Dr. Codd Was Right: A Random Act of Kindness

Vaccinated ≠ Not Infectious

$536,800,000 MARF^™(party like it's 1829)
-- New York Slammers, so far/2024 [GA and The Feds still to come]

Covid-19 has killed at least 1,123,836 people (as of 20 March 2023, final update)

Scientists aren't vocal enough about science. There are large groups of people who think scientists are all frauds and who don't believe in science, and they're being cultured by some of our far right-wing politicians, religious leaders and community leaders.
-- Drew Weissman/2022

To date, Microsoft is stating that organizations testing In-Memory OLTP have seen transaction speeds improve by up to 30 times compared to past performance, with the best performance gains achieved when the business logic resides in the database and not in the applications.
-- Jonathan Watts/2015 [my emphasis]

I have had to explain and re-explain and re-explain and re-explain, you know, how relational databases work, what is an eigenvector, what is dimensionality reduction.

-- Christopher Wylie/2018

... but Flash-based storage has such a different performance profile from rotating media, that I suspect that it will end up having a large impact on filesystem design. Right now, most filesystems tend to be designed with the latencies of rotating media in mind.

-- Linus Torvalds/2007

I believe quite strongly that, if you think about the issue at the appropriate level of abstraction, you're inexorably led to the position that databases must be relational.

-- Chris Date/2009

This week's thought

[The intelligence community] argued that [the restrictive amendment] would cripple the program because they typically use it before there is enough evidence to meet a standard of probable cause for a warrant, like early in investigations when they are trying to learn more about a phone number or an email account found to be in contact with a suspected foreign spy or terrorist.
-- Charlie Savage/2024 [IOW, let's catch the thief before the horse is out of the barn - the MARF^™(party like it's 1829) traitor's worst nightmare]

Therefore:

In a time of SSD, multi-core/processor, two terabyte memory and Optane App Direct Mode machines, there is no reason not to build from BCNF data. Time to do what Dr. Codd demonstrated. Technology has finally caught up with the maths.

19 March 2016

A Random Act of Kindness

Yet another report on RDBMS on HDD vs. SSD passes my bleary eyes. It's not materially different from all the others I've seen. And that's still a problem.

The whole point of SSD storage (or fully in-memory, a la HANA) is that Organic Normal Form™ schemas minimize storage footprint, maximize DRI, and are implemented through random I/O. Large RAID10 arrays of very fast fat HDD have been around for a long time, so SSD fast random I/O has been available longer than SSD, just not as cheaply.

The only meaningful test of RDBMS on HDD vs. SSD requires fully refactoring a lousy RBAR schema on HDD (the kind that "does transaction control in the client because that's what we're used to") to Organic Normal Form™ on SSD. Nobody bothers, that I've been able to find. It's too bad, because such tests end up being little more than rescaling of their respective sequential performance. And, yeah, SSD is faster. I think we knew that.

Dr. Codd Was Right

Vaccinated ≠ Not Infectious

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19 March 2016

A Random Act of Kindness

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