Oh MacBook Air, why do you frustrate me so?

Trust me, I have wanted the MBA since the first Intel MacBook Pros graced the stage. Its been a long, long wait as my PowrBook G4 12" aged disgracfully.

So two months of MacBook Air use... there are many, many things I like. Things I don't like that MacWorld would never publish

• It always defaults to Wireless even when the USB Ethernet dongle is plugged in. Now my PowerBook always used to default to the Ethernet when it was plugged in. This is painful because in my office you have to have VPN running over wireless. I have sat there on many occasions wondering my Outlook was not returning... just to find out that I had not switched off the wireless. Regression #1.
• Leave the bloody windows where they were! I loved the fact that my PowerBook, when plugged and unplugged from an external monitor remembered where I had placed windows. My MBA does not. I unplug and the laptop screen gets my widows. Thats fine. Now when I plug my external monitor back in... all the windows are still on the laptop screen. I now have to move them all over. Regression #2.
• Battery life 5 hours. You're kidding right? Typical use about 3.5 hours. This is just about the same as my PowerBook. I take the same set of flights between the West and East coasts in the USA. Both machines will run out of juice before I get to JFK. It would be tough to say Regression #3, but what the hell. At best its the same.
• MySQL. Ok can't blame Apple for this one, but what the hell, 10.5 has been out for a age and still no support for 10.5. Its a pain in the blinking neck, especially since there is no Oracle for Intel/Apple either... and Rosetta does not seem up for the job.
  

The 51st first date

Well it feels like it anyway. The MBA seems to be mostly running, I have had a few "sad macs" anymore then that will sum up the total for my 12" PowerBook over a four year period.

What i like

• The track pad is out of this world. The gestures just work. Two fingers to scroll down a window, three finger to go back a web page... I can feel how little I have to move the mouse to get stuff done!
• Its thin and sexy, but seems to have a similar cost of ownership as a super model / super car. It feels like I'm spending as much time under the hood as driving!
  
• Microsoft Office 2004 works just fine under Rosetta. I see all the sites complaining about loss of Macros in Office 2008, so I think I'm happy to keep the macros and run under emulation.
  

What I would like to see improve

• It takes a long, long time for it to pick up a signal on the airport. My PB picked up the SSID within seconds, the MBA take take 30-60 seconds.
• I'm not seeing the 5 hours, more like 3.5. I have to figure if its not going to sleep correctly.
• Can't get WebEx to work. I know others in my organization that have Intel Mac running 10.5.2 and it works and the PB running 10.4.11 is fine...
• Bigger keys, really! I guess I'm not the greatest of touch typists, but the PB 12" keys were close togther with no gaps... my finger feel like they are constantly going between keys. It may be also because the keyboard is so much larger
  

To be or not to be... that's the (Microsoft) word

The setup of the MacBook Air (or as I found others call it the MBA) continues. The latest problem appears to be Microsoft Office. After the Migration I was left with a bunch of what OS-X thought were shell scripts, as you can see below.



So I took the drastic step on reinstalling Microsoft Office. Drastic? Well I know what I pain in the backside it is to install and then apply the many, many patches... but I did and now my Office install looks like a correct Application from OS-Xs point of view.

Too orangey for crows..

So my battle with the MacBook Air continues. So lets recap

• Migration assistant failed leaving the Air in an undetermined state
• Remote Disk re-install of the O/S caused the Air to "sad mac"
• Purchased a SuperDrive which allowed me to re-install the O/S
• Further failures of the migration assistant

I tried one final O/S install and migrate last night. Left it running at midnight, with it saying it needed 7.5 hours... thinking that it may not be finished in time for me to take to work.

Wake up this morning with low expectations... but I was wrong, the migration succeeded! On first inspection, all appears to be Ok except for Microsoft Office 2004. Per the 80's UK advertisement for an Orange Drink called Kia Ora, I think Microsoft Office is just too orangey for the new MacBook Air...

Trouble at mill...

Its an old northern English expression dating from the Industrial Revolution. Basically it dates from the good old days of bad cotton mill owners and workers with few rights. The trouble came when the workers figured out that as a group they could do something collectively...

So my MacBook Air arrived. It actually arrived when I was out of town and had to wait four very long days to get home and play. As usual the opening of an Apple product is always good, the delight as you open and peel and the amazement of how thin the Air is. First observations...

• Its amazingly thin
• Keyboard feel good
• Screen looks like it could be bigger... hummm Air v2.0?
• Its amazingly thin
  

The last point is worth repeating, its amazingly thin. So like all my other Macs, I started it up and then went through the migration from my trusty 12" PowerBook G4 and then the reality set in. The Air is just not ready. Its seriously 3-6 months too soon.

Why? So here's the last 24 hours synopsis

• Migration over wireless. My PowerBook has about 65GB of stuff I want to transfer. A bunch of Applications but lots of Data. I first kick off the migration, the estimate is 12 hours. Bad but Ok. Will be ready in time for me to go to work. Twenty minutes later, it says 14 hours, another 20 minutes 16 hours... so I kill the migration.

• Migration over USB/Ethernet. This looked better, first started at 4 hours, but 90 minutes into it its up to 19 hours and then progress stops. Time to start again me thinks.

• Left with a machine with some disk space chewed up. I think "lets start from scratch"

• Remote Disk. This just did not work for me. I wanted to reinstall OS-X so you have to install the "Remote Install Max OS X" utility on another system. I first tried my PowerBook running 10.4.11. The Air book got halfway through the boot and then I got a "sad mac". This was over Ethernet. Tried Wireless, same problem. So I then try a G5 iMac running 10.4.11... exactly the same problem, the Air "sad macs" halfway through the boot. Bugger.

• Ok, so go to the Apple Store, burn $100 on a Apple specific USB/DVD drive (yes, I know it called a SuperDrive). I finally got to install OS-X again. Now I'm making progress, only 24 hours so far.

• Try the migration again, again it dies partially through the migration and it claims I no longer have a startup disk. Bugger, another install is required.

• Install OS-X again

• Again at the Migration assistant... it now fails to connect to the PowerBook, despite multiple re-boot of both systems.

I have been an Apple fan for many, many years and have converted many, many people. I'm growing disillusioned by products that Apple appear to be releasing that I pay hard earned cash for that frankly are not ready. Don't start me on my 8 core MacPro.

I'll keep you updated. Maybe after I throw the Air under a cotton loom. Trouble at Mill indeed, and here's Monty Pythons version of events

The four riders of the MacBook Air

Gallop, gallop... so Mr. Jobs finally give me a choice to replay my trusty 12" PowerBook G4. I had my prediction, was I right?

• Similar form factor, thinner would be nice
• I would say a profound YES
• Proper keyboard, i.e. a MacPro not a MacBook keyboard
• Another YES
• Faster processors, my 1.33GHz is not coping well these days
• 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz... not Flash Lightening, but much faster
• 2GB Memory
• YES
• Better battery life (hell this is a wish-list)
• YES
• 2 x USB 2.0
• NO. This is a real bummer, one USB... dude come on!
• 1 x Firewire
• NO. How exactly am I going to transfer my account info?
• iSight built in
• YES
• DVD burner
• NO
• Line in
• NO
• Headphone
• YES
  

So I think I got the key things right. Love how it looks, not sure I love only one USB and no Ethernet... but as the acid test defines it, I order one as the Apple Store opened... :-)

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!

My new disk has just eaten planet earth!

Here are some things that trouble me
-- Disk are really no more reliable than they were 3-5 years ago
-- Manufacturers are chasing capacity, 3x or 4x growth over the same period of time
-- The failure rate per MB stored grown as the same rate

I conclude that my data is being stored less reliable than 3-5 years ago. That really worries me. Sure, RAID-5, 5 and 6 will help. But it means that my data is much more vulnerable whilst the RAID group is being rebuilt, since the amount of time it takes to rebuild a RAID group with 1TB disks is proportionally longer than 73GB disks. I'm now in a much wider window to suffer a double or triple disk failure, because the disks are no more reliable. Yikes! Oh and a double disk failure. Well that's not the worst of my problems. Read error whilst re-building a RAID group. Yup, they happen all the time.

Given the price of disks, I am seriously considering RAID-1 everywhere. Why? Well it helps scale my I/O (see my other posts on supporting very large data warehouses), but it gets me away from RAID group reconstruction, I simply just need to re silver the disk, I don't need to recompute parity which kills my performance to the unaffected data.

So before you flame me, just think about why we had the other RAID schemes. It was to increase the reliability of unreliable disks (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). RAID-4 and 5 saved capacity because they stored parity not a physical copy of the data. But I am faced with an excess of capacity, because I need to size my system for I/O not capacity. In the old days you sized it for capacity and as a function of that you got an excess (well normally at least) of I/O. What used to require a whole shelf of disks now can be stored on a single disk. Great for capacity and density, horrible for the fact that I now have 1/12th or 1/14th of the I/O because disks have essentially remained unchanged since the introduction of 15k RPM disks.

RAID-1. Here we go.

Oh dear, you are out of capacity sir

I have to run very (and I mean close to 250TB) Data Warehouses. There are a huge number of challenges with these sort of environments, getting the data loaded, keeping the performance scalable and stable, backing up and restoring... its a much longer list!

So I have used Oracle, Sybase IQ, DB2, MySQL. I recently was introduced to Greenplum (I don't work for them), who provide an appliance (oh, how trendy) that combines a Sun "Thimper" (X4500 I think) which has 4 x AMD processors and 48 x 500GB disks, with a clustered version of PostgreSQL. I was intrigued. But then it made me think. I have 24TB of storage in 4U of rack space, that is really dense but I also have a large number of disks. Typically I am disk bound, so more dense disks makes a great deal of sense. I do end up wasting space (i.e. capacity) since I don't always need the storage BUT I do need the I/O. The push for greater capacity disk it not really helping me, so I really wish the disk manufactures would stop that race. Its just like the camera manufactuers putting more mega-pixels into your point-and-shoot. Above 6MP who cares right. Over 500GB on a disk, who cares if I ever want to do a mixed random rea and write workload (i.e. a database workload).

So why am I mad? All they are giving me is a higher rate of failure per MB of stored data, since the disks are no more reliable than they were, like in 1999

Here are some things that trouble me
-- Disk are really no more reliable than they were 3-5 years ago
-- The capacity has grown dramatically
-- The failure rate per MB stored is that same
-- Therefore the disk have a higher failure rate per MB stored

So Mr. Disk manufacturer, please learn that I need I/O and I need reliability. I don't need any more stinking MB per platter.

Crying over spilt beer

So, some blogs and I stress the some part here, have turned into "my last employer sucked because..." diatribe. I guess people need to vent, but I really don't care if I am honest. There have been several recently on the NetApp versus EMC. Well I have some interest here. I need to store things reliably, performance does matter to my application users and yes cost is always an issue. Sure, even my a supplier gives it to me at no cost (that will be the day huh?) there is still cost of managing the thing.

I guess the thing that gets my goat here, is that all these blogs read (and I read them all) like "your technology sucks because of X, Y or sometimes even Z". I guess that is the difference between somebody who cares about business versus the technology. The technology guy will say my technology is best because of some great feature that his or her competitor does not have. Well I don't give a monkeys adam to be perfectly clear. What I really care is the business value. I don't care that EMC's BCV's are technically superior than NetApp FlexClones. Sure the business value is that I can clone my application in an instant. If, I need to make a change to it, for example to change is SAP ID or Oracle Database SID, then I change a block. Well for BCV's, which are basically a copy-on-write, well darn it, I have a complete physical copy after I make the first byte of change. Its cool that NetApp FlexClones only store the change, so if I had used that technology then I would have saved storage right?

Wrong. I never, read never store my copies of Dev and Test on the same piece of storage as production. That would be dumb. Not just for performance, but you think I would let developers see a real copy of actual data. Our current financial data? Your HR records? Your are kidding right? So, no matter what I have to make a physical copy, simply to ensure the operational integrity of my system and privacy of the data. Now, NetApp does provide me business value in making the secondary copies basically cost free. The technology is cool, but that is real business value to me.

Do I expect that both can make a consistent point in time copy, sure. But both have consistency group features that allow that.

So, vendors, don't blind me with science. Tell me something that I care about. Tell me how you are different. Don't slag off your competitors, if you talk about them *that* much, then sure I'm going to get a trail unit. And sure, I'm going to love it to. Remember to speak about the business value and how it solves my problems, not the technology. Its your money and quarters figures to throw away.

The cult of the 12" PowerBook

So I sit here on my aging but much loved 12" PowerBook after a coast-to-coast trip in the USA. I still smile like the Cheshire cat when I see people with there jumbo 15" or 17" machines trying to open up their laptops in economy class. The 12" PowerBook, now discontinued, is probably the best form factor I have ever used if you spend your life in 9B (substitute your own favorite seat). I was happy to see that on my last trip I counted four other people who still hang on grimly to their beloved machines, waiting for that day when Apple thinks small is beautiful again. We can only hope.

So what would I like? Well
- Similar form factor, thinner would be nice
- Proper keyboard, i.e. a MacPro not a MacBook keyboard
- Faster processors, my 1.33GHz is not coping well these days
- 2GB Memory
- Better battery life (hell this is a wish-list)
- 2 x USB 2.0
- 1 x Firewire
- iSight built in
- DVD burner
- Line in
- Headphone

Things I could live without
- Modem
- Firewire 800
- If I really had to I could loose the DVD burner, if I have USB then I can plug in an external burner

Its still great to see so many of these machines in use, but Leopard is coming and Apache + MySQL + Eclipse just about brings my machine to its knees.

Coming up next time: "Stop crying over spilt beer"