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In a lot of different kinds of systems there are moving parts.  Electronics, automobiles, bridges and even living systems.  As it turns out in many if not most of these systems, the simpler designs tend to have various advantages over the more complex designs.  These benefits ring true in the business world as well.

Rock Climbing

Take the extreme sport rock climbing as an example.  I’ve been rock climbing off and on for about five years, though mostly indoors at rock climbing gyms.  One thing that you learn a lot about in rock climbing is safety.  There is a discussion of the harness, and how to double-back the waist cinch, and using multiple carabiners to lock into the rope, and then how to tie the rope in such a way that it tightens as it bears weight.  Both the person climbing and the person balaying – gathering the rope below – each have to take care of these things.  So generally they both check their own rope, harness, carabiners, and then check the other persons.

With indoor climbing this is all rather simple, and with just six checks for each climber to make, generally quite safe.  Plus there are monitors in the room watching people climb, and further checking for mistakes or oversights.  So over the years I’ve heard of practically *no* injuries in the gym.  It is so-called top-roping, and their are few moving parts.

With outdoor climbing you can do top-roping, however more advanced climbers prefer lead climbing.  It is much more challenging, and as I’ve described above there are many more moving parts.  The lead climber has to place “protection” into the rock every few meters.  These are special camming devices that grip into the rock.  Obviously all these components are not fool-proof, hence you want to add as many as possible.  But there are limits to endurance, and statistical averages at play, and more importantly many more moving parts.  So unfortunately lead climbing outdoors although possible to be on the safe side, tends to be much more prone to accidents.  More moving parts increases the statistical chance of a system breakdown.

iPhone

Something similar is at play when it comes to interface design.  With user interface or UI design, there is often a discussion of how many steps it takes to perform a function.  The more steps, the deeper the function is hidden.  Fewer steps means simplicity of design.

The iphone is a great example of this.  By simplifying the user interface, the machine works better.  At the Mobile World Congress last year Google announced that they get 50 times more searches from the iphone than *any* other mobile device.  Fifty times!  Think about that statistic.  This is more that flashy glitz and a pretty package.  This is a device that has fewer moving parts, not only in terms of buttons, but in the virtual interface components that a user navigates on the touch screen.

Internet & Engineering

Many of the same truisms that apply in the examples of rock climbing or smartphones also apply to internet systems, and the operations side of the business.  Can we use a web-services solution such a mailchimp.com to handle our email newsletter?  That means less to manage in-house, so our IT staff can focus on more important tasks.  Or how about outsource all email handling through a service like google’s Gmail for Business, or salesforce.com for CRM.

Simplifying your operations can also mean going with managing hosting solution, or better yet embracing the cloud with Amazon Web Services or Rackspace Cloud.   For that matter what database platform are you running on, or what computing platform?  Does it embrace the complexity and more  features philosophy?  Or does it strive for simplicity, and fewer moving parts?  And for that matter how many of those endless features are you actually using for your application?

Conclusion

As it turns out, engineers as much as business folks are wowed by endless features and the appeal of glitz and shine of a fancy new car.  But often in business what you need is reliability, simplicity, and fewer moving parts to get the job done, and get it done well.

Your website is slow but you’re not sure why.  You do know that it’s impacting your business.  Are you losing customers to the competition?

1. Gather Intelligence

With any detective work you need information.  That’s where intelligence comes in.  If you don’t have the right data already, install monitoring and trending systems such as Cacti and Collectd.  That way you can look at where your systems have been and where they’re going.

2. Identify Bottlenecks

Put all that information to use in your investigation.  Use stress testing tools to hit areas of the application, and identify which ones are most troublesome.  Some pages get hit A LOT, such as the login page, so slowness there is more serious than one small report that gets hit by only  a few users.  Work on the biggest culprits first to get the best bang for your buck.

3. Smooth Out the Wrinkles

Reconfigure your webservers to make more connections to your database, or spin-up more servers.  On the database tier make sure you have fast RAIDed disk, and lots of memory.  Tune queries coming from your application, and look at possible upgrades to servers.

4. Be Agile But Plan for the Future

Can your webserver tier scale horizontally?  Pretty easy to add more servers under a load balancer.  How about your database.  Chances are with a little work and some HA magic your database can scale out with more servers too, moving the bulk of select operations to read-only copies of your primary server, while letting it focus on transactions, and data updates.  Be ready and tested so you know exactly how to add servers without impacting the customers or application.  Don’t know how?  Look at the big guys like Facebook, an investigate how they’re doing it.

5. A Going Concern

Most importantly, just like your business, your technology infrastructure is an ongoing work in progress.  Stay proactive with monitoring, analysis, trending, and vigilance.  Watch application changes, and filter for slow queries.  Have new hardware or additional hardware dynamically at-the-ready for when you need it.

The analogy du jour for cleaning up the financial mess is that sunshine makes the best disinfectant.  The idea is to push for more corporate transparency as a cleaning agent upon our current financial troubles.   Whether this cleaning job will have longstanding impact remains to be seen, however it’s clear that transparency is good for markets and economic stability.

In computing that same sunshine can be put to work as a disinfectant as well.  Transparency is as important for your cloud hosted application or traditional servers alike.  So how does it work?

Your typical internet application consists of a whole fleet of servers working together to do work for you.  Unlike automobiles, bridges, buildings or even most electronics however, the construction is constantly changing.  In effect these are buildings that are always being built, and bridges always being expanded.  Due to their changing nature, their behavior changes as well.  That’s where transparency comes in.

There are a number of great historical data tools specifically designed to capture the myriad of different metrics on your servers and then analyze and graph that information for you offline.  We like offline because that means the monitoring itself won’t affect or impact the performance of your application and servers.  Some of the tools of choice today include Munin, Cacti, and Collectd.  They each have their own strengths and weaknesses in terms of installation, configurability and so forth.  What they all have in common though is the transparency they provide.

Once installed, they will begin happily collecting information and monitoring your servers, all day and all night long even while you are enjoying your sunday brunch.

Are you looking at an outage that you encountered yesterday at 11pm?  Did your customers have trouble ordering your products, or utilizing your service? Fire up your cacti graphs, and drill down to that time window, and then review the various metrics to see what they reveal.

Having the right information at your fingertips is the first step in being able to resolve troubles.  Only with the right information can you fix these problems, and serve your customers what they expect.  So follow the analogy of using sunshine as a disinfectant and shine some light into your complex cloud environments. Let transparency lead you to the root of the problem and clean it up before it touches your customers.

Book Review:  The Ascent of Money – Niall Ferguson

When I think back to the dot-com days, I recall euphoria in people’s eyes.  It was that excitement in the face of making boat loads of money off the stock market that I remember clearly.  It is the excitement of the gambler, the thought of taking the shortcut, of getting something for nothing.  I remember seeing that same look in people’s eyes when they talked about housing just a short few years ago.  Talk of flipping houses and making money without adding anything.

It’s after the bubble bursts that everyone starts to think clearly again.  The tide has receded and we are left wondering how there could be bathers who weren’t wearing bathing suits, while it’s now plain for all to see.

Niall Ferguson’s book chronicles money’s use through history both the good and the bad.  By putting the current financial mess into historical perspective, he offers us new insights into our current predicament, helping us chart the way forward.  For anyone wanting to understand the financial forces around us, this is definitely a book worth reading.

It really is a golden rule in business that beyond all the tasks you will perform, the ideas you will discuss, and the people you will work with, you will leave a lasting impression of who you are, and what the experience of working with you is like. Strive always to be a pleasure to work with and you will surely find repeat business and plenty of word-of-mouth referrals too.

An abrasive genius

We’ve all had the opportunity to work with that individual who is quite bright. They may be hard working, driven to solve problems and good at completing tasks. However the abrasive ones might complain, put down those who don’t understand them, discount others ideas because they are sure their own are best, and generally be a bit of a sore spot on the team.

Over time the individual isn’t appreciated, no matter how hard they work because people tend not to like them, find themselves begrudgingly working with the person, think of the interaction as “dealing” rather than working together and so on. This person becomes insecure despite their great knowledge, and expertise, primarily because people feel negatively towards them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

An average miss sunshine

Just as we’ve all had the experience of working with the abrasive genius we may also have the experience of working with mister or miss sunshine. They seem to always bring spirits up in meetings, tend more toward the positive, have a way of critiquing without criticizing, asking questions without tearing apart what you’re saying, and always seem likeable.

In fact we may even have experienced folks who are somehow average or worse at their job, perhaps even mess things up from time to time, but everyone is very forgiving of them because they are so very likeable?

Their warm personality will take them far. It encourages teamwork, collaboration, and makes them more confident as well.

Conclusions

So what’s the take-away? Well, why not be both? Set your sites on being highly skilled, but a pleasure to work with. Jack of all trades, but down to earth and easy to communicate with, and therein lies a formula for success and a true golden rule in business.

Book Review: Jeffrey Gitomer – Little Red Book of Selling

In truth, anytime you’re communicating with someone about something new, or when you’re both not “aligned” ie in agreement about something, you’re doing sales. You’re selling your argument, idea or perspective. So to in professional services, whenever you are pitching your expertise, talking about experiences with past clients, and so on it is all about sales.

What I like about Gitomer’s book is that it offers very down-to-earth advice, in easy to digest morsels. This book is not about the web, or specific advice about how to succeed providing a particular type of service, but rather how to succeed with people, how to work with people, how to impress and convey, and win over people so they will trust you, work with you, and in the end buy your services.

An excellent read all around, and an eye-opener for any of us not schooled in sales and/or marketing.

View Gitomer’s Little Red Book of Selling on Amazon

You’ve heard all about twitter, and you may have visited the website, or used it through other tools that bring your messages from linkedin or facebook into twitter.  It turns out there is a lot more to the twitter world that first meets the eye.

1. Make regular and relevant use of hashtags

2. Focus on your subject matter expertise

3. Monitor trends on google and twitter.com

4. Link to colleagues you respect and promote cross-pollination of networks.

5. Remember you are broadcasting, so word your tweets appropriate to your audience.

A friend and colleague of mine runs a small business doing internet consulting, programming, and services mostly for online magazines. We were talking about customers and clients, and the sometimes large disconnect there is between how we all perceive technology. He said something very insightful – “customers don’t know what they want, but they know what their NEEDS are”.

Story: Hosting an Email List

I used to host this very email list myself, using some open source software called phplist. It is very customizable, providing a lot of features and functionality, rivaling if not surpassing many of the pay services. So for five years I simply hosted the list myself.

I had a lot of problems though. I had problems with bounces being handled properly, and unsubscribes, and the tracking never worked very well. The reports which one relies on a lot to know what people read and find interesting and useful, were not setup in an ideal way either. Worst of all was the blacklist problem, as a lot of email services simply blacklist servers they don’t like. It then becomes very difficult to get off of those lists. So subsequent emails just end up in junkmail boxes, and people never see your newsletter. Furthermore there was a lot of administrative overhead for managing the software.

I recently moved to a hosted solution called Mail Chimp. I spent a lot of time comparing various services, but this one seemed to have very good customer service, and a lot of community support. After I sent out my first newsletter I found it integrated with google analytics, which was superb. It further would automatically post to twitter, had a wordpress plugin for integrating with a blog or website, and a whole host of other features I hadn’t even dug into yet.

I got all this for only $30/month, I gain the brains of all those people working to perfect the system, I gain the proessionalism that they enforce when I upload the list, better reports, more intelligence, and more readers! The whole experience was a learning one for me. I knew well what I needed, to reach customers, colleagues, and potential prospects. But clearly I didn’t know what I wanted.

The end result? I now can focus more on my business, my day-to-day needs, by getting it done RIGHT… Leave email list management to the experts!

Story: A Clogged Drain

For a while my bathroom sink has had this sort of slow drain problem. Probably off and on for about two years I’ve had the problem. Usually I’ll pour some draino down there and leave it for a few hours, and then rinse it with hot water. Even after these various times of cleaning it out, it never drained well, and within a few months it would always come back. Once it’s not draining, it starts to gunk up, a real pain in the neck.

So in effort to solve the problem, I went once again to the local grocery store. This time I really looked at the products on offer. Apparently there were FIVE different kinds of draino. I had never noticed, I just always bought the same one. Reading the labels closely, one was a gel, another a foam, another a liquid one, and a fourth was extra strength. On the back of one of the labels there was a table describing the different types of clogs and which product would be best. Apparently I had a slow recurring drain. It turns out that was a known TYPE of clog. I didn’t know there were different types of clogged drains.

I ended up with the foam draino which seemed to be the one for a slow recurring drain. I followed the instructions, and poured the entire contents down the drain as instructed. I waited an hour or so, and ran the hot water down the drain. Low and behold it was clear, more clear than it had been in a couple of years. Wow!

Now I’m not a plumber, obviously, it’s not my specialty. I had no idea how complex the subject was, nor the variety of solutions available. I didn’t even know what my problem was. But I knew what my needs were. I knew I wanted my drain cleared. I assumed it was a simple fix, and it shouldn’t cost more that $5 or $10, but then I had the problem for two years. In retrospect it probably would have been worth hiring a plumber for $100 or $150 to fix the problem right, and have a clear sink for two more years than I did.

The recurring problem may inflict more pain than the cost of resolving the problem properly, promptly, and with no fuss, without requiring me to master new subject matter, so I can get on with other business at hand.

Conclusions

We all know what our day-to-day needs our, in business, and in life. But we don’t always know what we want. We turn to subject matter experts in various areas to provide us with their knowledge, their experience, and allow us to focus on our core businesses.

Book Review – What Every Body Is Saying – Joe Navarro

Ever been in a meeting with a colleague, client, or boss. You’re discussing some issue which needs resolution. You can sense the temperature is rising but you’re not sure why? Maybe you are already at the point where things are reaching a boiling point, and wondering when they got there and how?

Joe Navarro’s book takes a fascinating peak into body language, to help us better understand our own and those around us. Keep your hands in plain view if you want to be trusted, keep smiling, and keep and open mind. There is a lot to learn in this book. Navarro is an ex-FBI agent, with years of experience at telling the good guys from the bad, the liars from the just plain nervous. So his views and perspectives are sure to be insightful, whether you want to work better with your colleagues, get that big promotion, or close a deal with a new prospect.

View What Every Body Is Saying on Amazon

Heavyweight Internet Group is a boutique technology consulting firm operating in New York City. In business for over ten years, we have weathered the dot-com storm, continuing to provide our clients with the very best expertise. Concentrating on client needs & their business bottom line, we let needs and value drive technology solutions, not the other way around.

Our many years in the business have brought us perspectives and experience which we bring to the table with every new client. The value is obvious. What’s more we provide individual attention and focus to each client, another tremendous benefit.

Selected Clients

Active Reasoning

Advance Publications

American DBA Online

American Law Media

Ariane Anthony Dance Co.

Community Connect, Inc.

Conducive Corporation

Cyber Logics, Inc.

Database Journal

Dotomi, Inc.

DownloadCard, Inc.

DBA Online

DBA Zine/BMC Software

Efferent Corp.

EFY Group – New Delhi, India

Far Countries, Inc.

firmView, LLC.

GL Trade, Inc.

IN2, Inc.

Infovest21, LLC.

Inside Cinema

Integrated Media, Inc.

Independent Oracle User Group

Kaplan, Inc.

Marketing Technology Solutions

Method Five, Inc.

MIDORINOSHIMA

Missing Pixel

Money-Media, Inc.

NBC/iVillage – NeverSayDiet.com

NBC/BravoTV.com

Nechsi, LLC

Net Creations, Inc.

New York Oracle User Group

Oracle Technology Network

Physical Arts Center

Proteometrics, Inc.

Real Estate Online

Riptide Communications, LLC

Robichaux & Associates, Inc.

Solbright, Inc.

Starmedia, Inc.

Streamedia, Inc.

Susquehanna International Group

Timeout NY

TSI, Inc.

Wireless Generation

Workspeed, Inc.

Xceed Corp.

1. Convert to Wordpress
2. Categorize and tag your content.
3. Use Google Analytics
4. Create new content regularly
5. Create a sitemap.xml

Wordpress

This popular blogging software has evolved into a full featured content management system.  Most types of businesses could host on wordpress, although they’d typically require a designer to layout a theme which matches your businesses requirements.

The advantage is huge.  Wordpress has evolved lockstep with the internet, and has integrated SEO right into the engine.  So your content will be very search engine friendly out of the box.

Categorize and Tag

This allows helps the search engines understand your material.  Remember these are software algorithms that read or “crawl” your site.  So they aren’t intelligent, and can make mistakes about what your content is about.  By providing specific tags, you help put your material in the right places, and have it indexed better by the search engines.

Use Google Analytics

This free service is a phenomenal way to see what’s happening on your site everyday, and what content is popular.  You can view hits, and where they’re coming from, and what search terms they used to find your site.

For an even more powerful tool and real-time analytics check out Chart Beat.

Create New Content

Adding new content regularly keeps your site fresh, and the search engines will notice this.  As more content is added, it will also allow the search engines to better categorize what types of content is there.  The more relevant content there is, the more the search engines will decide you are a good place to send their searchers.

Create a Sitemap

This is a map you give to the search engines so they can easily find all the pages in your site.  Without it they may only find pages linked from the homepage.  Wordpress has an easy plugin which builds this for you.  No mess, no trouble.

What is your strongest suit?

I talk to a lot of clients, prospects, and human resources folks everyday.  Every so often I’ll be asked “What is your strongest suit?  Would you say you are stronger in Oracle or MySQL?  You’re really on the database side, so you don’t do much systems administration, right?”   I hesitate to go with an either or answer because my exposure to technologies really has been mixed.  It’s easy to think in either or terms.  You can’t be expert at both database platforms, can you?  A lot of folks do specialize in one platform, or one type of work so it’s not surprising we tend to compartmentalize without thinking about it.

What about a jack of all trades?

Perhaps a better question to be asking is how many hats can you wear?  A generalist who can deep dive into the details when necessary can be a great asset to a business.   A manager who is watching costs, and a tight budget needs resources who can solve a lot of different types of problems, and hiring folks who wear a lot of different hats can be a great asset to them.

Specializing Job Roles

Unfortunately due to the way we think of education, we normally major in one thing, and further specialize through years of on-the-job experience.  This type of focus is important, but it can also be a detriment.  Psychologists argue that we naturally have mental blind spots.  Because of that we tend to bias heavily to what we are most exposed to, and see things with those glasses.

Take for example if we specialize in a particular programming language, we’ll likely see that as the best solution for all tasks.  If our job is on the operations side, we may see the business and it’s application in terms of the components and servers that host it.  We probably think about security, and performance, and reliability.  And if we are a developer, we’ll see it as a series of software components that interact in a certain way.  We may well focus on functionality, and the details therein, but think less about performance or upkeep of those infrastructure that sits on.  If we’re a manager or CEO, we will see the business as a whole and what solution it brings to it’s customers.  We are intimately aware of costs in human resources, infrastructure, and day-to-day operations that it takes to make the business continue to move forward and grow.  However we may not understand the intimate details enough to notice a design flaw a developer might, or understand the security implications to the business of a certain infrastructure decision.

The forest for the trees

Given all of this we can see how pervasive each of our blind spots are, and how they influence our frame of mind.  It’s very easy for us to miss the forest for the trees unless we are vigilant.  Communication can help us, and goes a long way towards helping the business as a whole be able to do this.  It can’t hurt to also have a few generalists who can wear many different hats, and plug in to projects in different and creative ways for the business.

BOOK REVIEW:  Cordelia Fine – A Mind of It’s Own, How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives

Here’s an interesting read that elaborates and clarifies how we are biased, how our minds tell us convenient fictions everyday.  Most people are overly optimistic, for instance about their driving ability, or their chances of success.  She explains that this is exhibited by healthy minds, and that there are a class of people that actually see things closer to reality.  Their perceptions of themselves are more even, and their predictions tend to be more realistic.  Apparently people with this unusual quality tend to be clinically depressed.

She divides the chapters up into some of our favorite vices, vanity, immorality, delusions and further being over emotional, secretive, weak-willed or bigoted.  Whatever areas are our particular trouble spots, we all exhibit some of these traits at times.

The author goes a long way towards explaining how and why we do this, and what can be done to improve the situation.  With her insights in mind we can hopefully make better decisions, and communicate better with those around us.

View A Mind of It’s Own on Amazon

OPEN INSIGHTS 64

WHAT YOU VALUE

Upon return to JFK recently I was walking through the airport and noticed the prominent HSBC ads.  The ad campaign has been running for a while, but somehow it didn’t register before.  The ad has three pictures of the same baby.  Under the first is "love", under the second "legacy" and the third "expense".  And indeed if you were to ask three people what they see in the picture, based perhaps on the moment, or who they are or a hundred other factors, you might get any of those answers.

And therein lies the paradox that what one person "values" may not be what another does.  This in itself captures a very real part of what it means to be successful as a consultant from day-to-day.  For a consultant is not just solving the problems *they* see, the ones they may have been trained to solve, the ones that they are trained to see, or the ones they seem most prescient to them.  For it is only by solving the problems that the client sees, and expressing and communicating that solution in terms that make sense to the client that you are successful.

Your computer acts much like a restaurant

A friend of mine is a surgeon, and he tells me that his friends and family constantly bring their ailments to him, asking his advice as a concerned friend.  I find something similar, that friends and family ask about their computer troubles, soliciting a friendly opinion or advice from someone who might know a bit more.

Recently a friend was asking me why their computer was slow.  I thought about it a bit and explained, you know… your computer is like a restaurant.  "A restaurant"? they asked.  I explained that your computer has a restaurant where things are prepared, and their is table top space where the cook prepares dishes.  This is like your computer memory.  If you have smaller dishes, you can fit more of them on that table, and the cook like the cpu in your computer, can do more work for you quicker.  By preparing a little faster, the waiters can bring out your meal quicker.  If your memory is severly limited, the cook will have to move things off the table in front of them, move them around, shift things to this place or that place instead of focusing on what’s directly in front of them.  But give them enough space to work, and they can prepare a great banquet, using large bowls, and big ovens. 

What’s more if a whole bunch of guests show up all at once, and all order different items from the menu, it is likely that the kitchen will get backed up.  And so it is true with your computer on your desktop. 

So I suggested that they get more memory.  But as important, I suggested they turn off, disable, or even uninstall non-essential software and services that will just slow your computer down.   With a twinkle in their eye, they thanked me.  Not just for the advice, but for the understanding.

Your enterprise database is much like a public library

Recently I was working with a client who was experiencing trouble with a new acquisition.  The new website was experiencing growing pains from too much new traffic, a good problem to have, but a problem none the less. 

As we discussed the technology infrastructure I sensed that the client didn’t really understand the components of a modern web application, the browser, the webserver and the database.  This is the so-called three-tier model, what computer professionals like to call a technology stack.  Of course throwing around sophisticated buzzwords would only confuse the client more, which was definitely not my aim.

I explained that the database was like a public library.  "Is it really?" they asked.  I explained that the database can be thought of as the books in the library.  When the library is closed for business, the books just sit on the shelves, not doing much of anything.  But they sit there on their shelves, waiting for business hours.  But once the library opens, that’s when the real magic happens.  Members of the public or other patrons come into the library and read the books.  They ask the librarian where to find something, or for other suggestions.  And this analogy works well for your web-facing database.  While the database is shutdown, it is like a library closed and not servicing anyone.  However it still contains all that interesting and varied information, all those books still sit on the shelves, and in our database, all our data still sits.  Once the database has started however, it’s live, it’s doing work, it’s servicing our requests, it’s reading information, and saving information for later retrieval.

After the explanation, the client smiled and shook my hand.  They appreciated both my knowledge and expertise, but also my no-nonsense way of presenting ideas and concepts in a language and terms that made sense to them.

Conclusion

Understanding what other people value, what their perspective is, or how they are seeing things means stepping into their shoes for a moment.  It requires looking from their vantage, asking questions that only they can answer, and in doing so coming to a greater understanding of what they need.  Only then can consultant really solve a clients needs.

REVIEW: SETH GODIN – LINCHPIN

Seth Godin is at it again with his just published "Linchpin – Are You Indispensable?".  That’s a good question to be asking right about now, as the unemployment rate reaches all-time highs.  As with his past great books, he offers a lot of great insights but the central one in this book is that it is better to think of yourself as a linchpin rather than a cog, and if you’re not doing that, it’s probably time to start.

As the job market becomes more competitive across many sectors, from Finance to Technology, and Graphic Design to Management, it is ever more important to add value and bring more to the table that others are not able to or not willing to, or simply not aware they can bring.  It is only by doing this that we can become indispensable and thus a linchpin.

View Linchpin on Amazon.com

PAST ISSUES

Issue 63 – Slow To Credit

Issue 62 – Context

Issue 61 – Medicine of Austerity

Issue 60 – Principal Agent

Issue 59 – Invisibility of Skills

TECH ARTICLES

Jan 2010 – DRBD & MySQL: Virtual Box Setup

Dec 2009 – DRBD & MySQL: Excellent Low-cost HA Solution

Nov 2009 – Bigger & Better MySQL

Oct 2009 – Faster & Stronger MySQL

Aug 2009 – 7 Ways to Crash a Database

Jul 2009 – MySQL: 5 More Dials to Tune

ABOUT US

Sixty Four Issues of Open Insights and counting! Wow, five years sure does fly by! With that, we look forward to bringing you five more years of business and technology insights.

We’ve always been about open-source technology, integration & mixing commercial technologies such as Oracle with open-source ones such as MySQL and Linux. As open-source becomes mainstream, and more shops consider moving critical services to these technologies, we continue to provide assistance and expertise for these transitions. Whether it is performance testing and tuning, benchmarking, high availability or recovery, we can provide services for your specific needs.

Looking for a top-flight DBA? Visit us on the web at www.iheavy.com.

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