The default tuning parameters for InnoDB are completely braindead. I don't know why they can't do a better job with that. For instance, the default InnoDB buffer pool size is 8MB. This is woefully inadequate for any nontrivial database operation, because that means your database will only allowed to be able to use 8MB of RAM for data operations.
Have you experienced performance issues with a properly-tuned InnoDB?
Any database can experience data loss. That includes Oracle, SQL Server, and even your beloved PostgreSQL. This can happen for any number of reasons, including (but not limited to) hardware failure, power failure, user error, etc.
Postgres isn't going to help you if you forget a WHERE clause. Oracle isn't going to help you if your RAID is corrupted.
FWIW, I have never had a MySQL database lose data, and I have committed more "user errors" than I'd like to admit. Hell, I once pulled up the wrong window and moved the frickin' database file right out from under a running MySQL server to another volume. No data loss.
Also FWIW, it is possible to experience data loss with Postgres, where it is Postgres's fault (as opposed to the RDBMS not being able to recover from some external fault). Example 1. Example 2.
Watch some old B&W movies and note how much more "gay" the male actors tend to be than they do today.
I've seen plenty of old movies, and I always thought that the male actors were much more masculine than in modern films. Although as a straight man, I won't assert any expertise on what it means to "act gay".
This is modded funny, but only because it's true. I saw that in my own children when they were little.
My wife and I had the same pool of toys for the kids when they were little (under age 2 or so). See if you can guess the gender of the kid who:
Picked up a doll, threw it on the floor, and then bludgeoned it repeatedly with a hammer
Took a firetruck and put a blanket over it, tucked it into bed, read it an imaginary story, and give it a kiss goodnight?
Took oversized legos and built a massive structure with it in order to smash it
Took oversized legos and baked a cake and threw me the cutest little birthday party
Look, we didn't encourage any of this behavior, so we were surprised as anyone. And a lot of this happened before the kids even had gender awareness (18mos or so). How could they take cues from society about what their gender was supposed to do before they even knew their own gender?
If you have any clients on big hosts that assume 1-day or 1-week DNS,
I've used two behemoth ISPs, and neither of them cache DNS entries for an entire day. It's more like an hour.
Again, this website is not mission-critical. No applicant is going to care if my website is down for a few minutes or even an hour. Most of them aren't that great with computers, anyway (or don't even own one). I know this, because I do rent-to-own computers, furniture, appliances, etc. for them as a side business.
My only point in responding to you was that there is plenty of room in the hosting biz for both full-time and on-demand services. Amazon is not going to eat your lunch, but you'll never eat theirs, either.;)
You are saying that static compute requirements are better met by static computing platforms. Well... duh.
The whole point of the Elastic Compute Cloud is that it is for elastic computing use cases (usage spikes, nightly/monthly/periodic heavy processing, cold spare, etc.) It's not supposed to be cheaper than a dedicated server.
Let me tell you one way that I use EC2, and you tell me if you can give me what I want for cheaper. I own several apartment buildings, and I run my business website on a lousy, inexpensive, totally-inappropriate-for-business-use webhost (dreamhost). My website at dreamhost goes down every few months for minutes, hours sometimes, but I don't mind.
I have a process running that tries my business website every 15 seconds, and if I get 4 straight failures, the website is automatically failed-over to EC2, and DNS is automatically remapped. The entire process from first detected failure to my website's return to operation takes about 2.5 minutes, but obviously any client who has the wrong IP in his or her cache will take a while to access the site on EC2. This is a level of downtime that I am more than willing to live with.
The cost of this service? $0.10/hr, but only when I am using it. Can you provide me this service for less? My EC2 bill (for that usage, anyhow) runs about $1.50/year. Can you provide that service for $1.50/year or less?
We can build out a lot of excess capacity and just leave it sit in the rack. If we need more just push a button and light it up. I'm not sure an Amazon or anyone else could do it cheap enough to justify moving it.
With EC2, I can have a server fully configured and operational in 90 seconds at the cost of $0.10. How quickly can you get a server up and running, and at what cost?
That being said, EC2 is not for everyone, and it may not be for you. The whole point of the Elastic Computer Cloud, is that you bring up and shut down instances as needed. If your computing needs are static, and it sounds like yours are, then EC2 starts to get expensive. Their smallest server costs $72/mo+bandwidth if you leave it running 24/7.
But if your requirements are elastic (load spikes, nightly/monthly processing, cold spare, etc.), then EC2 is a godsend. I'm guessing that your current provider can't give you a server for an hour of processing for $0.10. And that $0.10 is really $0.10. There are no minimums, start-up costs, contracts, commitments, or anything. You pay only for what you use. Incredible!
P.S. If you need Windows instead of Linux or OpenSolaris, it will cost you $0.125/hr because you need to pay for Windows licensing.
Cloud companies will likely not make metering very easy or cheap because they *want* you to get carried away.
I've only used Amazon EC2, but I can tell you for a fact that they make it very easy for you to know where you stand. And yes, they also have hard limits.
With EC2, you are limited to 20 concurrent instances unless you request more. The cost of running 20 of their highest-priced servers is $18.00/hr. So as long as your auto-scaling system pings you when your resources go over your comfort threshold, you should be able to get yourself to a computer, cellphone, whatever, and override what your auto-scaler did.
Also, with EC2 you can always log into your account and get an up-to-the-second, detailed account activity listing. There is no surprises. They even provide a detailed calculator so you can forecast what your AWS bill will be.
EC2 is highly transparent. If you can spare $0.10, give it a try sometime. It's pretty neat.
It does not take 10 minutes to launch a server in EC2, even if you don't know what the hell you're doing. My servers launch in about 90 seconds, but I've taken the time to make my own custom images that are optimized to boot quickly.
A web head that just uses one of the stock EC2 images, and then uses the distro's package manager to install apache, etc., is going to take, at most, 5 minutes to come online. Yes, that's right, you can specify a boot-up script for your images, and the boot-up script can call 'apt-get install' to your heart's content.
Unless you get permission from Amazon, you can run a maximum of 20 instances. (Permission is not hard to get, but you do have to fill out a form and tell them why you need so many instances.) The cost of running 20 of their highest-cost images? $18.00 per hour. So as long as your auto-scaling solution pings you somehow when it scales up above a threshold that you're comfortable with, you can always get yourself to a computer and override what was done automatically. $18.00 is not going to break the bank, hopefully.
Summary: Yeah, you should do capacity planning, but auto-scaling is important to handle unexpected traffic surges. If your application is slow for 90 seconds, the world is not going to end.
For smallpox, the disease has been eradicated. No one gets smallpox vaccine anymore.
For the cervical cancer example, I assume you mean the HPV vaccine. In my opinion, this would be stupid not to get. A huge percentage of the population has HPV, so infection is probable once sexual activity begins. Infection increases risk for cancer. Who wants cancer?
Interesting that you say that. I never used to get the flu shot (I haven't gotten the flu in probably 25 years), but now I'm required to get it because my wife is on immune-suppressing medication. So I think flu vaccine might actually be category 2.
Chicken pox.
I've never understood vaccinating for chickenpox. My vague recollection is that the chickenpox vaccine loses effectiveness in adulthood--precisely the time you are most susceptible to complications related to the virus. Perhaps some type of booster is required to maintain the immunity?
I don't think the chickenpox vaccine is all that effective. A buddy of mine got all three of his kids vaccinated. Guess how many fell ill with the chickenpox? All three of them.
At any rate, the point I was trying to make is that there are very few, if any, vaccines that would truly fall into your category 3. Otherwise, why would anyone bother vaccinating against them? What's the point of taking a vaccine for something that won't bother you too much, and where you can't really infect others?
As most parents will tell you, your kid feels and looks like crap after getting a single vaccine.
My kids didn't look or feel like crap after getting vaccines.
On the other hand, my daughter looked and felt like crap after getting the chickenpox (at age 11 months... they get the vaccine at 12 months... needless to say, she did not require the vaccine).
That's funny, when I was like 2 I had to take a vaccination and I had some horrible reaction to it and almost died and they were 100% sure that was the cause. I also didn't react real well to my 17 year old tetanus shot but that was a bit more common.
Ummm... why did you get the tetanus shot if you knew you wouldn't react well?
I'm glad that you survived all of the "childhood diseases", but realize that they can lead to many serious complications, including death.
Measles and mumps, for instance, can be very serious. On the other hand, I'm not really sure why they vaccinate against chickenpox. The vaccine seems to protect children well, but the protection wears off in adulthood--when complication rates are much higher.
For example, 11-year-old Madeline Kara Neumann died from diabetes while her parents prayed over her, and those parents are now charged, as they should be, with reckless homicide. Why not meet deliberate failure to vaccinate a child with, say, a charge of child endangerment?
I'm not sure I get how one follows from the other.
In your example, the child had a known disorder with known treatment, and known consequences for withholding said treatment. Yet the parents refused to allow treatment (I don't know anything about the example, but Kara was 11 years old. I wonder what SHE thought?)
But the decision to withhold vaccinations is totally different (FWIW: we vaccinated all of our children and think it's stupid not to). Here you are putting your child at a small risk (thanks to high vaccination rates) for contracting some nasty, but in many cases treatable, diseases.
Again, I think that it is stupid not to vaccinate your kids, but I am unconvinced that a parent who withholds the chickenpox vaccine from his or her children is committing reckless homicide.
make extremely sure that you have all the facts before you make a decision regarding the welfare of your child. If you're not up to that responsibility, then you shouldn't have custody of your kids.
I think that's a little harsh. It's not like the little buggers come with instruction manuals.
I make decisions regarding the welfare of my children every day, and I'll tell you for a fact that I do not keep up on all of the relevant research that would support these decisions. If you're honest with yourself, you'll probably realize that you are in the same boat.
And what difference would it make? Much of the research out there conflicts with other research, anyway.
This is just a benefit that they are giving to their customers.
They are storing huge, public, commonly-used datasets for their customers, free of charge. If you are a customer and want to use, say, census data, you don't have to waste your time uploading the data, and you don't have to pay the $0.10/GB to upload the 200GB of data. Amazon already hosts the data for you. You just run a simple command, and the data are now instantly available for you to use however you want.
If you are not an AWS customer, then this service probably will not do you any good. Just download the data from census.gov and be done with it.
A) Home Bandwidth is a sunk cost. Transferring it wouldn't ahve cost you more then a penny more then you are paying. Assuming you pay a flat rate.
My time is not a sunk cost.
B) Transferring the data would made it available to you for free, anytime.
Most of these datasets are hundreds of GB in size. That's going to take a long time to download and it's going to mean buying a new hard disk and/or deleting your pornography collection.
The whole idea here is that if you are an AWS customer, and you're crunching a bunch of numbers, and need to crunch some census/genome/whatever data, you can type 'ec2-create-volume --snapshot <snapshotId>' and now that dataset can be attached to any EC2 instance. You don't have to wait to transfer the data in, and you don't have to pay the $0.10/GB to transfer the data in. The data sets are there for you when you need them.
If you are not an AWS customer, then this isn't for you. Move along, now.
Can someone make these datasets available to download as aggregate torrents, or are they available only once someone writes an application and gets it working on AWS?
Which part of the word "public" did you fail to understand? Of course you can download the datasets and do whatever you want with them. You can download them from Amazon, or you can download them from the original source.
AWS is just hosting them locally, free of charge as a courtesy to their customers. If you want to access/analyze census data as part of your application, the entire 200GB is available to you instantly with just a few command line calls. You don't have to upload or pay to store the data on AWS yourself.
If you are not an AWS customer and don't want to become one, then by all means just download the data from the Census Bureau, yourself. No one is trying to hide public data from you.
But even when you adjust for this by looking at families where this is true -- women still make less because of those aren't the prevalent attitudes. Women would likely be making the same as men if these attitudes didn't exist.
This condition would tend not to exist in a free market. If employers could hire women more cheaply than men, a rational employer would hire the cheap women. This, naturally, would stimulate the demand for women, and increase their cost until they were on par with men.
At my company, women do not make less than men for comparable work. The oft-quoted figure is that women make $0.75 on the dollar with respect to men, but I just keep asking people the same question: "If men cost 33% more then women, why would I ever hire a man? I'd have to have rocks in my head."
So blacks, women, and people under the age of 40 just aren't working hard enough? Because those are the people that are most likely to be making less than average wages, more likely to be working without benefits, etc.
Heh heh. I guess someone forgot to tell my wife not to be successful.
Success is being in the right place at the right time. That's 50% of it.
That may be true, but do you think that successful people were in the "right place at the right time" because of dumb luck?
Personally, I was at the right place at the right time to achieve success, but that is only because I spent a lifetime figuring out where the right place was and what the right time was, and then I went there when the time was right.
Slashdot Mirror
The default tuning parameters for InnoDB are completely braindead. I don't know why they can't do a better job with that. For instance, the default InnoDB buffer pool size is 8MB. This is woefully inadequate for any nontrivial database operation, because that means your database will only allowed to be able to use 8MB of RAM for data operations.
Have you experienced performance issues with a properly-tuned InnoDB?
Any database can experience data loss. That includes Oracle, SQL Server, and even your beloved PostgreSQL. This can happen for any number of reasons, including (but not limited to) hardware failure, power failure, user error, etc.
Postgres isn't going to help you if you forget a WHERE clause. Oracle isn't going to help you if your RAID is corrupted.
FWIW, I have never had a MySQL database lose data, and I have committed more "user errors" than I'd like to admit. Hell, I once pulled up the wrong window and moved the frickin' database file right out from under a running MySQL server to another volume. No data loss.
Also FWIW, it is possible to experience data loss with Postgres, where it is Postgres's fault (as opposed to the RDBMS not being able to recover from some external fault). Example 1. Example 2.
Watch some old B&W movies and note how much more "gay" the male actors tend to be than they do today.
I've seen plenty of old movies, and I always thought that the male actors were much more masculine than in modern films. Although as a straight man, I won't assert any expertise on what it means to "act gay".
This is modded funny, but only because it's true. I saw that in my own children when they were little.
My wife and I had the same pool of toys for the kids when they were little (under age 2 or so). See if you can guess the gender of the kid who:
Look, we didn't encourage any of this behavior, so we were surprised as anyone. And a lot of this happened before the kids even had gender awareness (18mos or so). How could they take cues from society about what their gender was supposed to do before they even knew their own gender?
If you have any clients on big hosts that assume 1-day or 1-week DNS,
I've used two behemoth ISPs, and neither of them cache DNS entries for an entire day. It's more like an hour.
Again, this website is not mission-critical. No applicant is going to care if my website is down for a few minutes or even an hour. Most of them aren't that great with computers, anyway (or don't even own one). I know this, because I do rent-to-own computers, furniture, appliances, etc. for them as a side business.
My only point in responding to you was that there is plenty of room in the hosting biz for both full-time and on-demand services. Amazon is not going to eat your lunch, but you'll never eat theirs, either. ;)
(you cannot simply say "well it's your right not to give out your SSN but if you don't, we won't give you this card")
This is simply false. No one is required to extend you credit.
FWIW, I Am A Landlord, and I require an SSN (credit check) to rent an apartment. You don't want to give it? Fine, you are rejected. Have a nice day.
You are saying that static compute requirements are better met by static computing platforms. Well... duh.
The whole point of the Elastic Compute Cloud is that it is for elastic computing use cases (usage spikes, nightly/monthly/periodic heavy processing, cold spare, etc.) It's not supposed to be cheaper than a dedicated server.
Let me tell you one way that I use EC2, and you tell me if you can give me what I want for cheaper. I own several apartment buildings, and I run my business website on a lousy, inexpensive, totally-inappropriate-for-business-use webhost (dreamhost). My website at dreamhost goes down every few months for minutes, hours sometimes, but I don't mind.
I have a process running that tries my business website every 15 seconds, and if I get 4 straight failures, the website is automatically failed-over to EC2, and DNS is automatically remapped. The entire process from first detected failure to my website's return to operation takes about 2.5 minutes, but obviously any client who has the wrong IP in his or her cache will take a while to access the site on EC2. This is a level of downtime that I am more than willing to live with.
The cost of this service? $0.10/hr, but only when I am using it. Can you provide me this service for less? My EC2 bill (for that usage, anyhow) runs about $1.50/year. Can you provide that service for $1.50/year or less?
We can build out a lot of excess capacity and just leave it sit in the rack. If we need more just push a button and light it up. I'm not sure an Amazon or anyone else could do it cheap enough to justify moving it.
With EC2, I can have a server fully configured and operational in 90 seconds at the cost of $0.10. How quickly can you get a server up and running, and at what cost?
That being said, EC2 is not for everyone, and it may not be for you. The whole point of the Elastic Computer Cloud, is that you bring up and shut down instances as needed. If your computing needs are static, and it sounds like yours are, then EC2 starts to get expensive. Their smallest server costs $72/mo+bandwidth if you leave it running 24/7.
But if your requirements are elastic (load spikes, nightly/monthly processing, cold spare, etc.), then EC2 is a godsend. I'm guessing that your current provider can't give you a server for an hour of processing for $0.10. And that $0.10 is really $0.10. There are no minimums, start-up costs, contracts, commitments, or anything. You pay only for what you use. Incredible!
P.S. If you need Windows instead of Linux or OpenSolaris, it will cost you $0.125/hr because you need to pay for Windows licensing.
Cloud companies will likely not make metering very easy or cheap because they *want* you to get carried away.
I've only used Amazon EC2, but I can tell you for a fact that they make it very easy for you to know where you stand. And yes, they also have hard limits.
With EC2, you are limited to 20 concurrent instances unless you request more. The cost of running 20 of their highest-priced servers is $18.00/hr. So as long as your auto-scaling system pings you when your resources go over your comfort threshold, you should be able to get yourself to a computer, cellphone, whatever, and override what your auto-scaler did.
Also, with EC2 you can always log into your account and get an up-to-the-second, detailed account activity listing. There is no surprises. They even provide a detailed calculator so you can forecast what your AWS bill will be.
EC2 is highly transparent. If you can spare $0.10, give it a try sometime. It's pretty neat.
A web head that just uses one of the stock EC2 images, and then uses the distro's package manager to install apache, etc., is going to take, at most, 5 minutes to come online. Yes, that's right, you can specify a boot-up script for your images, and the boot-up script can call 'apt-get install' to your heart's content.
Summary: Yeah, you should do capacity planning, but auto-scaling is important to handle unexpected traffic surges. If your application is slow for 90 seconds, the world is not going to end.
There's a lot that do fall into category 3, though. Measles and smallpox, for instance, and certain forms of cervical cancer.
I dunno, man.
Flu, for instance.
Interesting that you say that. I never used to get the flu shot (I haven't gotten the flu in probably 25 years), but now I'm required to get it because my wife is on immune-suppressing medication. So I think flu vaccine might actually be category 2.
Chicken pox.
I've never understood vaccinating for chickenpox. My vague recollection is that the chickenpox vaccine loses effectiveness in adulthood--precisely the time you are most susceptible to complications related to the virus. Perhaps some type of booster is required to maintain the immunity?
I don't think the chickenpox vaccine is all that effective. A buddy of mine got all three of his kids vaccinated. Guess how many fell ill with the chickenpox? All three of them.
At any rate, the point I was trying to make is that there are very few, if any, vaccines that would truly fall into your category 3. Otherwise, why would anyone bother vaccinating against them? What's the point of taking a vaccine for something that won't bother you too much, and where you can't really infect others?
As most parents will tell you, your kid feels and looks like crap after getting a single vaccine.
My kids didn't look or feel like crap after getting vaccines.
On the other hand, my daughter looked and felt like crap after getting the chickenpox (at age 11 months... they get the vaccine at 12 months... needless to say, she did not require the vaccine).
That's funny, when I was like 2 I had to take a vaccination and I had some horrible reaction to it and almost died and they were 100% sure that was the cause. I also didn't react real well to my 17 year old tetanus shot but that was a bit more common.
Ummm... why did you get the tetanus shot if you knew you wouldn't react well?
I'm glad that you survived all of the "childhood diseases", but realize that they can lead to many serious complications, including death.
Measles and mumps, for instance, can be very serious. On the other hand, I'm not really sure why they vaccinate against chickenpox. The vaccine seems to protect children well, but the protection wears off in adulthood--when complication rates are much higher.
What would you consider to be in your category 3 above?
For example, 11-year-old Madeline Kara Neumann died from diabetes while her parents prayed over her, and those parents are now charged, as they should be, with reckless homicide. Why not meet deliberate failure to vaccinate a child with, say, a charge of child endangerment?
I'm not sure I get how one follows from the other.
In your example, the child had a known disorder with known treatment, and known consequences for withholding said treatment. Yet the parents refused to allow treatment (I don't know anything about the example, but Kara was 11 years old. I wonder what SHE thought?)
But the decision to withhold vaccinations is totally different (FWIW: we vaccinated all of our children and think it's stupid not to). Here you are putting your child at a small risk (thanks to high vaccination rates) for contracting some nasty, but in many cases treatable, diseases.
Again, I think that it is stupid not to vaccinate your kids, but I am unconvinced that a parent who withholds the chickenpox vaccine from his or her children is committing reckless homicide.
I'm pretty sure the Hippocratic oath does not specify that doctors are required to commit insurance fraud.
make extremely sure that you have all the facts before you make a decision regarding the welfare of your child. If you're not up to that responsibility, then you shouldn't have custody of your kids.
I think that's a little harsh. It's not like the little buggers come with instruction manuals.
I make decisions regarding the welfare of my children every day, and I'll tell you for a fact that I do not keep up on all of the relevant research that would support these decisions. If you're honest with yourself, you'll probably realize that you are in the same boat.
And what difference would it make? Much of the research out there conflicts with other research, anyway.
This is just a benefit that they are giving to their customers.
They are storing huge, public, commonly-used datasets for their customers, free of charge. If you are a customer and want to use, say, census data, you don't have to waste your time uploading the data, and you don't have to pay the $0.10/GB to upload the 200GB of data. Amazon already hosts the data for you. You just run a simple command, and the data are now instantly available for you to use however you want.
If you are not an AWS customer, then this service probably will not do you any good. Just download the data from census.gov and be done with it.
A) Home Bandwidth is a sunk cost. Transferring it wouldn't ahve cost you more then a penny more then you are paying. Assuming you pay a flat rate.
My time is not a sunk cost.
B) Transferring the data would made it available to you for free, anytime.
Most of these datasets are hundreds of GB in size. That's going to take a long time to download and it's going to mean buying a new hard disk and/or deleting your pornography collection.
The whole idea here is that if you are an AWS customer, and you're crunching a bunch of numbers, and need to crunch some census/genome/whatever data, you can type 'ec2-create-volume --snapshot <snapshotId>' and now that dataset can be attached to any EC2 instance. You don't have to wait to transfer the data in, and you don't have to pay the $0.10/GB to transfer the data in. The data sets are there for you when you need them.
If you are not an AWS customer, then this isn't for you. Move along, now.
Can someone make these datasets available to download as aggregate torrents, or are they available only once someone writes an application and gets it working on AWS?
Which part of the word "public" did you fail to understand? Of course you can download the datasets and do whatever you want with them. You can download them from Amazon, or you can download them from the original source.
AWS is just hosting them locally, free of charge as a courtesy to their customers. If you want to access/analyze census data as part of your application, the entire 200GB is available to you instantly with just a few command line calls. You don't have to upload or pay to store the data on AWS yourself.
If you are not an AWS customer and don't want to become one, then by all means just download the data from the Census Bureau, yourself. No one is trying to hide public data from you.
But even when you adjust for this by looking at families where this is true -- women still make less because of those aren't the prevalent attitudes. Women would likely be making the same as men if these attitudes didn't exist.
This condition would tend not to exist in a free market. If employers could hire women more cheaply than men, a rational employer would hire the cheap women. This, naturally, would stimulate the demand for women, and increase their cost until they were on par with men.
At my company, women do not make less than men for comparable work. The oft-quoted figure is that women make $0.75 on the dollar with respect to men, but I just keep asking people the same question: "If men cost 33% more then women, why would I ever hire a man? I'd have to have rocks in my head."
So blacks, women, and people under the age of 40 just aren't working hard enough? Because those are the people that are most likely to be making less than average wages, more likely to be working without benefits, etc.
Heh heh. I guess someone forgot to tell my wife not to be successful.
Success is being in the right place at the right time. That's 50% of it.
That may be true, but do you think that successful people were in the "right place at the right time" because of dumb luck?
Personally, I was at the right place at the right time to achieve success, but that is only because I spent a lifetime figuring out where the right place was and what the right time was, and then I went there when the time was right.