LVM BY EXAMPLE
In this post I’ll be discussing the fundamentals of the Logical Volume Manager in Linux, usually simply referred to as LVM. I’ve used LVM occasionally over the years, but for the most part I would just create a single big partition on my disk, toss XFS on it and call it a day. Recently that changed when I decided to replace my aging home media server with a new beast of a box that I wanted to do a lot more than simply serve up content.
ACCESSING PRIVATE VARIABLES IN THE JVM
In this I’ll discuss a uncommonly used but useful technique of accessing variables and methods which have been declared as private in the JVM, using the Apache Commons Lang library to work around the restriction. The description from the project page reads: The standard Java libraries fail to provide enough methods for manipulation of its core classes. Apache Commons Lang provides these extra methods. A couple weeks ago I was working on a project that required parsing some CQL statements.
MIGRATION TO HUGO
After almost five years of using Pelican as my static site generator, I’ve migrated to the Hugo tool. While I enjoyed Pelican and it’s flexibility, it’s performance started to bother me when building a site from scratch. Depending on what else was running on my laptop, a full build could take 15-20 seconds. This isn’t the end of the world, but in comparison Hugo takes less than 100 milliseconds. If it was simply a matter of build time, I may not have really cared that much, but I’ve been using Hugo to build the site and documentation for Reaper, the open source repair tool we maintain at The Last Pickle.
WORKING WITH GRPC, KOTLIN AND GRADLE
Edit: The source code for this post is located on GitHub Sometimes when I travel I end up trying to learn something completely new. For a while I was playing with Rust, Capn Proto, Scala, or I’d start a throwaway project at an airport and just tinker. My passion is and has always been databases. I’ve maintained this blog for roughly a decade, starting with MySQL for the first part of my career but moving to Apache Cassandra several years ago, and am now a committer and member of the PMC.
I AM STILL WRITING!
If you were to take a look at my blog, you’d think I’d flipped a table and left the tech industry. Not the case at all. I’m still writing, but less frequently, and on the TLP blog. I intend to start writing here again, but the material will likely focus around topics other than Cassandra, since I’m already writing about it elsewhere. Here are the posts I’ve authored in the last 6 months or so:
INSTACLUSTR NOW SUPPORTING APACHE CASSANDRA 3.7 AS LTS
Instacluster announced on the Apache Cassandra user list that they are making their supported branch of the Cassandra 3.7 tick tock release publicly available (see GitHub repo). Bug fixes that go into 3.8, 3.9, etc will be back ported to the Instacluster LTS. You can read the blog post about the decision. Some people I’ve talked to are concerned about having different commercial entities doing long term supported releases, and this concern is understandable.
RUSTYRAZORBLADE RADIO, A DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM PODCAST
I haven’t blogged in a while, which is a bummer because I was determined to write an article a week for the entire year. I haven’t even come remotely close to that goal. I’ve recently switched jobs from DataStax to Consulting with The Last Pickle, which has been pretty hectic. Add to that 3 presentations at the Cassandra Summit and the end result is very little time for personal projects.
WORKING RELATIONALLY WITH CASSANDRA
I’ve spent the last 4 years working in the big data world with Cassandra because it’s the only practical solution if you have a requirement to scale out, uptime is a priority, and you need predictable performance. I’ve heard different ways of describing where Cassandra fits in your architecture, but I think the best way to think of it is close to your customer. Think of the servers your mobile apps communicate with or what holds your product inventory.
CASSANDRA DATASET MANAGER PREVIEW 1 RELEASED
One of the problems of learning a new database is getting used to a new way of data modeling. PostgreSQL looks different from Redis, which is different from a graph, and is different from Cassandra. Cassandra Dataset Manager aims to reduce the time spent in a frustrating trial and error process trying to learn proper data modeling techniques for Apache Cassandra and Datastax Enterprise by providing curated data models which have been designed by professionals with years of experience.
CASSANDRA DATASET MANAGER VIDEO PREVIEW
I posted a short preview showing off some of the work I’ve been doing recently on Cassandra Dataset Manager, a tool to help new Cassandra users learn how to create proper data models. There’s documentation, but it’s still under heavy development.