Benchmark of Cassandra, HBase, and PNUTS with MySQL as a reference point.

Presentation

Research Document

Chrome appears to have some fairly serious bugs that can lead to deleted bookmarks. I tried deleting a single bookmark in the bookmark manager, and it ended up deleting an entire folder. Fortunately, there is a Bookmarks.bak available until the next time you quit chrome. This wouldn’t have been such a big problem if I hadn’t already been fighting bugs with the Xmarks bookmark syncing plugin for Chrome. I have now turned on Chrome’s built-in bookmark syncing, but I still use Firefox quite a bit, so I wish Xmarks and Chrome weren’t so buggy. This is why I normally avoid beta software like the plague.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=56d0b36c2e503bd6&hl=en

http://www.osnews.com/story/22872/Linux_Not_Fully_Prepared_for_4096-Byte_Sector_Hard_Drives

This is a like a CSI episode on flash memory.

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918

Currently, PostgreSQL replicates a database WAL (change log) files to the slave databases, which made it more difficult to get slave databases to have less than a minute of lag. This wasn’t a big deal, since before 9.0, which is in development, you couldn’t query the slave databases until you failover, which stops replication, and that’s a rare event. With streaming replication, it will be possible for the slave databases to be as little as one second out of date, which makes them much more useful for offloading read-only queries from the master database.

http://www.depesz.com/index.php/2010/02/01/waiting-for-9-0-streaming-replication/

This is a very insightful article on the very different issues that you will encounter when you put a large application in the cloud and how common solutions to these problems can’t be applied.

http://gojko.net/2010/01/25/designing-applications-for-cloud-deployment/

While PostgreSQL has had trigger based replication for a long time, it can be difficult to set up and maintain. Since 8.1 or 8.2, it has had warm standby, where you could fail over to a slave but not query it while replicating. The code for hot standby has been committed to the 8.5 development branch. From what I can gather from the mailing lists, 8.5 will probably be released around June.

http://www.depesz.com/index.php/2010/01/08/waiting-for-8-5-hot-standby/

It’s funny how this tool makes the UI look like it was drawn in pencil so that no one mistakes the mockup for a final product design.

http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups

Some users can’t or just don’t scroll web pages. Here is a tool that will help you figure out what impatient or inexperienced users are missing.

http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/