My Network Storage ate my capacity

I love Networked Storage, whether its Network Attached Storage (NAS) or a Storage Area Network (SAN). They have their pros and cons which I will not go into here. As I have written about before, I run lots and lots of Data Warehouses and they are a pain in the bottom for many reasons. In some ways a bit like owning a super car like a Ferrari

• Their initial cost of ownership is very high
• The older they get the less valuable they are, but you will never sell them
• They are often in the shop for expensive maintenance which always takes much longer than the technician told you it would
• Often are found is a fetching red color
  

Ok so I'm stretching it here a little. Big warehouses are painful to backup and restore so I love Network Storage, mostly because they have cool Snapshot and Replication technology. All the vendors are different, some better than others. However, they all suffer from the same problem. Whilst they can do smart things at the storage layer (e.g. just replicate blocks that have changed), for me as a DBA, sometimes a backup take a long time and sometimes it don't. I chosoe backup, but it could be just about any operation. It just not obvious until I try it and then cross my fingers that I'm going to meet my SLA. Bang, the SLA gun went off again.

Well fear not, there may be light at the end of the tunnel. I spoke to a rather nerdy group of developers at the W- Hotel after a long day at Oracle Open World in November. They promised the world (well after a free cocktail I was listening, well kind of). They said their "open Beta" was running and they could

• Analyze an Oracle database
• Provide on-line analytics of growth and change rates
• And for me the killer application, show me how much space I could save over time with Thin Provisioning and other storage tricks
  

So, by the time I got back from Oracle Open World I had forgotten the flyers, free cocktails and the (rather nice) free t-shirt they gave me. Not sure what plucked my interest (Oh I know, another dead database that need recovery because the storage admin had not keep up with the storage consumption)... so I tried it out and it actually seems to work. Who are these people?

MyVirtual-Lab.com. So if you are inclined to give a bunch of Mission District (I'm guessing here) hipsters a spin you might start getting some decent answers to life, the universe and everything... well at least find out when your database will run out of space.

Speaking to them at Oracle Open World, they said they are working on a VMware, Viridian and Xen Capacity Planning tool. If its anything like their Database tools, it will be very sweet indeed.

One Laptop Per Child ... it arrives!

So I promised many things when I started this blog. One I did not mention was that I'm kind of turning my 5 year old and 2.5 year old into techo junkies. They have long since had fully control of the Tivo recording schedule, start and stop their shows, record new shows etc. The poor Tivo is very confused, often thinks I'm a Latin (because of all the Soccer that gets recorded) pre-schooler (because of the kids shows) who likes Sci-fci (because of all the Dr. Who episodes).

The other side effect of being in technology is that sometimes you get the philanthropy urge. I first read about One Laptop Per Child when it first made a splash in the press. Seemed a real noble effort but one that seemed doomed to failure. Why? Cost. The effort to get mega-corp USA to do things not for profit... just did seem like it had the odds stacked against it. Well I was wrong, and I am very glad that I was wrong!

So our OLPC arrived today as part of the "Give one, Get one" program. Essentially to pay for 2 OLPC's, one goes to a needy cause you get the other. Not quite the $100 target price, these clock in at $200. But I figured for $400 I get a kid-ready machine that its the kids and the kids only and I get a $200 donation to write off against tax at the end of the year. Come on give me a break, a charity is just a charity!

So, instead of boring you here, I have started another blog just on life with two kids under the age of five and an OLPC.

Building a GWT application

So this blog has been a bit quite. Well been building an Application you see with Google's Web Toolkit (GWT). So here is the premis

-- Write Java code for the Server and Client halves of the Application
-- Get a simple mechanism that gives you AJAX behind the covers
-- A library of useful GUI widgets
-- A community of Developers that dish out more content than you have had hot dinners

So far so good. Well I get to write *and* debug the client and server side in Java code using the same debugger. Its cool. Basically, its turns your client Java code into JavaScript. Old trick I hear you say. So yes, this has been done many times before, but in GWT defense it kind-a-works. But, and there is always one of those, here's some things I would like to see

-- Java 1.5 Support. It just kills me to go back to untyped Arrays, Enums etc. Come on guys, get with it
-- The generated Java Script behaves more like Java code. Found on a few occasions that code that should have worked, didn't. Re-wrote it to use a different set of methods and it works. Smells of a slightly incompatible or incomplete conversions
-- More standard stuff

The last one is key. During the development I switch from 1.3 to 1.4... and boy a lot of 3rd party controls died. Fair enough, but basic things like
-- Date Pickers
-- Rounded tab bars
-- Floating (bubble) hints

...should all be built in by now... dude this is Web 2.0!