Category: @work

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Book publishing in the digital age | TechCrunch

“The lack of video, the lack of audio,” writes Richard Nash in What is the Business of Literature?, “is a feature of literature, not a bug.” This is exactly how we look at the book business at Thought Catalog. Books aren’t an antiquated technology. Books are cutting-edge technology. In fact, books are the greatest virtual reality machines on the market. While virtual reality gear like Oculus engulfs the brain to present a different reality, books engage the brain and present a different reality through a more creative exchange between medium and self.

Source: Book publishing in the digital age | TechCrunch

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MariaDB ColumnStore Adds Simultaneous Analytics, Transactional Processing – The New Stack


InnoDB or the other default MySQL storage engine MyISAM provide reasonable performance on analytical query workloads up to 100,000 rows or tables under a million rows. Performance is harder to tune and maintain beyond that, Thompson wrote in a blog post.
ColumnStore is suitable for reporting or analysis on much larger data sets. Mobile applications of customer Pinger, for example, process millions of text messages and phone calls with ColumnStore, in addition to more than 1.5 billion rows of logs per day.

Source: MariaDB ColumnStore Adds Simultaneous Analytics, Transactional Processing – The New Stack

Looks interesting. We’ve had performance issues with our large db tables for years that we’ve managed to work around, but it’s likely time to take a look at a redesign around a newer technology.

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Spaced repetition – Gwern.net

Spaced repetition is a technique for efficient memorization & practice of skills where instead of doing a lot of work quickly, each item’s practices are automatically spread out over time, with increasing durations as one learns the item. I review what this technique is useful for, some of the large research literature on it and the testing effect (up to ~2013, primarily), the available software tools and use patterns, and miscellaneous ideas & observations on it.

Source: Spaced repetition – Gwern.net

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The MySQL n00b: MyRocks: migrating a large MySQL dataset from InnoDB to RocksDB to reduce footprint

Enter RocksDB and the LSM (Log Structured Merge) technology: we are entering a new planet as far as data storage goes. The idea of an “append only” type of approach for writing database rows is something I never heard before. Databases usually are the most random writer ever! And although SSD will not suffer from write randomness, there are other factors that need to be taken into consideration. I’ll not go into more details about how LSM or RocksDB work, or why LSM is good for your SSD and your workload, as there is plenty of information about it on Mark’s blog (see above) or on the official page for RocksDB and for MyRocks (the RocksDB engine for MySQL) on GitHub; just check the Wiki there.

Source: The MySQL n00b: MyRocks: migrating a large MySQL dataset from InnoDB to RocksDB to reduce footprint

MyRocks and RocksDB sound like something worth exploring even for our small big data tables.