PostgreSQL & Web2.0 notes from OSDevCon
Elephant on OpenSolaris: Zdenek Kotala
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There are now 8 USDT probes in PostgreSQL for DTrace, Zdenek provided a demonstration using Chime, the DTrace visualization tool. This was extremely interesting and exciting, since the Chime project was one of the first projects on OpenSolaris, is quite mature and now being seen in presentations of other technologies as demonstration material. It was cool. You can go here for example PostgreSQL DTrace scripts.
There is also now a Sun Cluster data service for PostgreSQL, it is only failover data service, not scalable type, but this is also quite exciting to me because I worked quite a while on Sun Cluster data services documentation and man pages. To now see this product reaching out and being further developed in open source is wonderful to hear about. The PostgreSQL dataservice is only for Sun Cluster 3.2.
Web2.0, Thorleif Wiik, PixelPark
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Thorleif's presentation was the most corporate-type presentation of the two days that I attended. It was so interesting to hear from him about the business model they support and how they do it with Solaris technologies. PixelPark supports web sites which serve, for example, auto sales industry. So, they have the task of supporting storage of 400k images for one such site and serving them up across the world, for example. They used to do this with many small boxes and had high overheads of system administration and space. Today, they put all layers of the stack onto one box, separated by Solaris Zones, like this:
-Network
-Security
-Load Balancing
-Servers: Apache
-Database
Much to my pleasure, he uses the blog of Eric Kustarz, a good friend of mine in San Francisco, to find his file system tuning solutions and he referred it in his presentation.
It is just a totally small world these days.
