database

Testing is important — most people understand that by now. A lot of people write tests for their open source code already, but in-house testing is still hard. For example, many of us had an encounter with Jenkins: it runs well to a point where it becomes harder to maintain the Jenkins than it is to write tests. Another obstacle is test setup and environments: When I write and run tests, there is sometimes only so much I can do to mock and avoid actual calls to my storage backend....

Among all the different technologies in our stack, we also use MySQL. While we still run MySQL (or Percona-Server) ourselves, we selected a managed solution to power parts of our production infrastructure: a Multi-AZ setup with Amazon’s RDS. AZ is Amazon-speak for “availability zone”, essentially a datacenter. RDS stands for: Relational Database Service. Judging from my experience with our own setups where EBS is in the mix, I have to say that Amazon does an outstanding job hiding these potential issues with RDS from us....

I’m currently running a little database analysis to see how many of our users might be affected by Gawker’s breach of security the other week. Since we use Zend Framework, Zend_Db is our weapon of choice. Running the queries I noticed, that Zend_Db doesn’t seem to support an IN-clause with a straight fetchAll(). The IN-clause is only supported when I wrap my statement with Zend_Db_Select, which is something I rarely do....

I attended Berlin Buzzwords 2010 for the last two days and aside from meeting a bunch of great people during talks, here are some take away notes from this conference: I got introduced to new stuff — such as HyperTable (c++ bigtable implementation), which I had never heard of before. I actually know a lot more about hadoop, HDFS and tika now than I did before — though I won’t be able to use any a lot of it soon....

One of our biggest issues with CouchDB is currently the lack of compaction of our database, and by lack of, I don’t mean that CouchDB doesn’t support it, I mean that we are unable to actually run it. Compaction in a nutshell Compaction in a nutshell is pretty cool. As you know, CouchDB is not very space-efficient. For once, CouchDB saves revisions of all documents. Which means, whenever you update a document a new revision is saved....