PostgreSQL Connection Pooling: Part 1 – Pros & Cons

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, ‘threads’ were a programming novelty rarely used and seldom trusted. In that environment, the first PostgreSQL developers decided forking a process for each connection to the database is the safest choice. It would be a shame if your database crashed, after all.

Since then, a lot of water has flown under that bridge, but the PostgreSQL community has stuck by their original decision. It is difficult to fault their argument – as it’s absolutely true that:

Locked Up By Lock-In

When you start evaluating a solution, you are going to get a laundry list of features and functionality that you are supposed to use as criteria for selection. Some are important, like the ones that give you the feature set you need to get your job done. Others are less important for the majority of use cases. One thing tends to stand out for me though.

Since the dawn of platforms, I believe the first piece of comparison marketing has been “avoids lock-in”. You know you’ve seen it too. For those that may not be completely familiar with the term, “lock-in” describes a platform where all the components need to come from the same manufacturer or group of manufacturers in order to work properly. An example would be if a networking solution required you to purchase routers, switches, access points, and firewalls from a single vendor in order to work properly.

Chain of Fools

Lock in is the greatest asset a platform company has. The more devices they can sell you the more money they can get from you at every turn. That’s what they want. So they’re going to do everything they can to keep you in their ecosystem. Continue reading

Weekly Wrap: AWS Makes It Rain, Extends Credits to Open Source Projects

Learn Scrum and Six Sigma and prepare for your PMP exam with this $29 bundle

Whether you’re interested in managing a team or you just want to better communicate your goals with your colleagues, project management skills will come in handy. Many people learn how to manage a team on the job, and while hands-on experience is invaluable, learning a structured approach to project management will make your team much more effective. If you want to learn the skills necessary to keep your team running at peak efficiency, this $29 bundle is for you.To read this article in full, please click here

AMD CPUs Will Power UK’s Next-Generation ARCHER2 Supercomputer

AMD has picked up yet another big supercomputer win with the selection of its second-generation Epyc processors, aka Rome, as the compute engine for the ARCHER2 system to be installed at the University of Edinburgh next year. …

AMD CPUs Will Power UK’s Next-Generation ARCHER2 Supercomputer was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.

Usage-based billing with NetFlow and sFlow

The post Usage-based billing with NetFlow and sFlow appeared first on Noction.

You Cannot Have a Public Cloud without Networking

Listening to (some) industry evangelists you would believe that there’s no future in being a networking engineer. After all, all workloads will move into the cloud, and all clients will connect through a universal 5G network… but even if that utopia eventually comes true, you can’t get away from the laws of physics (and the need networking infrastructure).

TL&DR: our new online course will help you master the shiny new world. You can register right now or keep reading ;)

HackPPL: a universal probabilistic programming language

HackPPL: a universal probabilistic programming language Ai et al., MAPL’19

The Hack programming language, as the authors proudly tell us, is “a dominant web development language across large technology firms with over 100 million lines of production code.” Nail that niche! Does your market get any smaller if we also require those firms to have names starting with ‘F’ ? ;)

In all serious though, Hack powers large chunks of Facebook, running on top of the HipHopVM (HHVM). It started out as an optionally-typed dialect of PHP, but in recent times the Hack development team decided to discontinue PHP support ‘in order open up opportunities for sweeping language advancements’. One of those sweeping advancements is the introduction of support for probabilistic reasoning. This goes under the unfortunate sounding name of ‘HackPPL’. I’m not sure how it should officially be pronounced, but I can tell you that PPL stands for “probabilistic programming language”, not “people”!

This paper is interesting on a couple of levels. Firstly, the mere fact that probabilistic reasoning is becoming prevalent enough for Facebook to want to integrate it into the language, and secondly of course what that actually looks like.

Probabilistic reasoning has Continue reading

Delta Lake Project Raises Linux Foundation Flag

The Potential Of Red Hat Plus Power Is Larger Than Exascale

Red Hat is coming onto IBM’s books at just the right time, and to be honest, it might have been better for Big Blue if the deal to acquire the world’s largest supplier of support and packaging services for open source software had closed maybe one or two quarters ago. …

The Potential Of Red Hat Plus Power Is Larger Than Exascale was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

VMware on AWS gets an on-premises option

VMware has taken another step to integrate its virtual kingdom with Amazon Web Services' world with an on-premise service that will let customers automate database provisioning and management. The package, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware is available now for customers running VMware vSphere 6.5 or later and supports Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. Other DBs will be supported in the future, the companies said.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware on AWS gets an on-premises option

VMware has taken another step to integrate its virtual kingdom with Amazon Web Services' world with an on-premise service that will let customers automate database provisioning and management. The package, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware is available now for customers running VMware vSphere 6.5 or later and supports Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. Other DBs will be supported in the future, the companies said.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware tightens Amazon Web Services cloud integration

VMware has taken another step to integrate its virtual kingdom with Amazon Web Services' world with an on-premise service that will let customers automate database provisioning and management. The package, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware is available now for customers running VMware vSphere 6.5 or later and supports Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. Other DBs will be supported in the future, the companies said.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware tightens Amazon Web Services cloud integration

VMware has taken another step to integrate its virtual kingdom with Amazon Web Services' world with an on-premise service that will let customers automate database provisioning and management. The package, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware is available now for customers running VMware vSphere 6.5 or later and supports Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. Other DBs will be supported in the future, the companies said.To read this article in full, please click here

Verizon Picks Lanner to Built Next-Gen uCPEs

Ericsson Bribery Settlement Bogs Down Q3 Earnings

Three-way merger creates major new cloud solutions provider

Three major digital infrastructure providers have announced a merger that will create a solutions powerhouse, with the real winners being their channel partners, Dell and Cisco.AHEAD, Data Blue, and Sovereign Systems announced plans to merge their firms, creating a company with around $1.3 billion in revenue and a wide range of skills. All three firms specialize in modernizing digital business infrastructure and assisting enterprise clients transition to cloud computing, but each has its own area of specialty, and those areas complement one another.AHEAD specializes in enterprise service management, DevOps, monitoring and analytics, and security. Data Blue covers managed services and provides deep networking expertise. Sovereign Systems specializes in cloud, VMware, and ServiceNow expertise. While all three firms operate in multiple industries, the combined company will be especially deep in healthcare, insurance, and financial services.To read this article in full, please click here

IT Career Roadmap: Infrastructure software manager

A new and growing title in IT, infrastructure software manager is becoming a vital role for organizations, especially those embarking on digital transformations.

Attend a #LearnDocker Workshop This Fall

Join a Docker for Developers Workshop Near You

From October through December, Docker User Groups all over the world are hosting a workshop for their local community! Join us for an Introduction to Docker for Developers, a hands-on workshop we run on Play with Docker. 

This Docker 101 workshop for developers is designed to get you up and running with containers. You’ll learn how to build images, run containers, use volumes to persist data and mount in source code, and define your application using Docker Compose. We’ll even mix in a few advanced topics, such as networking and image building best-practices. There is definitely something for everyone! 

Visit your local User Group page to see if there is a workshop scheduled in your area. Don’t see an event listed? Email the team by scrolling to the bottom of the chapter page and clicking the contact us button. Let them know you want to join in on the workshop fun! 

Join the Docker Virtual Meetup Group

Don’t see a user group in your area? Never fear, join the virtual meetup group for monthly meetups on all things Docker.  

The #LearnDocker for #developers workshop series is coming to Continue reading

SDN for Physical and Virtual Networks in Space- and Cost-Constrained Environments