TristanBall

I suspect Digicel's marketing dept could give you the realtime PNG population to 6 decimal places.

Joking obviously, but only just.

So at first glance this looks pretty amazing, and you deserve kudos for your documentation quality alone!

2 comments. First, if you're going to lead with statements like "faster than x" - link to your benchmarks. They're not hard to find but I did have to go looking. Second, the skipped "random read" test is a glaring red flag to me, and honestly raises far more concerns than a weak result would have (a weak microbenchmark result may or may not be important, and at worst is something to be considered in engineering, while but trust issues with a vendor are poison ).

I don't know why you skipped the test, maybe it was time, maybe you didn't think it important, maybe you got unusual results and want to retest. But right now it looks like a footgun in what seems to be a very high quality release.

Larping as a dba now, and trust me many of us do know, and its a source of ongoing suffering, but we're often not developers and don't necessarily have the choice of tooling.

Right now the DB I'm paid to babysit provides cli tools that flip between tabular and k/v list output without making that configurable, or a tabular form that doesn't include headers, or a 3rd party tool that will, but has the spectacularly annoying "error on line 1 : multi-line query" issue. Or things that are slow or only talk via generic protocols like odbc etc etc etc

I think you're being a little unfair about the pipe delimited thing though, it's a least worst compromise based on who we're providing the data too - non technical business people, the vast majority of whom use excel or similar tools and couldn't even tell you what "data format" means, let alone configure their systems to parse something else.

Personally I had a bit of an epiphany around the ascii delimiters (us/fs/rs/gs) which work extremely well when the data is ascii/utf-8, and make data interchange between shell cli tools very easy. But they've also invisible and little business software supports them in a friendly way. Telling someone in accounts or market to "use octal 034" helps no one.

And I've resigned myself to using multiple tools, dev with tool 1 with decent error messages, tool 2 for production use because it can actually produce sane output formats.

What I don't have a choice on is which db we use, and it's not modern or cool and honest most things don't even have drivers for it

I suspect part of it is licensing games, both in the sense of "avoiding per core license limits" which absolutely matters when your DB is costing a million bucks, and also in the 'enable the highest PVU score per chassis' for ibm's own license farming.

Power systems tend not to be under the same budget constraints as intel, whether thats money, power, heat, whatever, so the cost benifit of adding more sub-core processing for incremental gains is likely different too.

I may have a raft of issues with IBM, and aix, but those Power chips are top notch.

While this true enough, an ironic side effect of my attending a couple of rounds of sales related negotiation training ( compulsory for everyone at that company ), was to really highlight how calculatingly manipulative this is.

I mean, we kinda all know that anyway, but somehow it reinforced it enough that I know find it actively distasteful.

Even the classic sales approach of buying coffee or a meal feels creepy know, but I've had to relearn to accept it because it's just so hard to fight every time.

When I tell people, the normal response is encredulous "but it's free?". It's really really not, the costs just aren't immediately financial.

(Gifts outside corporate life are generally fine, an actual human wanting to "manipulate" me into liking them more is generally expressing some level of affection. A corporation cannot do that)

Every know and again I get something funny enough that it gets me anyway.. I'm very fond of my all blue Rubic's cube from ibm for example, and I've got a few unbranded water bottles around the place.

Anything else I can't politely refuse just gets binned as soon as I can do so without a fuss.

Perhaps look to your marketing folks rather than engineering.

"Purchasing silver sponsership with [org] as a way to grow our brand awareness" is intrinsically understandable to pretty much any businesses manager.

"Giving away money for something we already have", which is what most technical managers will hear regardless of your actual pitch, is completely inexplicable to many.

It does require that sponsership is even possible, and recurring sponsership may be harder than recurring license fees of course, so its not a sure thing, just an option to try.

On of my favourite hardware investments as a teenager trying to learn c and assembly under dos was a caching hard drive controller.

It made those post crash reboots so much faster!

Talk about solving the wrong problem...

You don't have to change you process, so you can still explain it rationally.

Just leave off the "then I multiplied by 10" part.

Which I did by accident once ( not by 10, but it was still substantial )... but it turned out the customer was delighted because we were still 50% vs their existing vendor.

Enterprise pricing is a farce.

I very much agree with the poster above about vendors disqualifying themselves.. another red flag for me is the Two Suits and Skirt pre-sales Hydra Monster that big vendors love to send around, to scare you into letting them capture all the value that their purporting to provide you.

And yes, the above shows I've been both sides of the fence. I felt it was going to be good experience, and it was, but I have regrets too.

Only on some distro's.

Debian variants tend to link dash, which self consciously limits itself to posix compatibility.

Gosh they look interesting. But ridiculously customer unfriendly product naming, and a website that doesn't provide clear information on international shipping just raises so many red flags for me.

Yup.

And teaching yourself and your tools to use them as delimiters is damn near a superpower for semi-structured/tabular text forms ( aka csv/tsv and co ).

Issues with field definition, escaping, and embedded newlines all but go away.. newlines being the harder ones because some tools just insist on being line based and will hard code variants of cr/lf as newlines.

And they retain their meaning and uniqueness in utf8 ( true of all the ascii control codes ), which is an under appreciated feature imnsho.

Small team with a largely overlapping shared knowledge and attitudes.

Which is not to say it isn't really nice, but I think the chances of it happening are in some way inversely proportional to the number of people involved. It's probably not linear either.

I haven't thought about it in years but my very first pc support traineeship ( 25 years ago!! ) had aspects of this. There was so much shared context for us both that we often left it out, much to the bemusement of anyone else listening.

"Hey, remember we need ", "yeah", "oh and can you pick up", "already did its over there", "oh cool ok can you", "sure, probably after lunch"

It was FUN. But you just can't do it with much more than 2 or 3 people.

Any time I'm doing lego-brick engineering, aka unix style "small tools pipe together", then startup time impacts me most while I'm actively developing the new system.

That process is iterative, usually on a subset of the data, and slow starting tools make my day qualitatively worse.

The final performance matters sometimes, but more often than not it doesn't. 30 minutes or 45 for a batch job? That runs from cron? I don't usually care.

I'm never going to favour slow starting tools unless some aspect of their functionality pays for that cost, or I'm choice constrained, but final peak performance is almost never going to be a factor.

So to me it's not psychological bias, it's economics, and the currency is time, when it's me personally paying it. Semantics maybe, but just writing it of as bias isn't going to help me get things done.

Ha.. my linebreaks got removed!

\ linebreaks are not something I love,and a while ago I started using chained blocks..

These are usually a step between "overely complicated one liner" and structured script, and often get refactored to functions etc if the script evolves that far. But lots don't, and if I just want something readable, that also lends itself to comments etc, this works for me.

{ foo -a -b }|{ bar -c -d -e }|{ baz -e -f }

But I suspect it's not everyone's cup of tea!