If you’ve not yet attended a SSWUG virtual conference, you’re in for a treat. We have top name speakers, many, many sessions (it’s just not like those from others you may have seen) – 3 days of sessions, top technical tips, ideas and presentations… you just don’t find this other places online, period. Check out the speakers, the sessions, the […]

Getting the Big Picture – Part 2 Because applications are becoming more distributed it requires a different kind of monitoring in order to understand trends, faults, or reduced performance. One of the easiest things to monitor is duration. How long does it take to call a service and receive a response? Perhaps your measurements need to be balanced by the […]

Getting the Big Picture – Part One A while back we talked about how the face of monitoring has changed. Historically we monitored individual servers and their performance because we knew so much about what servers we had, and what software was running on them. Today with the cloud or virtual servers your load can move without your knowledge or […]

Getting the Big Picture – Part One A while back we talked about how the face of monitoring has changed. Historically we monitored individual servers and their performance because we knew so much about what servers we had, and what software was running on them. Today with the cloud or virtual servers your load can move without your knowledge or […]

This Ted Talk is a quick watch – but I think it misses an important item, at least from a "data guy" perspective. The talk opens talking about your Big Data legacy and immediately moves to social media and how all of those videos, all of that status update work you do, all of that online writing – it all […]

A Sharding Lesson in Replication Here is an idea I gleaned from a comment in a blog on the Cassandra web site about sharding. It turns out that no-sql has similar difficulties when it comes to sharding techniques. The blog was about handling high scalability for Social Network sites; http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/10/13/why-are-facebook-digg-and-twitter-so-hard-to-scale.html; The key to sharding is to distribute data across multiple […]

Ben has been writing about encryption a bit, and of course if you head to the site, you can check out the ongoing series we’ve been doing that goes through all of the different aspects of controlling and encrypting your data. (check it out here – it’s pretty comprehensive!) One area that seems to still be a challenge is that […]

Encryption – Final Thoughts Database encryption can be performed at a number of levels. Encrypt the drive(s) on which the database is hosted Encrypt the Entire Database Encrypt the Data before sending it to the Database Encrypt the Data inside the database itself Encrypt backups All of these techniques are effective and serve different purposes. I like to start with […]

Inc. has a great article by Jason Fried in his "Get Real" series. It’s about the team at 37signals and talks to the maturation of a company and specifically the development cycles and creative projects. Take a look at the article here – it’s a good read. I think a lot of people face this with many systems and solutions […]

Database Encryption – Part 1 This is a topic I love to review every once in a while. Encryption is a big enough task; but, wrap a database around it, and you have a bigger can of worms. Why would you want your database encrypted? Database backups take offsite may be restored easily if they are not encrypted If a […]