One of my very first blog posts was about what fuels my passion for technology & writing code and this blog post could be considered the continuation of that one. If you are a follower of mine on Twitter it won’t be a great shock if I admit here that I’m addicted to learning, but that   Read More …

I recently wrote about using bitmap indexes in databases along with using bitmap indexes for fast routing look-ups. Compressed bitmap indexes can be great for increasing read performance while at the same time using small amounts of memory. One of the drawbacks of bitmaps are the implication on write performance. It’s quite common for columnar   Read More …

In a previous post I wrote how compressed bitmap indexes can help provide fast query results over extremely large databases while providing memory and disk efficiency. Web frameworks like Ruby on Rails and ASP.NET MVC (and many others) also match values for routing HTTP requests. A web framework may evaluates a URI to route and   Read More …

Regardless of programming language, if you’re doing a lot of CPU intensive tasks the more you can consider how the CPU and it’s memory operate the better performance you will get. Depending on language you may or may not have access to certain optimizations like SIMD (JVM and CLR don’t support the 15 year old   Read More …

There are many different data structures used in databases to create indexes used to quickly evaluate queries. Each one has different strengths and weaknesses based on the tradeoffs they make on memory, cpu and storage (if persisted). One of these types of indexes is called a bitmap index. For the purpose of this post I’m   Read More …

The best kind of optimizations are ones that eliminate the need to do expensive but wasteful work. While analyzing internals of some open source databases I’ve found that some of them spend a lot of time trying to do the wrong optimizations at the wrong times resulting in wasteful work. The more interesting implementations try   Read More …

Apache Cassandra is named after the Greek mythological prophet Cassandra. Cassandra is the daughter of King Priam and Queen to Hecuba of Troy. Because of her beauty Apollo granted her the ability of prophecy. So back in the day a bunch of Facebook engineers named Cassandra after a Greek mythological prophet? That’s pretty cool. But wait,   Read More …

AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) is an open standard protocol for message-oriented middleware. Like most standards, the direction has taken a few twists and turns during the process of standardization and is in the final stages of being ratified as AMQP 1.0 within the OASIS body. From there AMQP will move on to become an   Read More …

Several weeks ago DataStax announced the first selections for their brand new DataStax Apache Cassandra MVP program. When I was told that I was selected I was extremely honored and also completely surprised. I’m proud to be among an amazing group of people who contribute to an amazing community. The C* community has blown me   Read More …

A message has value and risk properties that are a concern to the business. What the message is delivering defines the value of the message and delivery time defines the risk. A messages value and risk can change based on the varying delivery time. There are a lot of messaging technologies out there and developers   Read More …