Linq to Object Performance (Monday, May 11, 2009) - 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
Monitoring Solr with LucidGaze (Sunday, February 21, 2010) - 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
SQL 2008 filtered indexes (Wednesday, June 11, 2008) - 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
Amazon SimpleDB Batched PUTs Usage and Performance (Friday, July 10, 2009) - 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
