I recently finished Stanford’s excellent free on-line course Introduction
to Databases with Jennifer Widom. The course is a broad survey of database
technology including XML, Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) from
many angles (SQL forms the centerpiece of the course), OLAP (OnLine
Analytical Processing) and NoSQL.
I was very impressed with the breadth of Widom’s approach to the subject:
it was a major reason I decided to spend time on the course. Another strength
is its nuts-n-bolts approach: some theoretical topics are covered but for the
most part this is a course for practitioners. Finally, I particularly
appreciated the extensive use of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) in the
course.
Why study databases? I will merely say that data is a core tool pervading the
information resources of modern civilization. Databases are where data is
housed. Fo... (more)
Built on the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) model for cluster deployments,
LinuxForce staff has been hard at work over the past months developing and
deploying LinuxForce Cluster Services built upon exclusively FOSS
technologies and on December 15th we put out a press release:
Announcing LinuxForce Cluster Services
In September Laird Hariu wrote the article “File Servers - The Business
Case for High Availability” where, in addition to building a case to use
clusters, he also briefly outlined how Debian and other FOSS could be used to
create a cluster for a file server. File ser... (more)
If you know the history of LinuxForce, you know that we’ve been doing
remote systems administration using FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)
since our founding in 1995. And we’ve called our remote systems
administration service Remote Responder℠ for a long time too. But the
website RemoteResponder.Net is new.
The new site is part of our educational initiative to explain the issues
involved in administering FOSS-based IT infrastructures to achieve the
promise of greater reliability and ever-improving functionality while keeping
costs low and meeting an organizations’ ever-evolv... (more)
Last week I read a good article on cloud computing, Cloud ROI: A Grounded
View. It seems that even with all the hype (or because of it?) most are not
“running blindly” to adopt “the cloud”. I must admit the cloud
metaphor has a powerful poetic charm to it.
That is probably why it has grabbed the attention of so many over the past
few years. Everything in our world is ephemeral, so there is an aptness to
the concept of a “cloud”. Moreover, I too like and use cloud analogies.
But I am now looking for clearer skies!
Here is a short list of my gripes about "the cloud":
What does “... (more)
There are dozens of virtualization products on the market. When we launched
our first high-availability cluster in early 2008 we chose Xen due to it’s
ability to run on non-virtualized hardware, support in Debian 4.0 (Etch) and
general flexibility. We’ve learned a lot about the upstream of Xen,
including the challenges that Debian maintainers face, and we were
increasingly drawn to another free and open source virtualization technology,
Kernel Based Virtual Machine (KVM). The primary downside to KVM is that it
requires special CPU hardware support to run, but this hardware suppor... (more)