling Web Site war stories and I’ve been posting them to my Microsoft internal blog. I collect them for two reasons: 1) scaling web site problems all center around persistent state management and I’m a database guy so the interest is natural, and 2) it’s amazing…
Earlier in the week Dr. Tachi Yamada of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation presented the work they are doing on health care in developing countries. Some years back Bill Gates gave a similar talk at Microsoft and it was an amazing presentation. Partly due to the depth and breadth of Bill’s understanding of the…
I wrote this back in March of 2003 when I lead the SQL Server WebData team but it’s applicability is beyond that team. What’s below, is a set of Professional Engineering principles that I’ve built up over the years. Many of the concepts below are incredibly simple and most are easy to implement but it’s…
Last week Hillary Clinton presented at Microsoft to a sold out crowd of roughly 2,000 people. Jennifer Hamilton attended and sent her notes my way. –jrh o About 2000 people o Speech similar to one given on Monday night with a bit more a technology focus · US has always been the “Innovation Nation”–a hallmark…
Shankar Pal of SQL Server went to VLDB this year and passed his notes my way. Find them here: http://www.mvdirona.com/jrh/perspectives/content/binary/ShakarPal_VLDB2007.docx. Key points from my perspective: · Werner Vogels o Amazon able to lose a data center without missing SLA (note that this would also allow them to bring a down data center for service and…
Jacek Becla of the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC http://www.slac.stanford.edu/) team held a 1 day workshop on October 25th focused on Extremely Large Databases (http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/xldb07/). The goal was to look at “practical issues related to extremely large databases that push beyond the current commercial state of the art”. SLAC has built some enormous DBs in the…
I love commodity parts and I like cars, so this one caught my interest. The Tesla Roadster (http://www.teslamotors.com/) battery pack is made up of many cells exactly the same as the IBM T60P that I’m typing this on. Laptop battery configurations differ dramatically, but most contain multiple 18650 form-factor batteries http://www.molienergy.bc.ca/specs/ICR18650G.pdf). The 18650 designator comes…
Update: I’m now with Amazon Web Services: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/12/14/JamesHamiltonJoinsAmazoncom.aspx. I’m an architect on the Microsoft Windows Live Platform team and maintain an internal blog called Perspectives. My postings focus on high scale services, data center operations, very large database, flash memory, service design principles, power efficiency and power management. I made that blog internal because it…