1/15/08 - Lightning talks Meeting notes

Great meeting everyone! Thank you for attending.

Slides are available. Those of you that had slides (AND YOU KNOW WHO
YOU ARE), please forward them to me and I'll post 'em on the website.

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haskelldb - Rafael
* stop embedding sql in your code
MONADS
* Really, functional programming is AWESOME, and makes you smarter
** There was a TON more useful information in here, but I was busy
drinking up the scotch and did not get it all down. Please consult
the aforementioned slides when they are uploaded.

FAILDB - Chris May
* large array of servers -- 3k to test chip designs
failures caused by user content
* system captures successes and failures
* faildb structures
* pk, fk, fk
* task / branches / task runs (fk to task/branch)
* 300 million records
** 1 mil/day
* host/filer are varchars
* count took 2 minutes
** indexes fk indexes
** "cover indexes"
** mysql currently!!!
* can't do horizontal

Notes from the CIDR conference - Kristin Tufte
* CIDR conference -- innovative database research
* learned -- james hamilton (M$) works building server farms for amazon
** power usage in databases:
** 60% goes to servers, 30% cooling, 7% lost in transmission
*** #2 cost behind hardware
** ASSERTION: leave the servers on, but fill the valleys in the usage
** try to stablize your usage rather than turn the system off in the valleys
* pat hellen (sp?)
** normalization is for wussies
** don't normalize unless you desperately need the disk
** most data is not updated
** living in a sea of static data that does not get updated
** cidr -- google for the 2009 and you'll find the papers wisconsin
conference on innovative database research
** "building on quicksand" - keyword for finding a cool, related blog

Randal Schwartz interlude: o'reilly laid off 15% people today

How to teach students about databases BETTER!
By Professor Len Shapiro
* Teaching students about database
* Transforming data into INFORMATION
* Use real data
* Federal election commission data (!)
** dirty data
** LEFT OUTER JOINs NOT in the abstract
* Interesting questions
** which electoral committees give to which candidates
** which people give to which candidates from which area?
* Can use larger examples than what fits on powerpoint slides
* give out 8x11 piece of paper that they can look at
* Physical design concepts -- because the data is big enough
* unstructured data
** mean WEB data
** teach them how the google pagerank algorithm works
** talk about map reduce

pgnsmpd - Gabrielle Roth
* How to configure and install pgsnmpd
* What type of information you can pull out
* Maybe you're better off using pg_top

--
Selena Deckelmann
Open Source Bridge - http://www.opensourcebridge.org
PDXPUG - http://pugs.postgresql.org/pdx
Me - http://www.chesnok.com/daily