Sunday, June 8, 2008

JHUG Java Tech Day 07-06-2008

I am too lazy to write a detailed report for the event. Anyway, Paris already did it and Dionysios will certainly write about it soon. I just want to once again declare my willingness to give Netbeans a try (and once again I won't find the time to do it :-)) after the Netbeans presentation by Mikhail Kondratyev. The javascript editor, Mercurial support and the project groups (I really miss them in Eclipse) are of particular interest to me.

I will keep one quote from Kirk Pepperdine 's talk and that is:
"Databases cannot scale"
His presentation was very interesting but I have various db issues so this particular quote got stuck in my mind.

The Jbossians gave very vivid and enjoyable talks. Jboss 5 is something that we 've been expecting for quite some time and another feature set presentation just made us even more anxious, so Jboss guys, get it out soon! The event finished with Jboss cache and despite the fact that I haven't used it before, Manik 's presentation managed to keep my interest.

Ok, now that I finally did my lazy man 's report I cannot close without saying a good word about the lunch break that was really great. Hungry developer cannot code (Slightly altered version of a Greek proverb).

2 comments:

adamo said...

[Relational] Databases do not scale on two occasions:

1. You use them in a situation that they do not fit.
2. You do not know how to model your problem.

Therefore, if you have database problems, then databases are the wrong tool for the problem. Usually people who use such aphorisms in speeches are people who really do not get the relational model and misunderstand it for the subset of SQL that they daily use.

And you are not that kind of person / developer. It strikes me badly that you liked such an aphorism. Since every 20 years CS reinvents itself, variations of the network model do resurface, but we already know that they will fail.

past said...

Nah, he's just using the phrase out of context to spark a heated debate and get more page hits! Kirk Pepperdine was talking about performance tuning on multicore and clustered environments and mentioned that databases are still struggling to scale in such scenarios. It's no secret that nobody in their right mind would talk straight to a DBMS without an intermediate memory caching layer, where scalability is paramount.