Saturday, December 03, 2011

Demystifying BigTable & HBase

Much hype has been created around 'Column' oriented database, and it is difficult to find a simple explanation of the concepts.

Thinking over it initially can overload one with lot of questions to the point of completely questioning the rationale behind such radical change. However companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook would not use it if its merit was questionable.

Here is a very interesting read on the concepts behind column oriented database.

Column oriented database concepts - demystified

Widgets - Create vs Add

Widgets are small snippets of code that one can embed in their website (manually insert the snippet code in their website's source code).

While any Tom, Dick, Harry can 'Add' a widget (multiple widgets) on their sites, it is a totally different ballgame how a publisher provides data to widget call coming from such users.

I wanted to get into the technical details of how a widget is 'Created' by the provider and found this link a very interesting read.
How to build a web widget

Monday, June 27, 2011

Evolving ecology of rules

Over a period of time we all learn certain rules. Applying those rules in the right context at the right time means exercising right control.

Was going through a simple Learning Classifier system approach to evolving rules. Set of rules evolved in a dynamically changing environment simulated through good number of cases will lead to a better control system.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Column Oriented databases

Nice concept - how by just flipping over (rather scramble) one can get exceptional read speeds on terabytes of data.
Most read operations are associated with a lot of physical I/O interaction, hence time consuming and were causing lot of grief for developers as well as DB administrators because they were at the receiving end of the flak from customer/clients.
Google came up with Bigtable, a gave the concept of column-oriented database a taste of reality, and look what we have - most of Google's data resides in such column oriented databases.
Will talk about distributed concept later.