I’ve been doing a fair amount of technical research lately, thinking about my career. Let’s face it, it’s a Microsoft world, but when it comes to big iron, it’s usually a *NIX derivative. All said, MySQL is great, but PostgreSQL is the new heavyweight contender. And Perl or Python apparently.
So here’s my quick list (including some personal pet projects):
- OpenBSD – for all of my
pf needs
- OpenSolaris – because ZFS is amazing and this site runs on it
- PostgreSQL – it’s the new thing
- Python – I’ve got friends at Google and they swear by it!
- Perl – this is going to take much more work
- CUBRID – Need to run it on a *NIX box for replication testing, but there’s that annoying Java dependency
- CouchDB – Its not SQL, it’s MapReduce
“The conclusion is inescapable, that to be in the presence of even the meanest, lowest, most repulsive specimen of humanity in the world is still closer to God than when looking up into a starry sky or at a beautiful sunset.”
Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage, pg. 46
“…the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God…”
Luke 5:1, ESV
Here’s a quick list (mostly for myself) of RDBMSes I want to check out:
Open Source
CUBRID | PostgreSQL | CouchDB (NoSQL)
Commercial
Hyperion | Teradata | Vertica | Netezza | ParAccel | AsterData
Mixed Licensed
Greenplum | Virtuoso
There’s certainly more to this, and it may seem that I’ve overlooked things in my experience, but this is about deeper dives and figuring out what makes each tick and more importantly, how they’re differentiated. CUBRID is currently my fancy, but the documentation is very abstruse since it’s global release early last month.
These days, it seems I see more and more problems related to hard disks. This isn’t primarily on servers, although we’ve had our fair share of volume corruption, but on workstations.
The Problem
Users call in and complain about uncorrelated slowness, unresponsive applications, and even the inability to log into the domain when their password and network connection are great. Typically the Application log will be full of regular and frequent application or GPO errors. In the worst cases the System log will have NTFS, disk, and ftdisk errors, which is an absolute sign of disk problems.
Diagnosis
Beyond CHKDSK, there’s not much else the way of volume and partition checks built into Windows itself. You can determine the hard drive manufacturer and download their disk tools as well to check the physical state of the disk. The problem can be either logical (address by CHKDSK or repartitioning and formatting) or physical (click, click, click). Hopefully, it’s never the latter.
Recovery
You can run CHKDSK until you’re blue in the face, and it may never solve your problems. Instead, back up you data first. Then you can use DISKPART to CLEAN the partition scheme and recreate it and format the drive. This will address MBR and MFT corruption, which is first a logical issue. You may even want to use vendor supplied tools to completely wipe the drive clean before re-creating partitions and volumes.
This is also a great time to do some research on disk partition alignment.
But, if the problem is the underlying physical disk, you’ll need to get a new disk before putting data back. Sure it sounds simple, but this all comes down to a large time expenditure, because you’ll be schlepping bits from either install DVDs or a backup drive. And that can take a while.
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