Animated database courseware (ADbC)

George Bagropoulos — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 09:09:00 +0000

Learning database concepts is sometimes difficult and challenging. Animated Database Courseware (ADbC) is designed to support the teaching of database concepts. It is developed at Kennesaw State University. Areas covered include database design, SQL, transactions and database security. The animations are generic not tailored to any specific product or textbook.

In my opinion the tool offers good examples and covers most of the areas of modern database design. It has a good explanations of topics like transactions Concurrency, store procedure and functions, triggers.

High performance distributed data storage systems

George Bagropoulos — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 14:33:00 +0000

In the online edition of ACM Communications Sept. 2009 Issue I read a very interesting article from Michael Stonebraker’s blog about the end of RDMSs. I did a little research and I found that the distributed key-value stores are gaining ground especially in Web based applications. Many sites such as Amazon, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Facebook use distributed key – value stored to cope with petabyte data.

From the braindump blog I saw that there is a fast growing noSQL community that talks about how distributed non relational databases work.

A very interesting paper is the presentation of Amazon’s Dynamo highly available key-value storage system. From Amazon’s experience we learn that the reliability and scalability of a system is dependent on how its application state is managed.

For some quick links:

Hypertable is designed to manage the storage and processing of information on a large cluster of commodity servers, providing resilience to machine and component failures.

Cassandra is a highly scalable, eventually consistent, distributed, structured key-value store.

Voldemort is a distributed key-value storage system. In the “Build and Break” blog there is a nice post about the Voldemort project.

CouchDB is a document database server, accessible via a RESTful JSON API.

Mongo (from “humongous”) is a high-performance, open source, schema-free document-oriented database.

database – Tales from the bits

Animated database courseware (ADbC)

High performance distributed data storage systems