MongoDB London 2010 – why you should have gone!
- Image by hoerner_brett via Flickr
Friday was awesome; a combination of geeks, MongoDB, Pizza, Beer & free swag.
I wasn't expecting the MongoDB London conference to be quite as good as it was, but it was really insightful and useful for non beginners. We learnt about proper indexing, useful tips on indexing and schema design as well as doing some hacking with some fellow conference goers.
The schema design talk showed us the advantages and disadvantages of various ways of structuring documents, and highlighted some general things to watch out for.
I found it particularly interesting that, for instance, if you nest things like comments (for threading) that indexes need to be made for each level of the nest - which makes sense when you think about it. However, this means that if you are trying to retrieve all comments written by a particular user, multiple indexes won't be used.
Also, if you were designing a system which coped with a large number of replies / comments, for instance a forum you may hit the 4mb document limit for a single thread.
Sides from NYC conference, as the London ones aren't up as of writing this:
A talk entitled "Approaching 1 Billion Documents" gave us some insight about how MongoDB scales and reminds us that you can have a maximum of 24,000 collections per database at the moment. Not that this should pose a problem for most of us. You can view the slides here:
Other talks, such as ones on general administration were also insightful - it's nice to hear about the different backup strategies and ways of checking what is currently running on your database.
For instance;
db.curentOp()
lists which operations are currently going on in the database, you might see whats blocking, whats being indexed etc.
Statistics wise,
db.collection-name.stats()
will give some insightful information about a collection - such as what indexes exist, how much space they take, how many documents are in the collection, etc.
Also, if you're interested in seeing who attended, have a look at my Mongo DB London 2010 Twitter list - it covers most people from the day.
Related articles you will enjoy;
- State of MongoDB March, 2010 (mongodb.org)
- Reflections on MongoDB (collectiveidea.com)
- Video: John Nunemaker talks about mongoDB (webpulp.tv)
- Introduction to MongoDB (slideshare.net)
Amazon S3 reduced redunancy service – is it worth it?
Amazon announced a new option for their S3 service today which allows a reduced GB/mo price (starting from $0.10 / gb / mo, rather than $0.15 / gb / mo) - the catch is reduced redundancy.
The redunancy is decreased from 11 9's to 4 9's, which is according to Amazon still (400x) more than can be expected from your typical disk drive.
What does this mean? Well, 99.99% equals less than 52.56 minutes per year of maximum expected downtime, where as 99.999999999 equals 315.36 microseconds per year or less.
Is your data worth $0.05 / gb / mo fextra for 52 and a bit minutes more uptime?
Here is the announcement as sent by Amazon;
We are pleased to introduce a new storage option for Amazon S3 called Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) that enables customers to reduce their costs by storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy than the standard storage of Amazon S3. It provides a cost-effective solution for distributing or sharing content that is durably stored elsewhere, or for storing thumbnails, transcoded media, or other processed data that can be easily reproduced. The RRS option stores objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities, providing 400 times the durability of a typical disk drive, but does not replicate objects as many times as standard Amazon S3 storage does, and thus is even more cost effective. Both storage options are designed to be highly available, and both are backed by Amazon S3's Service Level Agreement.
Once customer data is stored using either Amazon S3's standard or reduced redundancy storage options, Amazon S3 maintains durability by quickly detecting failed, corrupted, or unresponsive devices and restoring redundancy by re-replicating the data. Amazon S3 standard storage is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities, while RRS is designed to provide 99.99% durability and to sustain the loss of data in a single facility.
Related articles
- Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) (aws.typepad.com)
- Google To Launch Amazon S3 Competitor 'Google Storage' At I/O (Jason Kincaid/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
- NetSuite and Amazon go cloud to cloud with SuiteStorage (v3.co.uk)
The last slice of Cake?
The lead developer of CakePHP, Nate Abele, today waved good by to Cake in a quick tweet about the project. Reports are that he is joining some of the Cake team working on a fork of Cake3 to be called “Lithium”.
Nate later confirms;
Yup, myself and most of the old team have spun off a new project called #Lithium (http://li3.rad-dev.org), based on PHP 5.3"
Awesome, another 5.3 framework - I'll be following Lithium's development as it occurs.
Symfony is one of the first major PHP frameworks planning to drop support for 5.2
Symfony 2.0 will leverage PHP 5.3 and drop PHP 5.2 compatibility. Big news - Symfony is one of the first major PHP frameworks to drop support for 5.2, though its not happening for some time.
Both the upcoming Zend Framework and CakePHP 2.0 versions will rely on PHP 5.3. And for Symfony, I said it will still be compatible with PHP 5.2. From my point of view at the time, it would be a mistake to upgrade major frameworks to PHP 5.3 now for one main reason: major frameworks are used by many big companies, and upgrading to the latest version of a software fast in such companies is not always feasible.
Symfony 2.0 is due to be released late 2010. Read some more on the Symfony blog.
New version of Lighttpd released – 1.4.24
- Connection state handling (pipelining should work now)
- FastCGI fixes: improved disabled-time handling, fixed bug in active-backends counter.
- TLS SNI support
You can download it from here, or read the rest of the announcement.
10 Essential Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter
Mashable have a great article on some of the best Entrepreneurs to follow on twitter - read the full article here, or if your lazy, we've made a twitter list for you.
Happy 40th Birthday, Internet!
On October 29, 1969, the first two nodes of ARPANET were interconnected between UCLA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and SRI International (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. It took 12 years for 213 computers to get linked in the network.
Read more at Mashable : http://mashable.com/2009/10/29/happy-40th-birthday-internet/