Strategy
Google runs queries against thousands of in-memory index nodes in parallel and then merges the results. One of the interesting problems with this approach, explains Google's Jeff Dean in this lecture at Stanford, is the Query of Death. A query can cause a program to fail because of
It's time to do something a little different and for me that doesn't mean cutting off my hair and joining a monastery, nor does it mean buying a cherry red convertible (yet), it means doing a webinar! * On December 14th, 2:00 PM - 3:00
Remember when the iPhone launched? Remember the complaints about the device not maintaining calls well? Was it really the hardware? Or was it the service provider network, overwhelmed by not just the call volume but millions of hyper-customers experimenting with their new toy? Look – a video! Look a video and
Example
You may have read somewhere that Facebook has introduced a new Social Inbox integrating email, IM, SMS, text messages, on-site Facebook messages. All-in-all they need to store over 135 billion messages a month. Where do they store all that stuff? Facebook's Kannan Muthukkaruppan gives the surprise answer in
Strategy
In a strange case of synchronicity, Google just published Instant Previews: Under the hood, a very well written blog post by Matías Pelenur of the Instant Previews team, giving some fascinating inside details on how Google implemented Instant Previews. It's syncronicty because I had just posted Strategy: Biggest
Strategy
Low Cost, High Performance, Strong Security: Pick Any Three by Chris Palmer has a funny and informative presentation where the main message is: reduce the size and frequency of network communications, which will make your pages load faster, which will improve performance enough that you can use HTTPS all the
hot links
* Google – A Study In Scalability And A Little Systems Horse Sense. A nice summary by Krishna Sankar of a version of Jeff Dean's classic talk on Google Scalability given to Stanford's EE380 class. * Quotable Quotes: * @jkalucki: Getting just 100 servers to work together for the first
Robert Scoble with a cool interview on the future of driving without traffic jams: Stanford Automotive, part II: The future of autonomous cars Sokolsky estimates that many of the features that Junior employs, like cameras monitoring lanes and blind spot detection, will start becoming standard over the next ten years.
Paper
Partitioning is what differentiates scaling-out from scaling-up, isn't it? I thought so too until I read Pat Helland's blog post on Hyder, a research database at Microsoft, in which the database is the log, no partitioning is required, and the database is multi-versioned. Not much is
In the past year, Intel issued a series of powerful chips under the new Nehalem microarchitecture , with large numbers of cores and extensive memory capacity. This new class of chips is is part of a bigger Intel initiative referred to as Tera-Scale Computing . Cisco has released their Unified Computing System
Strategy
Facebook's Ryan Mack gave a MySQL Tech Talk where he talked about using what he called Non-stored Procedures for adding edges to Facebook's social graph. The question is: how can edges quickly be added to the social graph? The answer is ultimately one of deciding where
sponsored post
Who's Hiring? * Imo is Hiring an Operations Engineer for a startup web-based service supporting multiple IM protocols. * Appirio is hiring 5 core product engineers for one of Silicon's Valley's "most promising startups". * Tuenti is hiring both a FrontEnd and BackEnd Engineer. * Playfish