Software, Business, and Life
Mar 03 2010
Here is the story of a substantial chunk of my professional life over the last five years. I didn’t tell this story in real time (for various good reasons), though I have mentioned bits of it in various talks. In 2004, I co-founded a vertical market Software as a Service firm, Mobile Workforce Management (MWM). [...]
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Dec 16 2009
I suppose there have been hiring companies with wildly unrealistic cost expectations forever; the internet just makes it more visible. Take, for example, this job post for PostgreSQL expert, which I republish here for criticism and comment, anonymized: We are looking for a postgre expert with indepth Oracle skill to help with the following project: [...]
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Oct 22 2008
pgFouine is a slick, useful, and free tool for analyzing PostgreSQL query workloads. It works without any impact on the running PostgreSQL: it analyzes the PG log output. The caveat is that it needs PG configured to write the right kind of log output. Sadly, as of version 8.3 PG has a wrinkle in how [...]
Oct 21 2008
At work we have a set of database machines set up so that one is the primary machine, making backups once per day, and several other machines restore this backup once per day, for development, ad hoc reporting, and other secondary purposes. We started out with an obvious approach: back up on server1, to a [...]
Oct 19 2008
At one of my firms (a Software as a Service provider), we have a Zabbix installation in place to monitor our piles of mostly Linux servers. Recently we look a closer look at it and and found ample opportunities to monitor more aspects, of more machines and device, more thoroughly. The prospect of increased investment [...]
Jan 13 2008
Last year I posted about the use of a Joe Celko-style nested set hierarchy representation, for fast hierarchy queries. Here I will describe another approach which is simpler to query, but more wasteful of space. I did not invent this transitive closure approach, I learned of it from several directions: Celko wrote about it as [...]
