Roy's Technology Diary

I have been experimenting with virtualization since quite sometime now. My interest towards hypervisors or virtualization was sourced from the need to enhance the productivity my development and testing staff, by enabling them to switch between multiple operating systems on the very same box, without having to reboot the entire system. Although virtualization has been around since many years now, but my search for better and cost-effective hypervisors recently seems to have been complimented with a plethora of them available at zero cost. VMware is finally giving away its Update 2 for VMware Infrastructure 3.5 along with a lightweight edition of its market leading hypervisor, ESX 3i, for free. Read more about this new here . Another competitive product is this segment is VirtualBox ; which is a powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the ...

Scaling Database is one of the most common and important issue that every business confronts in order to accommodate the growing business and thus caused exponential data storage and availability demand. There two principle approaches to accomplish database scaling; v.i.z. vertical and horizontal. Regardless of which ever scaling strategy one decides to follow, we usual land-up buying ever bigger, faster, and more expensive machines; to either move the database on them for vertical scale-up or cluster them together to scale horizontally. While this arrangement is great if one has ample financial support, it doesn't work so well for the bank accounts of some of our heroic system builders who need to scale well past what they can afford. In this write-up, I intend to explain a revolutionary and fairly new database architecture; termed as Sharding, that some websites like Friendster and Flickr have been using since quite sometime now. The concept defines an affordable approach t...

Most product development starts with a good design in mind. The initial architecture is clear and elegant. But then something begins to happen. What really happens is that the programs, like people, get old. However, unlike (in most cases) people there is no guarantee that software will mature as it grows old. Even worse, if we aren’t taking care of standard Software Quality Assurance (SQA), our system is not only ageing, but infact it is rotting. A Software undesirably grows old for two major reasons – The product owners have failed to modify the software to meet changing needs. The changes are made that yield poor results. It is SQA that determines the way we can check and improve our software quality. SQA is a planned and systematic approach to evaluation of the quality and adherence to software product standards, processes, and procedures. It includes the process of assuring that standards and procedures are established and followed throughout the software acquisiti...