Database testing for all version changes (including minor versions)

We know that SQL statement compatibility can change with major database version upgrades and that you should adequately test for them. But what about minor version upgrades?

It is dangerous to assume that your existing SQL statements work with a minor update, especially when using an augmented version of an open-source database such as a cloud provider that may not be as transparent about all changes.

While I have always found reading the release notes an important step in architectural principles over the decades, many organizations skip over this principle and get caught off guard when there are no dedicated DBAs and architects in the engineering workforce.

Real-world examples of minor version upgrade issues

Here are two real-world situations common in the AWS RDS ecosystem using MySQL.

  1. You are an organization that uses RDS Aurora MySQL for its production systems, and you upgrade one minor version at a time. A diligent approach is to be one minor version behind unless a known bug is fixed in a newer version you depend on.
  2. You are an organization that, to save costs with a comprehensive engineering team, uses AWS RDS MySQL (not Aurora) for developers and some testing environments.

I’ve simplified a real-world example to a simple SQL statement and combined these two separate use cases into one simulated situation for demonstration purposes.

mysql> SELECT content_type FROM reserved2;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT VERSION(), @@aurora_version;
+-----------+------------------+
| VERSION() | @@aurora_version |
+-----------+------------------+
| 8.0.28    | 3.04.2           |
+-----------+------------------+

mysql> SELECT VERSION();
+-----------+
| VERSION() |
+-----------+
| 8.0.34    |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

This is a simple enough query, this runs in AWS RDS Aurora MySQL 3.04.02 (which is the present Aurora MySQL long-term support (LTS) release). This is based on MySQL 8.0.28 which is FWIW not a supported AWS RDS MySQL version anymore, the minimum is now 8.0.32 (Supported MySQL minor versions on Amazon RDS).

It runs in AWS RDS MySQL 8.0.34 which is for example what version your developer setup is.

An AWS RDS MySQL Aurora minor version upgrade

You decide to upgrade from Aurora 3.04.x/3.05.x to 3.06.x. This Aurora version is actually based on MySQL 8.0.34 (the version you just tested in RDS). Without adequate due diligence you roll out to production only to find after the fact that this SQL statement (realize this is one simplified example for demonstrate purposes) now breaks for no apparent reason.

mysql> select content_type from reserved2;
ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'content_type from reserved2' at line 1

mysql> SELECT VERSION(), @@aurora_version;
+-----------+------------------+
| VERSION() | @@aurora_version |
+-----------+------------------+
| 8.0.34    | 3.06.0           |
+-----------+------------------+

Now, you need to investigate the problem, which can take hours, even days of resource time, and a lot of shaking heads to realize it has nothing to do with your application code but to do with the minor version upgrade. Which you simply cannot roll back. See Risks from auto upgrades with managed database services for some interesting facts.

Wait, what just happened?

If you performed this upgrade to the latest AWS RDS Aurora MySQL 3.06.0 version sometime after the release on 3/7/24 and before 6/4/24, a 3-month period, you are left with one choice. You have to make application code changes to address the breakage.

How many man-hours/man-days does this take? If you upgraded to this version in the past two weeks, technically you have a second choice. You can go to the most current version, 3.07.0, but you have already spent time in testing and deploying 3.06.0, which you need to re-test, then rollout in non-production accounts and then rollout to production. How many man-days of work is this?

It may be hard to justify the cost of automated testing until you uncover a situation like this one; however, it can easily be avoided in the future.

So why did this happen?

Lets look deeper are the fine-print

RDS Aurora MySQL 3.06.0

Aurora MySQL version 3.06.0 supports Amazon Bedrock integration and introduces the new reserved keywords accept, aws_bedrock_invoke_model, aws_sagemaker_invoke_endpoint, content_type, and timeout_ms. Check the object definitions for the usage of the new reserved keywords before upgrading to version 3.06.0. To mitigate the conflict with the new reserved keywords, quote the reserved keywords used in the object definitions. For more information on the Amazon Bedrock integration and handling the reserved keywords, see What is Amazon Bedrock? in the Amazon Aurora User Guide. For additional information, see Keywords and Reserved Words, The INFORMATION_SCHEMA KEYWORDS Table, and Schema Object Names in the MySQL documentation.

From AWS RDS Aurora MySQL 3.06.0 release notes (3/7/24).

While less likely you would name a column aws_bedrock_invoke_model, column names of content_type and timeout_ms are common words.

RDS Aurora MySQL 3.07.0

Aurora MySQL version 3.06.0 added support for Amazon Bedrock integration. As part of this, new reserved keywords (accept, aws_bedrock_invoke_model, aws_sagemaker_invoke_endpoint, content_type, and timeout_ms) were added. In Aurora MySQL version 3.07.0, these keywords have been changed to nonreserved keywords, which are permitted as identifiers without quoting. For more information on how MySQL handles reserved and nonreserved keywords, see Keywords and reserved words in the MySQL documentation.

From AWS RDS Aurora MySQL 3.07.0 release notes (6/4/24). Clearly someone at AWS saw the breaking changes and it was reverted. While it’s possible many customers may not need to catch this situation, this is one specific use case.

Conclusion

The moral of the database story here is Be Prepared.

You should always be prepared for future breaking compatibility. You should test with a regular software upgrade cadence and leverage automation as much as possible.

Next BaseLine is a software product that automates testing for many use cases, including this simple SQL compatibility issue. By adding to your CI/CD pipeline can help identify and risk in all SQL database access, including new engineering software releases or infrastructure updates. This product can be implemented in a few hours, and cost significantly less than the large amount of time lost with this one realistic situation.

Next BaseLine - Helping to create a better and faster next version of your data-driven product

Footnote

This example was not uncovered from a customer situation. It was uncovered and used as a demonstration because I read the release notes.

Test Case


SELECT VERSION();
SELECT VERSION(), @@aurora_version; /* No way to comment out the !Aurora example */
CREATE SCHEMA IF NOT EXISTS test;
USE test;
CREATE TABLE reserved1(id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, accept CHAR(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'N');
CREATE TABLE reserved2(id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, content_type VARCHAR(10) NULL DEFAULT 'text/plain');
CREATE TABLE reserved3(id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, timeout_ms INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL);
SELECT accept FROM reserved1;
SELECT content_type FROM reserved2;
SELECT timeout_ms FROM reserved3;

Digital Tech Trek Digest [#Issue 2024.10]

Google advances with vector search in MySQL, leapfrogging Oracle in LLM support

As the title states, GCP is the first MySQL-managed service to offer “vector” support. Clearly the buzz-word of 2024 along with RAG, genAI and LLM is so 2023.

IMO, Oracle should just rename MySQL Heatwave to Heatwave. It would distinguish the product as unique, which is is,

4 Signs You Belong In a Startup Accelerator for SaaS Founders

YouTube

Accelerators help early stage startup and enable businesses to grow faster, get mentorship, obtain funding/equitya and are generally industry specific. In this example Tinyseed focusses on B2B.

Some tips for considering an acclerator.

1. You know your numbers and your focussing on the right ones
– MRR
– Churn
-LTV or ACV – Lifetime value, Annual Contract Value
Vanity metrics/candy metrics. Email Subscribers, Free Trial Users, Unique Visitors. Without context on how they are growing paid users

2. You experimenting, especially in marketing and sales
– You should always be tweaking and finding the right market.

3. Your coachable
– You are going to use the resources provided and you are vulnerable (receiving a lot of feedback, lower your defenses)
– Your accountable to groups, e.g. masterminds
– Be open to criticism

4. You are fast and furious
– Your drive and need to be moving forward, never satisfied with status quo
– you try new things
– Nothing is perfect at the beginning, experimentation is a key

The Founder’s Guide to Stealth Startups

EverydaySpy

In this postcast “The Diary of a CEO“, Steven Bartlett interviews Andrew Bustamante. Andrew is a former covert CIA intelligence officer and US Air Force combat veteran. He is the founder of EverydaySpy, an online education platform that teaches real-world international espionage techniques that can be used in everyday life.

Messaging builds narrative. Don’t use mass marketing via social media, believe in your brand.
Marketing, present a message, crafted with an emotion, responsing showing motivation.

Competition is for Losers with Peter Thiel (How to Start a Startup 2014: 5)

This is a very old presentation that was recently re-shared with me.

In this presentation, Thiel starts off his presentation with the concept of “Avoid competition”

Creating value is a very simple formula of two things. Create X$ for the world, and you capture Y% of X where X and Y are independent variables.

A big piece of a small pie can drastically affect profit margin. All United State airline carriers combined compare with Google. Much smaller, much higher value.

He goes on to talk about effectively two types of businesses, a competitive business or a monopoly, there is no in between.

Are you talking about data the WRONG WAY?

Scott Taylor, a colleague I discovered lived in a neighboring town and whom I could meet in person after attending a virtual conference event, asks a very valid question about the importance of data management. He re-iterates the “3Vs” of effective storytelling, Vocabulary, Voice, and Vision. You can discover a lot more information in his book Telling Your Data Story: Data Storytelling for Data Management. The art of Effective Data Storytelling is something I practice daily. It is easy for a data specialist to have the data facts and visualize the data, but the art is being able to drive change by combining data, visualizations, and what I consider the most important component, narrative. I highly recommend Brent Dykes book of the same name, and when combined with Be Data Driven by Jordan Morrow you have a cradle of strategy when discussing data management to organizations that want to become a data-driven organization. It is way more difficult to implement than any plan and strategy you may read and prepare for.

About “Digital Tech Trek Digest”

Most days, I take some time early in the morning to scan my inbox newsletters, the news, LinkedIn, or other sources to read something new about professional and personal topics of interest. I turn what I read into actionable notes in a short, committed time window, summarizing what I learned, what I should learn and use, or what is of random interest. And thus my Digital Tech Trek.

Some of my regular sources include TLDR, Forbes Daily, ThoughWorks Podcasts, Daily Dose of Data Science and BoringCashCow. Also Scientific American Technology, Fareed’s Global Briefing, Software Design: Tidy First? by Kent Beck, Last Week in AWS, Micro Newsletter to name a few.

New Additions to my reading

SaaS Developer Community

Digital Tech Trek Digest [#Issue 2024.07]

Everything you need to know about seed funding for startups

A recent call with a startup founder funded by TinySeed led me to learn about MicroConf and Rob Walling. (Thanks Tony for the info). This has led to a lot of great info in several new newsletters and videos including this video. A few very valuable tips I learned included the answer to Why should you raise funds at all? The 1-9-90 rule, and different types of funding including Indie funding. It was interesting to find out that the TinySeed accelerator is 1 year, and not 13 weeks, which is common in NY. Rather than sharing my notes, go watch the video.

5 Books That Paved My Path to Entrepreneurial Success

I have not heard of any of these books, and I have such a long list, perhaps I need to publish my list and elicit feedback on prioritizing. The list from this article is as follows:

    1. Mastering negotiations with never split the difference
  1. 2. Embracing risk with skin in the game
  2. 3. Building habit-forming products with Hook
  3. 4. The roadmap to a billion dollar app in How to Build a Billion Dollar App

Visualization

Last week I was at two events in Brussels. I chose to head to London to fly home. I found this map present in many tube stations (The tube is the London Metro Subway). It’s been a decade since I was in London, and over two decades since I lived in the UK. I found the new map great. When I mentioned it as a good visualization, I was surprised that locals of the London area thought it was horrible. I saw the value in the visualization, but perhaps others see it like art, “in the eyes of the beholder”. It could also be “habit”.
London Tube Map - 2024 presentation
Typical London Tube map

Cats and Dogs

How many *NIX `cat` memes can there be? Well, a lot cat is the most misused thing by programmers new to Linux. I cringe every time someone uses it wrong in a bash script. Thread below with proper uses of cat only.

Hey, dogs, you are in the count also with HTTP STATUS DOGS. My picks are 300 Multiple Choices, and 429 Too Many Requests for me.

Upcoming Events on my radar

About “Digital Tech Trek Digest”

I take some time early in the morning to scan my inbox newsletters, the news, LinkedIn, or other sources to read something new covering professional and personal topics of interest. Turning what I read into some actionable notes in a short, committed time window is a summary of what I learned, what I should learn and use, or what is of random interest. And thus my Digital Tech Trek.

Some of my regular sources include TLDR, Forbes Daily, ThoughWorks Podcasts, Daily Dose of Data Science and BoringCashCow. Also Scientific American Technology, Fareed’s Global Briefing, Software Design: Tidy First? by Kent Beck, Last Week in AWS to name a few.

Random

I shared with a colleague on Feb 9. “3 SQL databases walked into a NoSQL bar. A little while later, they walked out because they couldn’t find a table.”

Digital Tech Trek Digest [#Issue 2024.05]

Because the world needs better dashboards

While my professional interests in Building Better Data Insights Faster rely on using visuals and narratives to show data-driven results, “Starting from first principles” is the question you have to ask. Identifying the quality of data sources, the time to delivery, and the confidence of accuracy are critical aspects of any dashboard.

Source: WrapText by Equals

This is the second article I’ve read about Equals in a week, and while I’m not ready to go back to a spreadsheet, this company has some great previous posts with excellent content, such as the 2023 summary and How to ship fast. An appropriate statement would be.

What a year. We embraced AI. We reimagined BI. We waved freemium goodbye. And as the cliché goes, we’re only just getting started.

[Last Week in AWS] Issue #352: New Year, New You, Here’s December in Review

Damm right, I think you are giving too much created by saying “a year”. More than once I had to rewrite code because AWS was years behind standard Python releases. AWS Lambda adds support for Python 3.12.

Whatever was going on with the delays in getting new language runtimes out a year or more after the language version itself was released seems to have been resolved. I wonder how long it’ll take that unpleasant chapter to fade from the collective awareness around Lambda.

Source: Last Week in AWS

Latency is the new outage

While technically a video that I listened to with Getting Started with ElastiCache for Redis Performance & Cost Optimization, this needs to be a slogan used more frequently. It is so true. The speaker in the opening minutes also describes some compelling reasons why our proliferation of data can contribute to a negative impact.

Source: Random AWS reading.

About “Digital Tech Trek Digest”

Most days I take some time early in the morning to scan my inbox newsletters, the news, LinkedIn, or other sources to read something new covering professional and personal topics of interest. Turning what I read into some actionable notes in a short, committed time window is a summary of what I learned, what I should learn and use, or what is of random interest. And thus my Digital Tech Trek.

Some of my regular sources include TLDR, Forbes Daily, ThoughWorks Podcasts, Daily Dose of Data Science and BoringCashCow. Also Scientific American Technology, Fareed’s Global Briefing, Software Design: Tidy First? by Kent Beck, Last Week in AWS to name a few.

Can a picture replace a text description?

Data visualization, data storytelling, and data lineage are all ways to better describe and visualize a specific situation for a set of data. Generally, I find these techniques are used as a means to uncover or identify information that ultimately pertains to individuals. For example how many sales have we made across time/location/business unit? How many customers do we have? How many social media photos has a person provided over a period of time? Unfortunately, this is not the kind of data that I feel has real-world meaning to me. It doesn’t describe the advancements made in the biomedical field to help fight disease, it doesn’t tell us the amount of energy that we have saved or the amount of energy that we failed to collect and the impact that has locally and globally on our world, or it doesn’t describe valuable human experiences in history about people and places. I find this value in data visualizations of others.

During a recent vacation, I thought about the impact of the visualization of my experiences and just how much information was not collected, and how much information was collected but is of average or poor value or is extremely valuable. How hard it was to collate even what I had collected, and to who or what the value of this information is? While these are personal experiences and not that of a commercial organization, Google certainly informed me of how many people were viewing a public image I uploaded and a comment I made of an iconic Australian location and food.

Inaccessible value in a text description

I recently caught up with a very dear friend. She had lost her husband 10 years ago after more than 50 years of marriage. He kept a written diary every year since 1946, starting a year after the end of world war II that he served it.

So from 1946 to 2012, that is 66 years, there is a wealth of information that includes personal feelings, expectations, and perhaps thoughts about what is going well and what’s not going well. It would also include valuable information about the world view from a very intelligent and influential individual. These diaries are still located today on the same shelf in the same office they have for the short 25 years I was aware.

To draw a conclusion to the question with a data analogy. A single copy, in a single location of un-indexed information, which first-hand sources know has unlocked potential. It is also an immutable and finite time capsule. It would also IMHO contain great value in feelings, emotions, family, and history that is important to a small community. Could a picture represent this data?

A picture

Whilst traveling I used my camera as a means to record the experiences that I was having with my family. I am a photographer and not a videographer so my expression is a picture rather than a video and optionally audio. Sidebar, we did give our child a diary for this vacation to write in, however the attempt to build this new habit only lasted 2 days. Forming new habits can be hard.

But can a picture relay adequate information to describe when and where this photo was taken, why it was taken, how I felt, who I was with, what did it inspire, how did it make me think about related experiences in the past.

Today there is technology now that can take a picture and describe the contents, effectively it could create a summarized description of the picture. With additional metadata such as Exif data where you can extract more details such as time and location. With machine learning you can do picture comparison to identify locations even if location was not specified with the photo.

You can now have AI create an image from a description, if only my Dall-E-2 account would not keep crashing I would try it out.

A picture on its own only contains some value. If you collect all this information and combined with other sources, for example when I used my phone and not my camera, this is stored use google photos. This company can use this information to create a timeline of where you were, when you were there, perhaps you were with and combined with all the sources this company has such as your Google calendar, and Gmail it can and does create a timeline much like the timeline you see in social media platforms such as Facebook if you are regularly user of such a platform.

So we have not a picture, but a collection of pictures, including those not taken or owned by yourself, combined with other structured and unstructured data that can provide an improved timeline.

In comparison in data visualization there is usually a time component for most data. Animated data visualizations which can be awesome usually represent data across time.

Example pictures

Let me give you some simple images as an example and I’ll add some information that is not included in the photos specifically what is available in today’s modern technology such as GPS location. First my existing EOS 5D camera does not provide that information and second I do not enable that on my phone because I want to keep that information private and Google does not provide a capability that would enable me to store personal information but do not share that information for consumption by for example use that information for other machine learning capabilities.

Emu

I had never seen an emu roaming in the wild in Australia before this trip. From a conversation with a friend on a different topic did she provide information that driving between Jeriderie and Narandera you will find emus in the wild. Indeed we did multiple times on this specific highway without having to randomly goto some isolated place hoping for the same outcome.

This is a truly unique animal without only an ostrich looking similar.
Emu in nature, NSW Australia

AWS Rekognition output with values >90% categorize this photo with Antelope, Animal, Mammal, Wildlife, Bird, Sheep, with parents categories of Wildlife, Mammal, Animal. Well that is horribly wrong. An Antelope has 4 legs, this clearly has 2. An Emu is not a Mammal.

AWS Rekognition Response – August 2022. Larger version

That was so bad (and unexpected) I wanted to give the technology another chance with a different emu pic.
Emu in nature, NSW Australia
This time AWS Rekognition output with values >90% describe this photo with Bird, Animal, Emu, Sheep, Mammal, and at 88% Antelope and Wildlife. So if you get Emu (that has two legs), why would you say Sheep which is 4 legs and not a bird? And if you said Emu and Bird, why would you then select Antelope, also with 4 legs, but so not a Bird.

AWS Rekogintion Response – August 2022. Larger version.

Feeling a bit duped by technology, I tried Google Image search next. The first image was recognized as “Tasmanian Emu”. I didn’t know there was such a thing, but it did say Emu and all other related visual matches were Emu. I was surprised it only picked 3 of the 4 animals in the first pic.

The second image was recognized as “Tasmanian emu”, “Emu” and “Common ostrich”. Doh!

Platypus

This next image I was confident AWS Rekognition would be spot on. It’s even a more unique animal, and there are no grass or obstacles to obscure the animal. Boy was I wrong.

Platypus in nature, Eungella QLD Australia

AWS Rekognition output with values >90% describe this photo with Wildlife, Animal, Mammal and at 87% Hippo. It is true that a Hippo is a mammal, and you do find them in water, but?

Platypus in nature, Eungella QLD Australia
Finding an even more evident picture that anybody would recognize, well the software could not. Wildlife, Animal, Mammal. At 85% Lizard, Reptile and Otter. A lizard is not a mammal?

This post is starting to turn into a self proposition even more than I thought.

Had I provided GPS, it would have said Eungella, QLD and any more additional searching would show that it’s a popular destination for finding a Platypus in nature. In-fact a precise GPS location would give the name literally as “Platypus Deck”. here. A human would quickly articulate this by reading text from basic online searches.

Would AWS Rekognition discount values responses if it could know the precise location or even the country. Somehow I feel not.

For what it’s worth, a Google Image Search of Platypus yields tons of pictures AWS should use in it’s recognition validate and ML model.

What this image does not say with whom I was traveling with, that is a local of the area and his comment that in 20 years I’ve not seen platypus as easily and playful as this. It would not describe that on social media, many locals were surprised with the quality of images and videos. It would also not describe what the video shows, how they dive and then burrow into the muddy water using their bill, then rise to the surface and dive again.

Trying Google Image search again, the first image yielded platypus which it is. For the second image, google found no results. Again, I was rather shocked in comparison to the images of platypus a Google Image search shows and the fact this second image showed more detail IMO.

If I correctly label this image with alt text as a platypus, will Google Image search in future show this within search results, or will the output of correct recognition improve at a later time.

Other animals

At this time I decided to give up on animals. An echidna is a unique animal unlike almost any other, a quokka is also, but does resemble a small kangaroo. I do have a hippo, I’ll have to try that out.

Other images

I decided to try some more easier images and I was again overall disappointed and therefore decided to stop adding content here after these two images.

Surfers during summer waves in Oahu

AWS Rekognition above 90% accuracy was Sea, Ocean, Water, Nature, Outdoors, Person, Human, Surfing, Sea Waves, Sport, Sports.
Google Image search gave the first visual response as Viewing summer Swells on Oahu, which is spot on. It was Oahu, not Maui (wonders if I have a surfer image from Maui), and it was more importantly in Summer and not winter which has much larger waves.

Finally I tried to pick one of the most uniquely observable images that you will only find in one location and this image also included readable text.
U.S.S Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor Hawaii

AWS Rekognition above 90% was Flag, Symbol, Watercraft, Vessel, Vehicle, Transportation, Waterfront, Water, with Ferry and Boat being 88%. Rather shocked it could not pull out not 1 but 2 specific and clear areas of text and used this. The visible text is “U.S.S ARIZONA MEMORIAL” and “USS ARIZONA BB 39″.

Google Image search described this image as the Pearl Harbor National Memorial which is exactly what it is (in summary).

Even a picture of the Sydney Opera House, a truly unique building did not yield the result of Sydney via AWS Rekognition.

I look forward to this post being indexed to see if Google can give the source of the image as my site. I am also going to have to look into Google APIs for image recognition rather then the very slow and painful web browser option.

In conclusion

To return to the question of this post. Can a picture replace a text description? In short, no. A picture can summarize and quickly convey meaning simply because of how our mind processes visuals but it cannot replace a full text description.

In these examples I would expect almost every reader to be about to summarize these images more accurately, whereas (accessible) machine learning has a very long way to go. Even with location information, only some people would be able to add additional value or better infer an initial description, however all the information I could convey that is of applicable value is not within the picture itself. You cannot interpret additional meaning and value without more context, or without intrinsic knowledge. Using the surfers example, you can find waves used by surfers all around the world. In Oahu specifically in summer, surfable waves are infrequent and small, whereas in winter apparently they are very different.

With data storytelling, a data visualization is going to provide a similar outcome. Better visualizations will contain color and legends that visually describe information more clearly. They will also offer additional insights in creative ways, such as magnifications or clear differentiators. Should photographs as these shown here, automatically contain further context that is shown just in the image. Should image recognition automatically suggest titles that can be further edited by the author? Should an audio summary of the image be able to be recorded with the image? Should any single picture use context of other pictures around locality or time or similarities in the view to build a better picture. It is interesting to consider how technology could improve to provide greater value to the consumer.

How much text is needed is an entirely different question. Is the saying “A picture is worth a 1,000 words” approximately accurate?

Even a complex picture that takes months to review all the detail does not replace a full text description. If you would like an example for comparison checkout the “L. Tellier Kitchen Poster”. A piece of art that I own.

Reviewing your strengths and areas for improvement

The end of the year is often a time to review the progress of your yearly goals and to set new goals for the next year. These goals may include improving your professional and personal development. There are many different ways to assess your personality for your profession and over the decades I participated in both employer-sponsored assessments and personal improvement assessments. Some of these have included Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®), the Facet 5 Personality Profile, NERIS Type Explorer®, and StandOut® strengths assessment.  This StandOut® assessment was part of the onboarding process a year ago and is also available by my employer to repeat at no cost. This different opportunity from other assessments I have undertaken has enabled me to re-assess my strengths as I review this year and reflect on goals for next year. 
 
Your StandOut® assessment lists the top two roles which “are the focal point of all your talents and skills. They represent your instinctive way of making a difference in the world.”. You also see a ranking of the remaining seven roles, which was most helpful the second time when my results were slightly different, however, the top three roles were overall consistent.

Right now, you can take this StandOut® assessment for free(1)

During this time I also found online audio descriptions of my original top two roles, these being Creator and Teacher. What I liked about this audio addition was a different description of the written report. While I do not wish to repeat the information you can find online of these two roles or the roles that may best match your strengths, I found both the written summary and audio to be a precise reflection of who I am and “are the focal point of all your talents and skills. They represent your instinctive way of making a difference in the world.”. Here is a summary of my top two roles:

Creator

  • “Creators make sense of the world, pulling it apart, seeing a better configuration, and creating it.” 
  • “As a creator, the first question you ask in any situation is what do I understand? When you look out at the world,  you don’t jump right in and leap to conclusions, instead, you stop, you take a step back, and try to look thru the superficial details at the surface, and get underneath to the causes of the effect we see on the surface”. (audio intro translation)

Teacher

  • “Teachers are thrilled by the potential they see in each person. Their power comes from learning how to unleash it.”
  • “As a teacher the first question you ask in any situation is what can I learn? What can (s)he learn?  You take your own development very seriously, your inquisitive, you read, you want to grow, you want to develop, and you see your life as a constant journey of development for yourself… and you also take other peoples development seriously. You see little increments of growth in others and you get a kick out of these”. (audio intro translation)

While information from assessments can be an affirmation.  Sometimes a key point can be completely wrong.  This happened with my Facet 5 report from several years ago, where one line really stuck out. “Having to spend too much time on the following elements has been shown to be demotivating …Being asked to be creative”. I could not find that line to be any further from the truth. My creativeness extends from the professional outlook in problem-solving to the numerous personal activities I undertake, from creating a children’s card and board game, writing a self-published infants board book and creating new products without plans from 100% recycled wood to name a few.  I am glad that the StandOut® description for creator included  “put things in a more creative configuration”.  This was a pleasing correction.

No assessment is perfect, however they can help reaffirm your strengths and can also offer insights into areas of improvement you may wish to incorporate into your future goals.

(1) *This is not an endorsement or promotion as an employee.*

Re-posted on LinkedIn

TDD for Infrastructure

Test Driven Development (TDD) is an important principle for producing quality software. This is not a new concept. The Extreme Programming (XP) agile methodology (1999) outlined the concept before the acronym became more widely accepted as “Another requirement is testability. You must be able to create automated unit and functional tests… You may need to change your system design to be easier to test. Just remember, where there is a will there is a way to test.” Another clear way to describe the hurdles TDD has encountered as a common sense approach is “This is opposed to software development that allows code to be added that is not proven to meet requirements.”

Infrastructure setup is still software. All setup should have adequate testing to ensure at anytime (not just during installation or configuration) any system is in a known state. While Configuration Management (CM) works with the goal of convergence, i.e. ensuring a system is in a known state, testing should be able to validate and identify any non-conformance and not to attempt to correct.

The Bash Automated Test System (BATS) is a known framework for shell scripting. It is very easy to use.

Good habits come from always doing them. Even for a quick test of a running MySQL server via vagrant for a blog post, the automated installation during setup includes validating a simple infrastructure setup via a bats test.

$ tail install.sh

...
sudo mysql -NBe "SHOW GRANTS"
systemctl status mysqld.service
ps -ef | grep mysqld
pidof mysqld
bats /vagrant/mysql8.bats

Rather than having some output that requires a human to read and interpret each line and make a determination, automated it. A good result is:

$ vagrant up
...
    mysql8: ok 1 bats present
    mysql8: ok 2 rpm present
    mysql8: ok 3 openssl present
    mysql8: ok 4 mysql rpm install
    mysql8: ok 5 mysql server command present
    mysql8: ok 6 mysql client command present
    mysql8: ok 7 mysqld running
    mysql8: ok 8 automated mysql access 

A unsuccessful installation is:

$ vagrant provision
...
    mysql8: not ok 8 automated mysql access
    mysql8: # (in test file /vagrant/mysql8.bats, line 60)
    mysql8: #   `[ "${status}" -eq 0 ]' failed
The SSH command responded with a non-zero exit status. Vagrant
assumes that this means the command failed. The output for this command
should be in the log above. Please read the output to determine what
went wrong.

$ echo $?
1

This amount of very simple testing and re-execution of testing either via ssh or a re-provision highlighted a bug in the installation script. Anybody that wishes to identify please reach out directly!

...
# Because openssl does not always give you a special character
NEWPASSWD="$(openssl rand -base64 24)+"
mysql -uroot -p${PASSWD} -e "ALTER USER USER() IDENTIFIED BY '${NEWPASSWD}'" --connect-expired-password
# TODO: create mylogin.cnf which is more obfuscated
echo "[mysql]
user=root
password='$NEWPASSWD'" | sudo tee -a /root/.my.cnf
sudo mysql -NBe "SHOW GRANTS"
systemctl status mysqld.service
ps -ef | grep mysqld
pidof mysqld
bats /vagrant/mysql8.bats

A simple trick with a BATS test is to echo any output that will help debug a failing test. If the test succeeds no output is given, if it fails you get the information for free. For example, lets say your test is:

# Note: additional security to both access the server via ssh
#       and accessing sudo should be in place for production systems
@test "automated mysql access" {
  local EXPECTED="${USER}@localhost"
  run sudo mysql -NBe "SELECT USER()"
  [ "${status}" -eq 0 ]
  [ "${output}" = "${EXPECTED}" ]
}

Execution will only provide:

 ✗ automated mysql access
   (in test file /vagrant/mysql8.bats, line 62)
     `[ "${output}" = "${EXPECTED}" ]' failed

What you want to see to more easily identify the problem is:

 ✗ automated mysql access
   (in test file /vagrant/mysql8.bats, line 62)
     `[ "${output}" = "${EXPECTED}" ]' failed
   root@localhost != vagrant@localhost

This echo enables a better and quicker ability to correct the failing test.

...
  [ "${status}" -eq 0 ]
  echo "${output} != ${EXPECTED}"
  [ "${output}" = "${EXPECTED}" ]
...

Testing is only as good as the boundary conditions put in place. Here is an example where your code used a number of environment variables and your testing process performed checks that these variables existed.

@test "EXAMPLE_VAR is defined ${EXAMPLE_VAR}" {
  [ -n "${EXAMPLE_VAR}" ]
}

The code was subsequently refactored and the environment variable was removed. Do you remove the test that checks for its existence? No. You should not ensure the variable is not set, so that any code now or in the future acts as desired.

@test "EXAMPLE_VAR is NOT defined" {
  [ -z "${EXAMPLE_VAR}" ]
}

References:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development
[2] http://www.extremeprogramming.org/when.html
[3] https://github.com/sstephenson/bats
[4] https://github.com/bats-core/bats-core

Getting a clearer picture of http response time breakdown via CLI

I came across this handy python script https://github.com/reorx/httpstat that provides a http response breakdown in text. This saves you having to open up a browser and look at a visual network response waterfall.

For example, using my website homepage and blog for comparision.

$ python httpstat.py http://ronaldbradford.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2016 16:52:09 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.9-1ubuntu4.17
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Cache-Control: max-age=1
Expires: Fri, 23 Sep 2016 16:52:10 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

Body stored in: /var/folders/mk/0v6thtzd7mb9sb9r4fhv4bcc0000gn/T/tmpK_foIX

  DNS Lookup   TCP Connection   Server Processing   Content Transfer
[    72ms    |      27ms      |       35ms        |       39ms       ]
             |                |                   |                  |
    namelookup:72ms           |                   |                  |
                        connect:99ms              |                  |
                                      starttransfer:134ms            |
                                                                 total:173ms
$ python httpstat.py http://ronaldbradford.com/blog/

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2016 16:52:39 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.9-1ubuntu4.17
X-Pingback: http://ronaldbradford.com/blog/xmlrpc.php
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Cache-Control: max-age=1
Expires: Fri, 23 Sep 2016 16:52:40 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Body stored in: /var/folders/mk/0v6thtzd7mb9sb9r4fhv4bcc0000gn/T/tmpn5R1f2

  DNS Lookup   TCP Connection   Server Processing   Content Transfer
[     5ms    |      34ms      |       129ms       |       790ms      ]
             |                |                   |                  |
    namelookup:5ms            |                   |                  |
                        connect:39ms              |                  |
                                      starttransfer:168ms            |
                                                                 total:958ms

Note that 301 redirects are not handled so be sure you are getting the full content you expect in a request.

$ python httpstat.py http://ronaldbradford.com/blog

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2016 16:52:22 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu)
Location: http://ronaldbradford.com/blog/
Cache-Control: max-age=1
Expires: Fri, 23 Sep 2016 16:52:23 GMT
Content-Length: 322
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Body stored in: /var/folders/mk/0v6thtzd7mb9sb9r4fhv4bcc0000gn/T/tmptLSJTv

  DNS Lookup   TCP Connection   Server Processing   Content Transfer
[     5ms    |      61ms      |       39ms        |        0ms       ]
             |                |                   |                  |
    namelookup:5ms            |                   |                  |
                        connect:66ms              |                  |
                                      starttransfer:105ms            |
                                                                 total:105ms

Writing and testing unit tests in OpenStack

The following outlines an approach of identifying and improving unit tests in an OpenStack project.

Obtain the source code

You can obtain a copy of current source code for an OpenStack project at http://git.openstack.org. Active projects are categorized into openstack, openstack-dev, openstack-infra and stackforge.

NOTE: While you can find OpenStack projects on GitHub, these are just a mirror of the source repositories.

In this example I am going to use the Magnum project.

$ git clone git://git.openstack.org/openstack/magnum 
$ cd magnum

Run the current tests

The first step should be to run the current tests to verify the current code. This is to become familiar with the habit, especially if you may have made modifications and are returning to looking at your code. This will also create a virtual environment, which you will want to use later to test your changes.

$ tox -e py27

Should this fail, you may want to ensure all OpenStack developer dependencies are inplace on your OS.

Identify unit tests to work on

You can use the code coverage of unit tests to determine possible places to start adding to existing unit tests. The following command will produce a HTML report in the /cover directory of your project.

$ tox -e cover

This output will look similar to this example coverage output for Magnum. You can also produce a text based version with:

$ coverage report -m 

I will use this text version as a later verification.

Working on a specific unit test

Drilling down on any individual test file you will get an indication of code that does not have unit test coverage. For example in magnum/common/utils:

Once you have found a place to work with and you have identified the corresponding unit test file in the magnum/tests/unit sub-directory, in this example I am working on on magnum/tests/unit/common/test_utils.py, you will want to run this individual unit test in the virtual environment you previously created.

$ source .tox/py27/bin/activate
$ testr run test_utils -- -f

You can now start working on making your changes in whatever editor you wish. You may want to also work interactively in python initially to test and verify classes and methods especially if you are unfamiliar with how the code functions. For example, using the identical import found in test_utils.py for the test coverage I started with these simple checks.

(py27)$ python
Python 2.7.6 (default, Mar 22 2014, 22:59:56)
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from magnum.common import utils
>>> utils.is_valid_ipv4('10.0.0.1') == True
True
>>> utils.is_valid_ipv4('') == False
True

I then created some appropriate unit tests for these two methods based on this interactive validation. These tests show that I not only test for valid values, I also test various boundary contains for invalid values including blank, character and out of range values of IP addresses.

    def test_valid_ipv4(self):
        self.assertTrue(utils.is_valid_ipv4('10.0.0.1'))
        self.assertTrue(utils.is_valid_ipv4('255.255.255.255'))

    def test_invalid_ipv4(self):
        self.assertFalse(utils.is_valid_ipv4(''))
        self.assertFalse(utils.is_valid_ipv4('x.x.x.x'))
        self.assertFalse(utils.is_valid_ipv4('256.256.256.256'))
        self.assertFalse(utils.is_valid_ipv4(
                         'AA42:0000:0000:0000:0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329'))

    def test_valid_ipv6(self):
        self.assertTrue(utils.is_valid_ipv6(
                        'AA42:0000:0000:0000:0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329'))
        self.assertTrue(utils.is_valid_ipv6(
                        'AA42::0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329'))

    def test_invalid_ipv6(self):
        self.assertFalse(utils.is_valid_ipv6(''))
        self.assertFalse(utils.is_valid_ipv6('10.0.0.1'))
        self.assertFalse(utils.is_valid_ipv6('AA42::0202:B3FF:FE1E:'))

After making these changes you want to run and verify your modified test works as previously demonstrated.

$ testr run test_utils -- -f
running=OS_STDOUT_CAPTURE=${OS_STDOUT_CAPTURE:-1} \
OS_STDERR_CAPTURE=${OS_STDERR_CAPTURE:-1} \
OS_TEST_TIMEOUT=${OS_TEST_TIMEOUT:-160} \
${PYTHON:-python} -m subunit.run discover -t ./ ${OS_TEST_PATH:-./magnum/tests/unit} --list  -f
running=OS_STDOUT_CAPTURE=${OS_STDOUT_CAPTURE:-1} \
OS_STDERR_CAPTURE=${OS_STDERR_CAPTURE:-1} \
OS_TEST_TIMEOUT=${OS_TEST_TIMEOUT:-160} \
${PYTHON:-python} -m subunit.run discover -t ./ ${OS_TEST_PATH:-./magnum/tests/unit}  --load-list /tmp/tmpDMP50r -f
Ran 59 (+1) tests in 0.824s (-0.016s)
PASSED (id=19)

If your tests fail you will see a FAILED message like. I find it useful to write a failing test intentionally just to validate the actual testing process is working.


${PYTHON:-python} -m subunit.run discover -t ./ ${OS_TEST_PATH:-./magnum/tests/unit}  --load-list /tmp/tmpsZlk3i -f
======================================================================
FAIL: magnum.tests.unit.common.test_utils.UtilsTestCase.test_invalid_ipv6
tags: worker-0
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Empty attachments:
  stderr
  stdout

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "magnum/tests/unit/common/test_utils.py", line 98, in test_invalid_ipv6
    self.assertFalse(utils.is_valid_ipv6('AA42::0202:B3FF:FE1E:832'))
  File "/home/rbradfor/os/openstack/magnum/.tox/py27/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/unittest2/case.py", line 672, in assertFalse
    raise self.failureException(msg)
AssertionError: True is not false
Ran 55 (-4) tests in 0.805s (-0.017s)
FAILED (id=20, failures=1 (+1))

Confirming your new unit tests

You can verify this has improved coverage percentage by re-running the coverage commands. I use the text based version as an easy way to see a decrease in the number of lines not covered.

Before

$ coverage report -m | grep "common/utils"
magnum/common/utils    273     94     76     38    62%   92-94, 105-134, 151-157, 208-211, 215-218, 241-259, 267-270, 275-279, 325, 349-384, 442, 449-453, 458-459, 467, 517-518, 530-531, 544
$ tox -e cover

After

$ coverage report -m | grep "common/utils"
magnum/common/utils    273     86     76     38    64%   92-94, 105-134, 151-157, 241-259, 267-270, 275-279, 325, 349-384, 442, 449-453, 458-459, 467, 517-518, 530-531, 544

I can see 8 lines of improvement which I can also verify if I look at the html version.

Before

After

Additional Testing

Make sure you run a full test before committing. This runs all tests in multiple Python versions and runs the PEP8 code style validation for your modified unit tests.

$ tox -e py27

Here are some examples of PEP8 problems with my improvements to the unit tests.

pep8 runtests: commands[0] | flake8
./magnum/tests/unit/common/test_utils.py:88:80: E501 line too long (88 > 79 characters)
./magnum/tests/unit/common/test_utils.py:91:80: E501 line too long (87 > 79 characters)
...
./magnum/tests/unit/common/test_utils.py:112:32: E231 missing whitespace after ','
./magnum/tests/unit/common/test_utils.py:113:32: E231 missing whitespace after ','
./magnum/tests/unit/common/test_utils.py:121:30: E231 missing whitespace after ','
...

Submitting your work

In order for your time and effort to be included in the OpenStack project there are a number of key details you need to follow that I outlined in contributing to OpenStack. Specifically these documents are important.

You do not have to be familiar with the procedures in order to look at the code, and even look at improving the code. You will need to follow the steps as outlined in these links if you want to contribute your code. Remember if you are new, the best access to help is to jump onto the IRC channel of the project you are interested in.

This example along with additions for several other methods was submitted (See patch). It was reviewed and ultimately approved.

References

Some additional information about the tools and processes can be found in these OpenStack documentation and wiki pages.

Understanding OpenStack developer dependencies

While reviewing the OpenStack keystone codebase on an existing VM used with devstack I came across a dependency problem with Python pbr. Python Build Reasonableness (pbr) is actually a result of work on OpenStack. Additional info can be found at Openstack pbr.

On one server machine I had this package installed. At this time I do not know what process actually installed the pbr package.

$ sudo dpkg -l | grep pbr
ii  python-pbr        0.7.0-0ubuntu2      all          inject useful and sensible default behaviors into setuptools - Python 2.x

This is incompatible with current code from several OpenStack projects, keystone and python-openstackclient being two I am working with when reviewing the projects requirements in requirements.txt.

$ grep pbr requirements.txt
pbr>=0.6,!=0.7,<1.0

As seen here, 0.7 is specifically excluded. When updating this machine with the required versions to run the checked out code I ran into the following problem.

$ sudo -H pip install -r requirements.txt

...
  Found existing installation: pbr 0.7.0
    Uninstalling pbr-0.7.0:
...
     OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pbr/version.py'

This lead me to determine I need to run multiple separate VMs. Dedicated VMs for devstack installations when I'm testing things, and a dedicated VM for source development. I later determined the best action was to do development on my host machine installing these developer dependencies and always running any deployed versions in VMs.

Minimum requirements

Using a stock Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server installation I took the time to iteratively check the needed dependencies

# Git needed to retrieve OpenStack code
sudo apt-get install -y git-core

# Python is installed by default on an Ubuntu Server

# install easy_install
sudo apt-get install python-setuptools

# install pip - Package Management System   Uses Python Package Index (PyPI)
sudo easy_install pip

# Install tox - Python automated and standardized testing
sudo -H pip install tox

# Python Developer Libraries
sudo apt-get install -y python-dev

# Openstack developer dependencies
sudo apt-get install -y libffi-dev libssl-dev libldap2-dev libffi-dev libsasl2-dev libxslt1-dev libxml2-dev

With the necessary dependencies met, the following builds a working keystone developer virtual environment.

git clone git://git.openstack.org/openstack/keystone
cd keystone
tox -e py27 --notest

Required Dependencies

Certain projects do a good job of defining the required OS dependencies such as keystone.

To validate these requirements the following is an iterative process of determining the compilation error message and needed package dependency.

  • For missing #include <ffi.h> install libffi-dev
  • For missing #include <openssl/aes.h> install libssl-dev
  • For missing #include "lber.h" install libldap2-dev
  • For missing #include <ffi.h> install libffi-dev
  • For missing #include <sasl.h> install libsasl2-dev
  • For missing #include "libxml/xmlversion.h" install libxslt1-dev which requires libxml2-dev

For setting up a development environment libsqlite3-dev was not initially needed. This does not mean it's needed later for testing purposes.

Simple steps to increasing site availability

A recent database production migration with a large client highlighted a fundamental flaw in their designed architecture for suitable site availability. While the development team had take several good steps in improving scalability of the site, there was a clear failure in understanding and supporting different levels of data availability which I cover in my presentation Successful Scalability Principles.

It was the decision of the development manager to shut down the entire site to perform a final DB migration. The downtime was only 60 seconds but this approach was completely unnecessary with any user requests simply being rejected without any explanation.

The Problem

The system had already be siloed/partitioned/sharded into 5 distinct sources of information. 4 of these data sources in MySQL had applicable read and write capacity (i.e. MySQL replication), and application configuration to support reading data not from the primary data source. Both of these principles are good steps towards scalability and performance. What was lacking was availability.

The wrong way

The migration of the final partition involved moving from AWS RDS to AWS EC2 instances running MySQL. This final all important module managed advertisements, campaigns and ad tracking required that no data was lost.

In AWS, the approach taken was to remove approximately 60 webservers from the public load balancer (ELB). The result of this was all requests, some 20,000 to 25,000 requests simply hung or produced a likely HTTP 500 error.

This was the first fundamental flaw. What does your website look like when it is unavailable? In this case this was never considered or planned for. At worse, all sites should have an emergency “site unavailable due to maintenance” page, trivially managed by a second virtual host in your apache web server configuration. This can be enabled with zero downtime. While inconveniencing the end user, you are informing the end user and they will be more receiving of proactive information.

The second fundamental flaw is that the unavailability of one part of the system, should not affect the entire system if there is no interaction. There are 5 distinct and standalone partitions, only 1 required downtime.

The Right Way

In this situation there was more then one approach to minimize downtime while switching data sources and to ensure all data was captured.

Most sites fail with the fundamental principle of supporting different levels of data availability. In this specific case, one partition (i.e. 1/5 of the data) would be unavailable. Why should that situation effect 100% of your website? Furthermore, only the ability to write was affected, why then should that affect the ability to read ads.

There are at least four types of data availability. Specifically the ability to write data, read data, read cached data and no data access. There are also more fine grained methods of which I will also discuss one.

Defining your data availability requires your application to support and manage data access. This is not easy if you application was not developed with this in mind. I will give you a simple example. Many popular LAMP frameworks including Drupal & WordPress were never designed for read scalability. They relied on a single MySQL server. The act of scaling reads, and providing a read-only site is an after thought and many website struggle to create creative ways to support this primary architectural design pattern.

Knowing that a user request requires the ability to read and/or write data is the first key step. Knowing what type of data is the second. Providing a messaging system between what levels of data access there is, and the ability to turn off features while maintaining site uptime is critical for improving site availability.

More advanced approaches then consider the role of caching data. Generally sites will use caching to assist in reads, but caching can also be implemented to support non critical writes. In this particular example, a write to cache presented a small but tangible risk for data loss. The solution was to implement a secondary logging strategy. This is a separate persistent write capability during the downtime, and the ability to replay. By limiting the writes to log only (i.e. write once) operations, it became very simple to migrate from one system to a second system, logging and reapplying all data changes and ensuring no site downtime, and no data loss.

Conclusion

Managing site availability comes back to a very important question. Clearly define your uptime needs.

Performance v Scalability – For Employers

In a recent discussion with a fellow peer reviewing a job description he was applying for, we got into a discussion on the specifics of a Performance Engineer verses a Scalability Engineer.

Performance and Scalability are two very different goals. While it is true that improving performance can lead to increased scalability capacity with the same physical resources, increasing the scalability of your application does not necessarily lead to improved performance.

Performance is all about perception. In layman’s terms, how quickly can you provide a response to a request from your customer. As volume increases, performance generally degrades after a certain point, and then as volume continues, often the outcome is complete failure. Having a suitable scalable architecture can enable you to provide consistent performance for a given and growing workload.

A Scalability Engineer needs to have architectural skills, management skills, deployment skills and automation skills. A Performance Engineer needs to have more specific technology skills, development skills and some architectural skills.

A great example of a performance problem is when a client contacts me to help with a slow performing website. When the home page takes 5 seconds to load, but only 500ms of that is the actual page generation, and ultimately the maximum possible amount of time spent in the database, in isolation as a database expert I could only improve on 10% of the actual problem. As a performance engineer, your knowledge of the full stack including the web container, the data store accesses (persistent and non-persistent), optimizing the network payload size with compression, various techniques of caching and parallelism capacities are all essential skills needed.

A scalability problem is when your site supports 5,000 concurrent users, but it needs to support 25,000. Applying the primary skills just listed will not solve your scalability need. Simply adding 5x of servers is a simple way to provide support for more concurrent users, but where is the bottleneck or limitation of your application as you scale. Does adding 5x web servers place too much load on your caching tier or your database tier? While most applications utilize load balancing for web traffic, and so a new webserver is generally straightforward (to a point), can your application even support adding more database servers? Or does your architecture lead to read scalability, but not write scalability? Not being able to scale writes is a clear single point of failure for scalability. Most scalability needs require (re)architecture of your stack and the management of how this can be achieved while maintaining an operational site. After a point when you have 500+ servers, adding 50 more servers is generally the role of great automated deployment processes. The problem is usually greater when moving from 5 servers to 25 servers.

For employers that are writing a job description and using a specific job title, consider if the objectives in the description matches the title.

This leads to the question, what about a Reliability Engineer? That is another detailed discussion that relates to performance and scalability, but also have very different goals. Clearly defining your uptime needs is just one question a reliability engineer needs to ask.

Clearly define your uptime needs

In writing about Performance and Scalability I referenced a quote that I have provided in a number of presentations regarding a valuable interaction with a client. All software architects and managers need to clearly understand this for their own sites in order to enable technical resources to deliver a highly scalable solution.

Development Manager:  We need a maintenance window for software upgrades and new releases.
CTO:  No Downtime.
Development Manager: But we need this to fix problems and improve performance.
CTO:  No Downtime.
Consultant (aka Ronald Bradford):  Mr CTO. What is your definition of no downtime?
CTO:  We serve pages, we serve ads.
Consultant: We can do that.

Asking the right question about the uptime requirements completely changed the architecture needed to meeting these specific high availability needs.

It is important to know with this major TV network client the answer was not updating content, selling merchandise or enabling customers to comment. Each of these needs requires a different approach to high availability.

A testimony to Linux resilience

A client released a new version of their website onto 20 AWS m1.medium instances (current site at peak load runs approximately 60 m1.medium webservers).
It was clearly an unsuccessful release, but what was surprising was the system did not actually crash, it was effectively a meltdown, but servers were still operational with load averages > 100. I was impressed with the ability for Linux to still (just) function.

parallel-ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o ConnectTimeout=5 -i -h   uptime
 18:01:00 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 104.26, 110.03, 113.12
 18:01:00 up 18:56,  1 user,  load average: 62.33, 87.75, 90.40
 18:01:03 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 105.28, 115.33, 115.61
 18:01:03 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 149.35, 155.74, 133.68
 18:01:03 up 18:51,  0 users,  load average: 124.63, 121.31, 115.91
 18:01:03 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 118.99, 109.92, 110.60
 18:01:04 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 121.73, 118.40, 113.50
 18:01:04 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 113.89, 120.56, 114.64
 18:01:05 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 119.30, 119.71, 115.65
 18:01:05 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 126.33, 120.33, 119.02
 18:01:05 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 117.47, 113.01, 112.84
 18:01:05 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 172.21, 158.62, 135.19
 18:01:05 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 115.81, 114.96, 116.18
 18:01:05 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 122.25, 115.32, 115.27
 18:01:05 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 164.13, 168.04, 153.03
 18:01:05 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 123.80, 114.94, 110.29
 18:01:06 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 173.64, 173.80, 158.76
 18:01:06 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 132.52, 140.94, 135.43
 18:01:06 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 166.17, 151.68, 135.23
 18:01:06 up 18:44,  0 users,  load average: 170.14, 164.03, 145.31

The AWS m1.medium is a single CPU instance.

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor	: 0
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 45
model name	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 0 @ 2.00GHz
stepping	: 7
cpu MHz		: 1800.000
cache size	: 20480 KB
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 13
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu de tsc msr pae cx8 cmov pat clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht syscall nx lm up rep_good aperfmperf unfair_spinlock pni pclmulqdq ssse3 cx16 sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt aes hypervisor lahf_lm arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dts
bogomips	: 3600.00
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 46 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

The lack of good Internet access in the US

The state of high speed internet providers in the “Capital of the World” is rather woeful. Located in Queens, only a few miles from Manhattan leaves you few choices. Always plenty of ads, but options like Verizon FiOS are not available.

There is basically a monopoly with Time Warner Cable, and while the service is generally reliable, the falseness of pricing and options is criminal.

First of all I could not raise an individual via Chat Online, I was forced to call, wait, provide my details, then be told by an individual he could not do anything, I get transferred, then have to provide all my details again. That’s the *HUGE* failure in customer service. You already know my phone number and account details, why do I have to give my phone number, name, address and account number multiple times.

I wanted to save money, but they only wanted me to pay more. Infact, I was offered a package at double what I was paying for now. If I stated I wanted to save money, why would I be dumb enough to pay more. In the end I was offered an upgrade at no charge for 6 months, but of course after that my bill will go up another $10 per month. Did I gain anything or was I, the consumer, screwed over.

Why does this service suck so much. In Australia,

Poor programming practices

When will it stop. These amateur programmers that simply cut/paste code really affect those good programmers in the ecosystem trying to make a decent living. I was reviewing a developed (but incomplete) PHP/MySQL system using a common framework (which in itself is irrelevant for this post).

In one source file there were 12 repetitions of the following code:

   //permissions
    $this->security_model->setUserPermissions($id);
    if (!array_key_exists($id,$this->session->userdata['permissions']) OR
	!array_key_exists('id', $this->session->userdata['permissions'][$id]) OR
	!array_key_exists('scope', $this->session->userdata['permissions'][$id]['name'])){
      $this->session->set_flashdata('alert', 'You are not authorized to go there.');
      redirect($this->agent->referrer());
    }

It’s bad enough when code is repeated and not put in a simple re factored function. When it’s repeated 12 times in one file, and OMG over 100 times in the product, that is a recipe for bugs, and high maintenance codes due to extremely poor coding practice.

Carbonite Online Backup is a fraud

Do not listen to the hype or the advertising. Carbonite backup solution is a fraud. I never realized the extent of the failures of the software until I had a problem, which is when you expect and demand commercial software you pay for to work.

Ironically, looking now via Google search for Carbonite restore problems there are plenty of horror stories. And just to add to the experience, the definition of Carbonite in the dictionary is “Explosive”.

Here is the first red flag. You logon to the website, and if you click on “View Files”, or under the “Backup” tab with a nice cloud icon you click “Access Files”, there is no information available. You will receive the error “We are unable to access your files on this computer right now. Please contact Customer Support at http://www.carbonite.com/support for further assistance.”. What is really means is “Until your computer is online and your Carbonite software is working, you have no access to the details of your files that are apparently backed up.”

When you contact customer support, they have no idea what that message means, and after wasting your time (for me in a chat session), a ticket was opened with technical support. The problem is there is no way to track your ticket online, get updates, post information etc. I minimized the window, and now my chat session is closed (most likely by the rather ill informed customer representative). Guess what? There is no information about the ticket number in your account. So I may as not every had that conversation, any evidence of it is now lost.

I was told that until a technical support person could access my computer there was no way I could access my files. WTF? If there is no centralized list or log of my files on your backup solution, and no way to see this, how do I know you ever backed up my files. A fancy progress bar that flashes and says backing up files. Any 2 year old can write that faux display. Red flag number 2. It seems the only way to see my files is to install this software on yet another system to restore files. That is as Google Searching indicates, a likely lesson in extreme frustration

The ultimate cause of the problem was my system crashed, and when it restarted, Cabonite software was in this stuck state of “Registering”. I was told to just re-install the software, that’s not an answer in my books. That is red flag number 3.

I have definitely removed my credit card from their site to stop any automatic renewal of this crap software.

For the record, my home office backup solution includes important files on a Drobo. Backups of Documents to DropBox and then sync’d to another system. Backup of all files on several machines to a central external USB, and then regular backups of that which are taken offsite.

You cannot be too careful with important things like photos. Unfortunately this solution lacks a central catalog, and versioning of files (I.e. I overwrote an important presentation and did not realize for a few months, when I looked at all my backups of this, 3 or 4 copies, they were all the overwritten file, not the original. It took about a day to actually find a copied version, not a backed up version)

The heavy handed LinkedIn approach to your contacts

I recently wanted to add two individuals to my list of professional contacts at LinkedIn. I was extremely disappointed at the modified user interface (UI) experience that made it difficult to do so. In the past, you just entered a list of emails.

Many companies these days pressure you into opening up your entire network of contacts for their benefits of knowing your social graph. This is unacceptable.

You have to go thru the following complexity just to send an email request for connection in LinkedIn now.

  • Add Connections
  • Select any email (last button of options)
  • Click Invite by individual email (hidden at bottom of page)

Why SQL_MODE is essential even when not perfect

In a recent rant on Why I think SQL_MODE is useless…, I wanted to counteract this statement with why we MUST all use SQL_MODE, even with the inherit flaws.

The fundamental principle of a database is to restore and retrieve data. When I can insert data into the database and then I select this data it is different, this is fundamentally wrong. This is a loss of essential data integrity, something a database should NEVER do.

SQL_MODE solves the problem of “silent truncation” in most instances, and produces an all important error. As pointed out, the SQL_MODE has several limitations, however the benefits do out way the risks. Quality control on source code can reduce the limitations, but no amount of coding can stop the CRUD that comes out of the database without some SQL_MODE settings.

I would ask two more important questions.

  1. How in the first place can such a critical feature of silent data truncation ever be permitted in MySQL? Who made that decision and why?
  2. When is the owner of MySQL codebase realize this is rather ridiculous and enforce essential minimual data integrity that can be obtain with options including STRICT_ALL_TABLES, NO_ZERO_DATE, NO_ZERO_IN_DATE and NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION.

References

Determining consulting rates

It can be hard sometimes, particularly with startups to determine what to charge. I have tried various models over the years from nothing, to greatly reduced, to full-price. Nothing works well.

As one of the top consultants in MySQL, I kept my rates down as an individual to compete competitively with the 3 or 4 other companies world wide that provide relative services, this in the end hurt my bottom line.

I charge a premium rate that matches my skills, expertise and competitors. I charge that for all customers, large, small, old and new. When the value of my work in performance tuning, disaster management, scalability and architecture is offset by the loss of potential or future business it is not difficult to justify a reasonable rate. I also continue to speak extensively, write and publish materials that provides detailed practical knowledge for organizations and individuals that can invest the time, but not the money.

I am still shocked when large established companies want a discount, just last week for a few hours work a company wanted 33% off.

An extract from “3 Things Entrepreneurs Should Never Depend On When Starting A Company” provides a great re-enforcement about what is appropriate pricing.

Fearful Pricing

When I started my business, I undercharged for my service. I didn’t have the confidence to ask for a decent price, and I thought I had to have the lowest price in order to get business.

What did these practices get me? Low profits and poor cash flow.

In order to survive as a startup—both financially and mentally—it’s crucial that you make sure you’re receiving maximum reward for your maxed out efforts. If you don’t see the true value in your business, how do you expect your clients to do so? Your work is worth it; adjust your prices accordingly.

Read more: Business Insider

Visualizing reqstat

The reqstat tool was written to provide a vmstat like output of total web requests happening in real time. This really lightweight monitoring leverages memcached and has a trivial impact for immediate benefit.

  $ ./reqstat 5 5
  epoch,time,rps,avg_req,last,%comp,---,threshold,exceed,last_excess
  1307723122,162522,25,125.92,75.25,48,---,150,9,175.55
  1307723127,162527,24,107.33,6.97,48,---,150,6,188.45
  1307723132,162532,25,118.39,97.63,50,---,150,8,151.37
  1307723137,162537,22,120.51,88.62,42,---,150,5,168.56
  1307723142,162542,26,106.62,6.12,51,---,150,6,167.81

While this is useful, I can see 22-26 requests per second, averaging 106-120 ms, visualizing this gives more information immediately available like:

It is easy to look at an average and lose site of the larger picture. What are the outliers, how many are there? Visualizing of larger samples (a later example which will show 10,000 rps across multiple servers) shows that the granularity is also critical.

This graphic is produced with Flot. A very simply javascript library. You can also use gnuplot, an example script is included in github.

This output is the result of benchmarking, this being generated from reqstat output with a script in my monitor git repository.

Visualizing crowd sourcing data

At the closing keynote of the recent Strata Summit in New York, O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly showed a representation of crowd sourced data on Wikipedia of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, showing a before and after picture of the page. While interesting, it did not represent what could be shown with the data.

Using the Wikipedia API’s, some features of my VisMarks startup I was able to create a better representation showing an animation of the article over time. While this Wikipedia Earthquake Animation (on a different page for loading) shows a representation of the first 1,000 revisions it highlights one cool way visualize crowd sourced data. Pay particular attention to the new language articles introduced, the images and table of contents as different types of data being added.

While the likes of Twitter and Facebook can provide a stream of information on an emerging event, Wikipedia is unique in that individuals contribute to a single source of combined information. This removes all the noise of duplication. It does not remove the CRUD, however as seen in this article this is quickly removed by others in the community.

It is also cool to see the size of the article grow over time. Below is a graph of the first 24 hours.

These are simple examples of using public API’s and simple tools (in this case, imagemagick,gnuplot and some shell scripts) to tell a story with data visualization.

Why are we standing still?

I wrote an email a week ago to several close friends titled, “[w]hy are we standing still?” I opened with “[y]ou are all good friends and you are all smart people. We need to work together more … I deal with startups all the time and I rarely find a team of smart articulated people, so why can’t we just do this?”

What was the motivation? I had just read online that startup A has 100 million users and startup B had just raised $42 million. I came to the realization that I am wasting my time trying to develop significantly better tools in my chosen profession because I would never achieve these types of numbers. Those tools would never need the performance and scalability expertise for which I am widely recognized. I am, as CNN Money recently wrote in “Tech companies desperate for ‘rockstarninja’ engineers,” a “Rockstar Ninja” in the tech field.

I work with startups daily and most abuse the technology being used. Technology is not even the problem. In fact, for me and my group of close tech friends, it is almost trivial at times. What is complex, however, is the people and the process combined with the one thing that nobody can escape, time. Ideas are also not the problem, I have plenty of those. I even have several ideas at various stages of actual implementation including VisMarks – Visual Bookmarking and Mooify – The social barometer for moods, thoughts and emotions. These are each at different levels of initial completion. Are they world changers? Probably not, however, they are iterations of the process of what Eric Ries calls The Lean Startup Machine. (Side Note: The next Lean startup machine weekend event is in New York starting on April 1st.)

So back to my band of smart friends, why are we still standing still? Not being content with just talking, I took action and have organized a 24 hour weekend collaboration at my own home for next weekend, code named JFDI/Bliss (there is an interesting story behind the name). I set aside not one project to tackle but three. And by tackle, I mean create, deploy, iterate and even complete a MVP, keeping in mind the technology is not the hard part. The first project is from my good friend Graham, the founder of Ultra Light Startups. We have had many conversations about our respective ideas in the past years, discussing different potential projects. This project is actually referenced by our second project from another friend, John (uBlanket his current startup), that we discussed just last week over dinner. The third, my own VisMarks project, needs only one technical hurdle solved and some user interface design to complete initial functionality. We will also be reviewing and integrating technology from the Lean Startup Bundle for SXSW for the The Lean Startup Challenge.

I can easily provide the food and drink, internet, power, a large finished basement area, a back yard if the weather is good, bedding (it’s a 24 hr event) and even some of my world class beer collection so there are no physical hurdles or expenses to start working together. That is our lean ultralight startup. We have two goals: first, to be able to collaborate in person because thought can be multiplied exponentially when discussing any idea or problem and second, to have fun.

So it all sounds easy, right? Wrong. What’s missing? Just as the capability of being able to code is only a small portion of being a qualified and competent developer, creating the technology is only one portion of a successful startup. Managing Director of TechStars New York, David Tisch (@davetisch) stated at a recent Ultra Light Startups panel discussion some key points that highlighted the resource components of a successful startup. The ideals of this NYC accelerator are mentorship, network and exposure. We need all three. When asked what is the ideal skill set for a team, his response was three people: one business, one technical and one product person. We need those as well. However, when David was asked what is most important when choosing startups for their program, the answer was the people on the team. Important considerations are how you work together, what have you done together as a team, where do you most need help. For the last question that answer is easy. We need help and mentoring in areas including marketing, business development, legal, accounting, PR, promotion, funding, sales, leadership, management, vision, etc. All of these cost money we do not presently have and are necessary to get the traction of millions of users.

The goal should not just to become rich but be happy, have a lot of fun and make a difference in the world in small way we know best, technology.

There are many innovators in our industry, however, the following are a few I follow very closely. These include Dave McClure (@davemcclure), who I followed for a long time before we first met at the inaugural Rethink Hawaii event in 2009. Dave’s AARRR startup metrics for pirates approach is something I share with many clients that do not see the critical need of tracking what their leads do from initial acquisition. This is necessary to help answer questions including what is the your total cost of acquisition of a paying client and what is the best return on investment.

Eric Ries (@ericries) is a person I have followed now for over a year reading, many great posts including What is a startup?, Four (not five) myths about the Lean Startup and Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto to name a few.

Finally, the Kauffman Foundation (@kauffmanfdn), provides good resources and opportunities including the recent 2011 State of Entrepreneurship Address in Washington DC. Entrepreneurs create new businesses and new businesses are the greatest source of jobs and this creates a better economy. Entrepreneurship is also not just about creating something new, it is also about finding better ways of doing things we presently do. Their work with immigration reform, and involvement with the Startup Visa and Statup America are issues close to my own heart.

I have easily been distracted from my day job and upcoming speaking presentations researching work for our initial kickoff. Excitement is a great motivator to achieving something great.

Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress.

I recently deployed a new WordPress installation to my existing production webserver running Apache, MySQL and PHP for other websites, yet I was presented with the following message.

“Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress.”

This thread at wordpress.org did not help me, however I was able to solve the problem, but this thread is now marked as closed. That’s poor form because I can’t share the solution I found.

My PHP configuration file did not have the following.

#php.ini
[PHP]
extension=mysql.so

Adding this and restarting Apache did not fix the problem.

The problem was more fundamental and required PHP to be recompiled. Orginally PHP was configured with the ‘–with-mysqli’ option. PHP requires the ‘–with-mysql’ which is rather stupid they have this dependency.

Recompiling PHP and adding the necessary extension were both necessary to get my new WordPress installation operational.

Eyes Only for Recruiters

Dear Recruiters.

I am always open to hearing about exceptional opportunities that will be a challenging role with hard problems to solve and a great team to work with.

You have been directed to this link because you have contacted me. Please do not consider this as impersonal (after you cut and paste this spiel so many times) it is simply easier to publish my response.

My standard recruiter spiel

This request for additional information will help me determine if I am interested in discussing your opportunity in further detail. Please answer all questions. Please do not be an annoying recruiter like the 2 or 3 a week I have to deal with that refuse to provide details. I’m not going to call you unless I am interested, my time is very valuable. If you can not provide information via email to determine my interest level I can not help you, nor am I motivated to share this with my network.

The details
I get contacted 5 times a week by recruiters. In 90% of cases I would be lucky if I am provided with more then one sentence regarding a position, and hence why you have received a concise response. If your the 10% exception then also please continue reading, you just have less work to do towards getting a meaningful response.

I am not just going to pick up the phone and call you, especially when you provide a single sentence and ask me to call you. My time is extremely valuable, I bill at $250 per hour. If you value my time, then please respect it. To better determine if I am the right person for your inquiry please provide more information including but not limited to:

  • What are the required skills sought?
  • What is the industry involved?
  • What is the remuneration?
  • What is the time frame, i.e. what is “short term” if applicable?
  • What is the existing team infrastructure that I would call peers?
  • What is the associated technology stack?
  • What is the detailed job description?

Simply sending me a full job description is not going to win you points if is does not address these questions.

NOTE: I’m not a junior DBA or even a senior DBA. I’m in the top 1% in the field. I have easily proven my output is 2x-3x of MySQL DBA’s working for major fortune 500 companies where these resources are effectively holding companies to ransom. If you are approaching me for a DBA role please ensure it is exceptional. Very few organizations even need a full-time DBA. What they require is a skilled resource such as myself to create an infrastructure that leads to a dispensable role, not an indispensable role for a DBA. I can assist organizations in this transition that includes working with partners for 24×7 DBA support .

You can find my skills and experience on my website at http://ronaldbradford.com and on various pages. If you have further questions then please ask. I do not give out my resume initially and I will never provide this via a Word document.

On a closing note, those that have started this conversation with “connect with me” via LinkedIn, you a one step from the trash or being reported to LinkedIn for spam (i..e if you have never worked with me, then do not make that claim). I do not accept invitations from people I do not know. I do not accept invitations even from people I do know if I do not want them in my network. I will not open up my professional contacts to recruiters. If you are unable to send a proper email from Linked In, it is rather trivial to track me down. There are no points for being lazy.

Successful MySQL Scalability Presentation

Last night I was the invited guest at the SF MySQL Meetup. In my presentation “Successful MySQL Scalability” I talked about a set of principles to ensure appropriate system architecture, data availability and best practices to build an ideal solution for your business. The presentation was also live streamed and is available online.

MySQL South America tour

DISCLAIMER: This post contains no technical MySQL content however it is good news for the MySQL Community.

MySQL content will be included for the first time with the LAOUC (Latin American Oracle Usergroups Council) Oracle tour that is being organized in conjunction with OTN (Oracle Technology Network).

I have no idea what MySQL user communities are in South America however if you live in any of the following cities, please feel free to contact me. I am happy to have additional discussion regarding MySQL or help in some way if there is interest in any cities.

This seven country tour includes:

  • Oct 12 – Lima, Peru
  • Oct 14 – Santiago, Chile
  • Oct 16 – Montevideo, Uruguay
  • Oct 18 – São Paulo, Brazil
  • Oct 20 – Bogota, Colombia
  • Oct 22 – Quito, Ecuador
  • Oct 25 – San Jose, Costa Rica

More details on the specific locations in each city will be available when finalized.

I would be very happy if anybody wants to translate this to Spanish or Portuguese for readers in South America.


View OTN Latin America in a larger map

First thoughts of Augen Android Internet Tablet

In the last few days there has been some press of the Augen gentouch 7″ Tablet. A new cheap tablet that is running Android 2.1.

Image from http://android-devices.net

There were a few primary motivations for getting one, the first being price, at $150 I consider cheap for a small tablet, and second it runs Android, something I’m wanting to play more with. I have an original Google G1, and I also purchased one recently for my fiance.

So what are my first impressions.

  1. First it was difficult to get. It is only available at KMart it seems. My local KMart in New York City didn’t have any. Apparently they sold out very quickly with stock on Wednesday. 10 KMart stores later (via phoning them) I found just 1 more that had even received stock, and they had 1 left. Lucky last. It was only that we had a car on Saturday it was even possible to get to this store. (-1 for ease of acquisition via company distribution)
  2. KMart claimed the price was $165, but if you checked the online magazine it was $149.99. I had to prove that first to get the price via using the web on my phone. (-1 for Kmart customer service)
  3. I wanted to buy and additional memory card as I knew from online review this was available however the box (which was still unopened before purchase only mentions Expansion Memory Card Slot, it doesn’t mention the actually size format. Even reading the manual after purchase talks about a SD card or a TF card, but is not specific. I ended up purchasing a Sandisk Mobile microSDHC 16GB card. Even that packaging was confusing as it clearly states “For Mobile Phones” twice on the package. (-1 for ease of information/packaging)
  4. Turning on the first time was a pleasant surprise because the item was fully charged. (+2 there). With my MiFi I was immediately able to connect to the web while still in the car (as a passenger). (+1 for access to primary use)
  5. The touch screen is clearly not as responsive as an Apple or smart phone, it’s mixed sometimes it only requires a light touch, sometimes a heavy touch. Early reports mentioned this, so it was not unexpected. Again for the price and proposed uses I have for it, it wasn’t a deal breaker. I saw one online video that included a stylus, and another mention online, however the manual gives no indication, and I don’t seem to have one.
  6. Downloading the 2012 HD trailer via YouTube worked promptly and without issues and picture was good (+1) but there is no external controls for audio. (-1 for that).
  7. There is a headphone jack however I find out later that this is a 2.5mm jack, and standard headphones used by everybody on the planet is 3.5mm. (-1 for that). The website claims they will supply people at no cost a set of 2.5mm headphones. Again useless as I don’t want to have to carry those around as well. What I want is a 2.5mm to 3.5mm converter, actually two because I’m sure I’ll lose it easily. (-1 for that)
  8. The main buttons for “back, menu, home” are actually on the back of the device. Once you know that it’s not that bad, but it is a little odd. Of course for right handed person. If they were on the side it’s possible any type of “death grip” may accidentally press them.
  9. Unit comes with a handy and practical leather case (+1) with adequate access for side controls, however it’s only good for holding not using because the buttons are on the back (-1).
  10. By purchasing a 16GB at $99, the price is now $250, it’s not as impressive a cost product.
  11. The purchased SDCard was not easy to install, there is no clear instruction on right side up and certainly nothing in the docs, and there are reports online that people misplace in the slot and the card gets lost inside of unit. I didn’t have that problem and I don’t really see that would happen for me. The manual indicates you will get an icon about it, however that wasn’t the case so I really didn’t know if it worked or not. (-1) Using the AndExplorer indicates a /sdcard so I assume it’s operational.
  12. There is reference to a U Disk (who knows what that is). with a supplied cable I assume it’s a means of adding a USB thumbdrive to the mini USB slot. Trying this however didn’t seem to work so I don’t know if that’s the intended use.
  13. The power supply is yet another plug I have to now carry (along with one for laptop, phone, mifi). I was really hoping the power adapter would have been a mini or micro USB. (-1)
  14. The first real use after web, video, google maps, email is to download other stuff however it seems the Android Market is broken. The official website (which I now can’t find, -1 for poor SEO and google searchability) makes a note this is broken and is expecting a patch (-2 for poor testing there.
  15. The manual was not proof read by an English person. The title cover states “Table” not “Tablet” however the funniest part was reading some the manual. I will not type what I found, but you can see the image below. It so made me laugh.
  16. There is no video output, which is really annoying because the side panel actually states HDMI in printing, but nothing physical.
  17. The screen res is 800×480. Ok, so it’s small but of the sites I’ve initially visited the horizontal bar has not been an issue. I suspect it may be in the future, but this is not my primary development machine.
  18. No webcam
  19. I wanted to download some of my ebooks, however this seems to be broken and related to the market problem. Will see after patch.

I’ve yet to really test it out, these are just my first impressions. For the price I consider it a worthwhile investment for the purposes I want it for. That is some browsing, (ideal for bedroom), I can see it a wicked 7″ GPS unit with turn by turn controls for driving, but without GPS it will be a bit manual. Reading email, or an ebook, and even use as a large digital frame, especially for my photos.

This is a gen 1 product, so you have to accept the shortcomings. You are either an alpha adopter that is willing to accept limitations and accept the benefits it does have or your not.

Other References:

Augen’s $150 Android tablet hits Kmart circular, coming to stores later this week (what first caught my eye). KMart update. First impressions of the Augen GenTouch78 Android tablet (with second mention of a stylus).

Still room at Kaleidoscope for MySQL attendees

Today I received notice that next week’s Velocity conference is at maximum capacity. With just under 2 weeks before the start of ODTUG Kaleidoscope in Washington DC we still have room for late registrations. There is 4 days of MySQL content, free events and also a Sunday Symposium that includes talks on performance and high availability.

Contact any of the MySQL speakers directly and you can receive a special 50% discount code. This is only for MySQL attendees.

If you live in the DC area and only want the FREE option then come along and join use on Monday night for a free session and reception.

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010
July 27 – July 1
Marriott Wardman Part Hotel
2660 Woodley Road NW
Washington, District Of Columbia 20008
www.odtugkaleidoscope.com

Conference highlights include

Community Service Day – Saturday, June 26, 8:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Join ODTUG volunteers and help refurbish a school in D.C.  Under the guidance of Greater DC Cares (GDCC), the leading and largest nonprofit coordinator of volunteerism in the D.C. region, ODTUGgers will: Sort books, beautify school grounds, and paint games on blacktop outside of hte school.

There is still time to sign up!  

Four Full-day Symposia – Sunday, June 27, 8:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Application Express; Oracle EPM and Essbase; Security, Scalability, and Performance; SOA and BPM. One-day registration available.

Welcome Reception/Battle of the Rock Bands – Sunday, June 27, 6:15 – 8:00 p.m.
Meet the exhibitors and compete in the “Battle of the Rock Bands.” Sign up to play.


Opening General Session – Monday, June 28, 8:30 – 10:00 a.m.
Awards for Best Technical Paper and Best 2009 Presentations
Keynote – “Future of the Internet and its Social Impact” by Lee Rainie, Director of the PEW Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.
Sundown Sessions with Oracle ACE Directors – Monday, June 28, 5:45 – 6:45 p.m.
Reception to meet the Oracle ACE Directors immediately follows – 6:45 – 7:45 p.m.

Special Event – Wednesday, June 30, 6:30 – 10:00 p.m.
Featuring comedian John Heffron, 2nd season champion of the hit TV show, Last Comic Standing.
Music by live cover band, Right Foot Red