Category: CoolTools

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The MySQL n00b: MyRocks: migrating a large MySQL dataset from InnoDB to RocksDB to reduce footprint

Enter RocksDB and the LSM (Log Structured Merge) technology: we are entering a new planet as far as data storage goes. The idea of an “append only” type of approach for writing database rows is something I never heard before. Databases usually are the most random writer ever! And although SSD will not suffer from write randomness, there are other factors that need to be taken into consideration. I’ll not go into more details about how LSM or RocksDB work, or why LSM is good for your SSD and your workload, as there is plenty of information about it on Mark’s blog (see above) or on the official page for RocksDB and for MyRocks (the RocksDB engine for MySQL) on GitHub; just check the Wiki there.

Source: The MySQL n00b: MyRocks: migrating a large MySQL dataset from InnoDB to RocksDB to reduce footprint

MyRocks and RocksDB sound like something worth exploring even for our small big data tables.

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Windows Subsystem for Linux Windows Interoperability Brings Linux Commands to Windows CLI

The Windows Subsystem for Linux can invoke native Windows binaries and be invoked from a Windows command line. This feature is available to Windows 10 users running Anniversary Update build 14951. This new interoperability functionality delivers a seamless experience between Windows and WSL. Technical details on how this interoperability works can be found on the WSL blog.

Source: Windows Interoperability | MSDN

This is pretty cool. From either command prompt (CMD) or PowerShell you can use the syntax bash -c “ls -la” to invoke basic Linux commands without launching the Ubuntu environment. More advanced tools like curl are also available.

The article indicates the reverse is also true but I wasn’t able to get Windows binaries running from the bash window. I don’t know if it’s a bug or something about my configuration.

 

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Now Open – AWS US East (Ohio) Region | AWS Blog

As part of our ongoing plan to expand the AWS footprint, I am happy to announce that our new US East (Ohio) Region is now available. In conjunction with the existing US East (Northern Virginia) Region, AWS customers in the Eastern part of the United States have fast, low-latency access to the suite of AWS infrastructure services.

Source: Now Open – AWS US East (Ohio) Region | AWS Blog

Low latency to US East (Virginia) should provide an opportunity to try out some cross region experimentation to work on fault tolerance and high availability.

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rclone – rsync for cloud storage

Rclone is a command line program to sync files and directories to and from

  • Google Drive
  • Amazon S3
  • Openstack Swift / Rackspace cloud files / Memset Memstore
  • Dropbox
  • Google Cloud Storage
  • Amazon Drive
  • Microsoft One Drive
  • Hubic
  • Backblaze B2
  • Yandex Disk
  • The local filesystem

Source: rclone – rsync for cloud storage

This looks interesting. It’s open source on Github, cross platform, and could solve any number of issues when working in the cloud.

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TIL the server side of Slack is written in PHP. How about that?

Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you?
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PHP-the-language has many flaws, which undoubtedly have slowed these efforts down, but PHP-the-environment has virtues which more than compensate for those flaws. And the options for improving on PHP’s language-level flaws are pretty impressive. On the balance, PHP provides better support for building, changing, and operating a successful project than competing environments. I would start a new project in PHP today, with a reservation or two, but zero apologies.

by Keith Adams, Slack Engineering

Source: Taking PHP Seriously

Rather interesting to learn that the server side of Slack is written in PHP. I guess I assumed it was a Ruby or Go thing. I think it’s useful to hear about success stories for a mature language like PHP. It shows us that just because something has been around for awhile doesn’t mean it can’t do something cool.