Are you thinking on moving your database from a SQL implementation to a NoSQL one ?

Sometimes when you decide to move to a different approach lots of doubts pop out of your mind, there are a couple of actions that can make your decision more solid and secure. I’ll try to provide some tips that would help you to choose the right NoSQL implementation.

When do you need to think about NoSQL ?

Often web application start by being implemented on top of MySQL, the one day your application got traction and performance issues start to be a real pain due to high load of read/write queries on your system.

At this point you have 2 choices:

1. “Shard” your data to partition it across several sites
2. Go for a licensed SQL DBMS or move to  a NoSQL DBMS

Basically, you need to scale with less amount of money spent possible. Michael Stonebraker written a good article on this.

Recently i had a challenge where i needed to return a hyper fast response with data to the user (browser), although due to the number of operations needed to perform on database that was just not possible. So, i did some research, and remembered a technique that Bruno Pedro pointed out awhile ago.

If you play a little bit with Php and http headers you will make possible to:

1. Return data to the browser
2. Detach http server process from client (browser)
3. Keep script execution running

The solution is actually quite simple, if you refer to PHP Manual – Connection handling section, you will find a lot of examples on how to do this.

Following a curiosity by Claudio Franco, i will try to explain what tools do i use and what hardware do i have to support my day-by-day activity.

Computer: My old MacBook 2.16Ghz / 4 GB Ram

External monitor: Acer AL1912

Backup Drive: External Hard Drive 500 GB + Dropbox

Operating System: Mac Os Snow Leopard 10.6.3

Virtual Machines: Virtual Box Software with 1 x Debian Server (emulate production) 1x Windows 7 machine (Browser debug)

Linux Datacenter VM’s: 1 Slicehost (US) and 1 Linode (UK)

Mobile Phone: Nokia E71

Media Device: IPOD Touch 16GB

Communication/Office Tools: Google Apps (Gmail, Calendar, Docs, …) , Skype

Code editor: Vim and TextMate ( The inseparables )

Am i happy with the hardware that i own ?

Definitely NO, i need urgently to upgrade my MacBook and the External Monitor is old and low quality. I haven’t choose the hardware i own in order to support my consulting activity, it’s just the hardware i had. And, until now, has been enough, with some memory performance issues from time to time.

What about fun ?

For fun i just play my Xbox 360, in this area i have no complaints.

What’s your work environment ?

Hi, long time since i have wrote some content over this blog, no excuse, just got lazy for the past 2 months, a lot of things just changed and i am adjusting myself.

4 months working from home

The past few months i shifted to a freelancer role and started working from home full-time, there are some drastic changes that you need to make in your way of living in order to adapt and keep productivity high, i will talk about it later on.

You can hire me for some freelance project now! Wanna know more about me?

Moved this blog from my us slicehost to uk linode vm

Needed more resources for some personal projects without increasing the price, so Linode was a good solution, with the bonus of having a better round trip times to Portugal.

A child on his way

A new family member is on his way, it’s a boy and i am extremely happy about it.

Open for questions

You can now ask me something over at http://www.formspring.me/iamjosedasilva, feel free to be curious.

Future writings on this blog

I am preparing a serie of articles to release on this blog, but feel free to suggest some topics you’d like to hear about.

Everyone that is around software development for several years have already been at the situation where an “eco” is constantly buzzing  at your ears, saying “are we there yet ?”

Just found a great post by Caterina, “Want to be an entrepreneur? Drop out of college.“, and got myself feeling a great joy, finally someone say’s it out and loud.

Some great quotes from Caterina post :

“College works on the factory model, and is in many ways not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student and out comes a scholar.”

“… the basic skills necessary to start a tech company — design or coding — are skills that can be learned outside of the academy, and are often self-taught.”

Go on and read the full content at Caterina blog.

I have a whole shelf of books praying about entrepreneurship, motivational, work less, be in charge of your destiny book, although read none like the truths on this post and written down over at “Linchpin” book.

Does this mean that a whole new mentality is rising ? Would this be the start of a brand and modern society ?

What do you think about this ?

Just found a Kristina Chodorow, Software Developer for 10Gen, talk on introducing MongoDB.

The talk definitely worth’s the 45 minutes.I suggest for you to go to Parleys and see the talk with slides side-by-side.

The talk touchs almost all MongoDb hot topics:

• What is MongoDB
• MongoDB’s Goal
• MongoDb 5 min installation
• Basic Concepts: Database, Collection, Document, ObjectID
• Interacting with MongoDB : Querying, Inserting, Updating, Deleting
• Storing Files: GridFS
• “Stored Procedures” .js collection
• Replication

Looked for a reliable document oriented database, and after some tests and code, decided to give a try on MongoDB for a small proof of concept that i am working on. On the rest of this post i will try to guide you through the main principles of MongoDB integration with PHP.

Jens Østergaard gives a great talk about “Why is scrum so hard”. A great talk about the challenges of scrum using some real examples.

Slides for the talk can be found following this link (http://files.meetup.com/936565/20090819-SFAgile-Jens.pdf).

Procrastination doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, there are several ways to perform active procrastination.

In the video below, Gina Trapani explains how you can turn passive procrastination into active procrastination.

You can read the full story on Fast Company post.