Friday, February 24, 2006

Database performance articles and the need to understand your database.

I was reading through various blogs and this site caught my eye. Lo and behold here are some great articles on SQLserver performance tuning by Dennis Forbes.

Whilst the articles are written with SQLserver in mind, the 95% saving or 20x faster is a metric I can understand and have seen from experience. If you have time read them now, otherwise bookmark for later.

I would add that whilst a lot of developers acknowledge the need for databases, they want their application to be database generic, essentially using the database as a black box. This leads from a database equivalent to a flat file system with a SQL wrapper to a tables which mirror the object model and require multiple joins with complex relationships to tables containing lots of redundant data.
I agree with Tom Kyte when he writes that he finds the need for the database to be generic as strange given the programming language, application server, webserver etc all tend to be specific and definitely not generic.
This all leads to products like hiberate which seek to remove the need to understand the database and relational model completely. Just call essentially a rule based translation tool to handle the mapping of object models to relational tables.

My advice is to read the concepts manual of the database you are going to be using, understand the architecture, understand ACID and most important, understand your data i.e. your content is an essential ingredient in why your company creates value which customers require.

Have Fun

Paul

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Charolais website

My sister and brother have a Charolais Cattle stud. I thought I would provide a link to their website.
They have been breeding for the tenderness and marbling genes are pretty close to having the all genes required which have been discovered and can be tested.

Have Fun