Amazon SimpleDB Batched PUTs Usage and Performance - One of the most important factors in getting optimal performance out of Amazon's SimpleDB is keeping the total number of requests to a minimum and making the most out of the ones you make. At one time this was tricky from a write perspective because only a single item could be updated in a PUT operation. Last spring Amazon eased the pain a little by allowing us to batch PUT operations into a single command. In order to demonstrate the use of this feature and analyze its performance I'll use C# and Amazon's .Net SimpleDB library. Single PUTs To establish a baseline I'm going to run a test with some sample data (Sun Micro's stock data from 1/3/05 to 7/9/2009 obtained from Yahoo! finance) and write it into a "StockPrices" domain...
SQL 2008 filtered indexes - there are so many cool new features available in sql server 2008 that many a DBA are excited. as an index-tuning man i've been intrigued by filtered indexes which essentially allow you to slap a WHERE clause on an index making it small and focused on a strategic subset of the tables data. you know, the sort of thing that would have required an indexed view in the past. in order to test them out i created a simple table in a scratch database and filled it with data using DataDude. CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Sales]( [Sale_ID] [int] IDENTITY NOT NULL, [Complete] [bit] NOT NULL, [Location] [int] NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK_Sales] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ( [Sale_ID] ASC ) the table was filled with 10000 rows with [Complete] = 1 and 100 rows with...
Linq to Object Performance - Linq (specifically Linq to object) really has improved the "feel" and readability of .Net code by turning what we used to do with flow control, like loops and conditionals, into a query expression. Few people love tight code during development more than I, but I also have to support applications as they age. As the user base and application data grows performance almost always becomes a concern. In that vein I figured I'd whip up a simple test over a sizable amount of data and compare the execution times of a Linq and a traditional approach to filtering a list. First I needed something to build a list of: public class Movie { public string Title { get; set; } public TimeSpan RunTime { get; set; } } Then I filled...
Monitoring Solr with LucidGaze - As a professional DBA I'm always interested in monitoring systems. I have to know what's going on with my systems. Even in a world with automatic scaling strategies and automatic tuning humans have to be in the loop. Let's face it, sometimes automatic things don't work. Worse yet they sometimes automatically do what you said, not what you meant:) As I've been moving more of my read-only data out of traditional relational databases and into highly scalable, simpler document-oriented systems like Solr I've been keeping an eye out for monitoring tools. Specially for Solr I found LucidGaze by Lucid Imagination, a Lucene/Solr specialty shop. What is LucidGaze? LucidGaze is essentially the combination of a Solr request handler and a web application that sits in your servlet container. The request handler gathers...
