Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve appeared in a newspaper ;) Last time, I found myself on the front page of the Richmond Times Dispatch for an article about blogging. Unfortunately I don’t still have a copy of the article on my computer, only a hard copy. Anyhow, this time is not nearly as splashy, but still cool all the same. A couple weeks back a reporter for the Wall Street Journal contacted me in reference to this article I wrote about being green. Here’s the part he quoted me on:
The new TVs are finding favor with some consumers. After getting a $186 electric bill in early December, Matt Walters, a Web developer in Richmond, Va., decided to look for ways to reduce his electricity use. He quickly targeted his 50-inch plasma TV, which has a digital video recorder, Blu-ray player and other devices connected to it.
“I started looking for devices that were more guilty than others,” says Mr. Walters, 29. “The plasma TV was one of the first things” he identified.
Mr. Walters bought a few power strips to connect the TV and other devices together and got in the habit of turning it off when he wasn’t using it. When his electric bill arrived the next month, he says to his surprise he saved $27. He plans to pay more attention to the power use of the electronics he buys, and adds that he would consider an energy-efficient TV for his next purchase.
[Read full story by Christopher Lawton at The Wall Street Journal]
I am a Web Developer located in Richmond, VA. Primarily, I work on the back-end of websites utilizing my database and desktop application coding experience from the past to achieve desired results for the user interface. Recently however I have started moving more into the UI realm, utilizing JavaScript and AJAX to allow for better performance out of the back-end systems.
Well, given my background, you can probably guess that I’m going to end up recommending something that is open source. I would also say most of my experience comes from databases that have a strong presence in the web community. Historically, the bulk of my experience is with MySQL, which really is a nice database platform. It supports several table types (MyISAM, InnoDB, etc) which have their pro’s and con’s. It also enjoys wide support from programming languages.
I’m not sure that I would rate it as the best though. For instance, about 3 years ago I released an online feed reader called OneFeed. It had a nice Ajax front-end that looked like Outlook’s typical 3 pane view. Then it had crawlers on the back-end that were parsing the feeds that users had subscribed to. It was definitely a learning experience. My #2 bottleneck ended up being the database. I had started off on MySQL with MyISAM table types. Well, the feed crawlers were basically writing to the database non-stop, as in 24/7/365. They were having to parse over 20,000 feeds once every hour at its peak. So the problem is that with MyISAM, when a write goes to the database, it locks the entire table instead of just the record that is being written to. This was bad because it meant the user interface was being slowed down because of the crawlers trying to keep up with their job (there were 12 crawlers at the peak).
So, I ended up shifting over to InnoDB which allows record level locking on tables, and this definitely sped things up quite a bit. But the database was still sluggish to respond on certain queries. The database size was also exploding.
About this time is when I shut OneFeed down. However, I was speaking with another developer that was working on an online feed reader as well. They, too, were having the same issue that I was and they took it to the next step, which was switching to PostgreSQL. With PostgreSQL they were able to kill several birds with one stone. They achieved faster query times and smaller database sizes.
PostgreSQL also offers triggers and more robust features. However, some of this is becoming moot as the platforms have started moving towards each other. MySQL has picked up triggers, etc, and PostgreSQL has been stepping it up on performance. So, these days, there’s less difference between the two for the average user.
Anyhow, that’s about the most I can tell you. I’d say MySQL probably has broader market share, but PostgreSQL is somewhat viewed as being more robust still. I really don’t know tons about Oracle, and have only played minimally with MS SQL Server. So I can’t really comment accurately on those. I know my brother likes SQL Server, and I’ve never really heard him (or anyone really) complaining about it being stupid. So if you’re living in a Microsoft world, I’m sure it’s a great platform. I’ve never really had to work with SO much data that I even needed to consider Oracle as an option.
This post is part of Episode 7 of the weekly Ask Matt Series.