Blog

Recently I've been migrating my old Blogger content to WordPress. I've been considering this ever since Blogger announced it's new layout / format which required hosting the blog on their servers. Finally I found the energy to tackle the beast but quickly hit my first obstacle- how to import the old Blogger posts.

If you haven't already, you must be using New Blogger and a Google Account on Blogger. If you are still using Old Blogger, the importer will not work. - http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content

Importing from my old Atom or RSS feeds didn't work.

Importing from a Blogger export file didn't work either.

Finally I found a solution which worked for the most part.

November 09, 2009 Tips

When discussing availability of a service, it is common to hear the term "Five Nines" referring to a service being available 99.999% of the time but "Five Nines" are relative. If your time frame is a week, then your service can be unavailable for 6.05 seconds whereas a time frame of a year, allows for a very respectable 5.26 minutes.

In reality, none of those calculations are relevant because no one cares if a service is unavailable for 10 hours, as long as they aren't trying to use it. On the other hand, if you're handling 50,000 transactions per second, 6.05 seconds of unavailability could cost you 302,500 transactions and no one cares if you met your SLA.

This problem is one I've come up against a number of times in the past and recently even more and the issue is orders of magnitude in IT. The larger the volume of business you handle, the less relevant the Five Nines become.

November 04, 2009 Architecture Storage

Recently I created my first ZFS clones but quickly realized that there was no simple way to tell the clones from the regular filesystems. My first instinct was to run 'zfs list -t clone' similar to 'zfs list -t snapshot' but this didn't work. Maybe it works in newer versions of ZFS.

October 25, 2009 Tips Unix

Reporting projects are the kind of projects which never seem to end. After a couple iterations I've come to the following conclusions:

1. Absolutely no reports should run on a production database.
2. Moving/aggregating data from a production database to a reporting database using ETL tools prone to synchronization issues and pretty unreliable.
3. The best option is to set up real time replication of the data and build additional views on that.

Unfortunately, if you need to get data from heterogeneous databases, ie. Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, etc. into a single reporting database, replication is not a simple solution. If you are running expensive database software in production, it may not be cost effective to run the same database for reporting.

Of course there are cross database replication solutions like Golden Gate or SharePlex but they are very expensive. I had already given up on getting data from Oracle into MySQL for reports when I stumbled across Tungsten Replicator.

October 25, 2009 Architecture

I've been working with Unix for a fairly long time now- about 13 years.

I'll admit that I started with Linux and thought it was light years ahead of SunOS 4.x running on those old SPARC machines- I mean who had heard of SPARC processors? I remember my boss trying to explain to me that even an older SPARC processor was more powerful than a newer Intel Pentium processor. I didn't really believe him. In time, I convinced them to get rid of most of their SPARC/Solaris in favor of the hip, free, and cheap Intel/Linux combination.

Now I see that I couldn't have been more wrong. I realize that SunOS 4.x probably still has features which I don't know how to use properly. When I look at Solaris 10, ZFS, Zones, LDOMS, DTrace, etc. I not really sure you could pay me to work with Linux (that would be soo depressing). That isn't even mentioning the SPARC hardware it runs on- Can any Intel server compare to a T5140???

October 25, 2009 Unix