Posts by Paul Vallee
Anyone interested in the architecture of highly scalable and stable infrastructure will enjoy this Presentation by Randy Shoup and Dan Pritchett of Ebay on how they, in their words, “strike a balance between site stability, feature velocity, performance, and cost.”
Martin Wisniewski, Harish Ramchandani and I are headed to GITEX 2006 in Dubai tomorrow. If you haven’t heard of this trade show, let me tell you it’s huge. It’s measured at one of the world’s top three IT trade shows by attendance, which last year was about 80,000 people!
This video ran before Dell’s keynote at Openworld. I’m just not sure what more to say; you’ve just got to see it for yourself.
It’s not academic research about us, The Pythian Group, but rather about our inspiration for our company’s name, the actual young woman who was the Pythian priestess, the Oracle of ancient Greece who would give her pronouncements at Delphi.
I just read this excellent review by Matt Asay of an excellent interview by Guy Kawasaki (of garage.com and apple fame) of MySQL CEO Marten Mickos.
I’ve been invited by new Pythian partner GridApp to co-host a webinar with their eminent chief scientist, Matt Zito. If you don’t know about GridApp, you certainly should. They offer a rapid-provisioning and configuration management system called Clarity that substantially streamlines repetitive database management chores while simultaneously providing visibility into inventory and configuration changes.
Did anyone else notice this interesting e-week article titled The Downside of Certification? It immediately reminded me of an article written by Pythian team lead and datawarehousing architect Rob Hamel titled “Get Down with OCP: Evaluating DBA Job Applicants in an OCP World”. What Rob noticed in 2004 was that certification can mask a certain type of incompetence from a casual technical evaluation process.
Tip of the hat to Eddie Awad who does some noticing and some digging to confirm that lnnvl(), a function that provides functionality similar to ANSI “Is Not True” and can be used to return boolean TRUE whenever the predicate to the function is either NULL or FALSE is now supported in 10GR2.
Good luck to acquaintances (dare I say friends? we have never met in person!) of mine Jonathan Lewis and Doug Burns who are presenting on April 27th at the UKOUG Northern Server Technology Day.
Good luck to Pythian DBAs Christo Kutrosky and Babette Turner-Underwood who are presenting at Collaborate ’06 today and tomorrow. These are two outstanding presenters with deep technical knowledge reinforced with day-to-day use of the technology and I would encourage anyone to attend. If you attended the presentation, by all means post any feedback here!
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