What sets SQL apart from every other programming language available today? In one word: Portability? The SQL language has been ported to pretty much all of the modern operating systems and environments. Even NoSQL engines that do not support SQL natively are being extended to support SQL. So, at the end of the day, if you want to develop a […]

Amazon has already explained the issues that brought down so many sites and resources, and there is are some (not-so) subtle things to learn from the situation. When the services went down, it was due to human error, plain and simple. Well, not so simple (you can see their summary in long-form, here), but at its root, it wasn’t a […]

What is a Unit Of Work? If you’re new to working with any sort of data storage, this is a very important question. The answer to this question is essential to your success when persisting data to any kind of storage. Some storage engines make it easier than others. So, let’s start out with an understanding of what a Unit […]

When things go crazy, that’s what you need a plan. It sounds so obvious… Whent things are in an unknown state you want to be executing your plan, not creating it. This true whether your systems are sitting in your own data center, or someone elses. The outage at Amazon no-doubt shined the light on many a DR plan that […]

Even when you are using cloud resources with a high degree of redundancy, and the cloud systems are performing correctly, you can still run into outages. That’s because you are running software hosted by cloud systems. Of course, your risk depends on what kind of cloud service you are using. In this case I am talking about platform as a […]

A well written book can provide the resourceful reader with a lot more than how to write software. This is something rarely done in any other teaching medium, and in my experience compliments all other instruction quite nicely. A technical book generally starts with a high level summary, and works down into details gradually. It will have an introduction, providing […]

This is not a critique of AWS or S3. Rather, a look at the response and what worked, what didn’t. As of this writing, no real specifics of what happened are available. The things we can learn, however, are immediately obvious on a few fronts. 1. Initial Response First, the initial response was all based on discovery when customers noticed […]

Do you still hold a release or update in anticipation of an unknown service pack? I was surprised to hear that some people do indeed still wait to update their systems – they wait for the next service pack after a major release. This was true “way back when” but I’ve not heard of this being a wide-spread approach of […]

I really appreciated a recent comment from an editorial on new technology with a candid reply, “I am not sure where to start”. This is so true for many of us. I think it is even more true for those of us who used to program in tools that evolved quite slowly. You could spend a great amount of time […]

As more and more high-availability support and more and more dependability in the cloud comes into play, have your HA requirements changed? I realize the easy answe is “Never! We need HA options to do HA right and make sure our real systems are up and available!” (Feel free to quote this in the comments). But more and more often, […]