Coding Horror: Hot Tech Blog
If you bored, check out this hot new blog:
When I said new, I lied. Jeff Atwood’s been blogging on here since 2004, but I’ve only just discovered his blog. Very technical, code-oriented, his last few articles cover comprehensive anti-spam theory with a classical “defense in depth” solution, performance tips for virtualization, build servers, and defeating capchas.
For example, in an article about Windows Vista and VM, he writes:
As alluded to in the above lunch anecdote– and as you can see from the Task Manager screenshot above– Windows XP has no qualms whatsoever about leaving upwards of a gigabyte of system memory empty.
This is exactly what linux has been doing for years–filling up system memory with things it needs, because when it doesn’t need them it will swap them out for other things. Then, in another article, he wonders why databases don’t index themselves:
But in a modern client-server database, the server should be aware of all the queries flowing through the system, and how much each of those queries cost. Who better to decide what needs to be indexed than the database itself?
The answer is that it’s not enterprisey enough. Auto-indexing would create slower insert/update times, cause a bigger disk footprint, and affect complex systems in unknown ways. Performance differences often produce side-effects.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 9:48 pm and is tagged with client server database, disk footprint, classical defense, performance differences, defense in depth, performance tips, system memory, complex systems, qualms, anecdote, atwood, task manager, gigabyte, upwards, screenshot, blogging, queries, horror, windows xp, databases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
