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Database Error Detection and Recovery

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the bringing-out-the-dead dept.

CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an interview by Steve Bourne with Bruce Lindsay, responsible for a lot of the SQL and RDBMS we use today, in which they discuss error detection and recovery. My favorite part other than the photos is the definition of Heisenbugs - those problems that disappear only when you explicitly look for them."

4 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Rite of Passage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    The trouble is that a certain page renders wrong (what I think is wrong), the first time you look at it after opening Internet Explorer, and then displays correctly every time you look at it afterward, even with 'refresh'.

    That sounds like one of these bugs. I've had even worse - all the text on the page disappearing, but minimising and then maximising the window fixes it! Internet Explorer really is a piece of shit.

  2. Re:Rite of Passage by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Informative
    Don't forget the unintentional stack smashing, which is all too easy to do when you're writing tricky pointer code in C, and damned hard to find, especially when you barely understand the code you just wrote in the first place.


    For stuff like this, a wonderful debugging tool is valgrind -- it takes about 5 minutes to download and install (GPL, Linux/x86), and will find all kinds of memory-usage bugs in your program that you never even knew existed.

    --


    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  3. Re:Picture by SnowZero · · Score: 2, Informative

    The picture is Lindsay, not Bourne. See here for an earlier picture. I admit its a bit disturbing, but some CS people don't want to "waste" time shaving and getting their hair cut. I also need a haircut and a shave, but not nearly as bad as him. This picture has helped motivate me :)

  4. Re:Heisenbugs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Fome Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle ?