Posts in 2019

 

Convert file I/O into pipe I/O with /dev/fd

Some Unix commands read data from files or write data to files, without offering an obvious way to use them as part of a pipeline. How can you write a program to interact with such a command in a streaming fashion? This would allow your program and the command run concurrently, without the storage and I/O overhead of a temporary file. You could create and use a named pipe, but this is a clunky solution, requiring you to create and destroy a unique underlying file name. Here’s a better approach.

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Pia Betton on Service Design

I attended an excellent talk by Pia Betton on service design, which according to Wikipedia is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its customers. Here are my notes.

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How to monitor MySQL / MariaDB query progress

The progress indicator of MySQL or MariaDB long-running commands and queries is extremely extremely and frustratingly coarse. In an index update I’m running now it was stuck in the same state for more than three hours. Thankfully, the pmonitor tool allows us to precisely monitor the progress of many commands. Here’s an example of its application on MariaDB.

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So, you’re chairing a conference session?

Earlier today a first-time session chair asked me for tips on chairing his session. With conference presentations becoming shorter and more packed, I realized that the task of the session chair has become more demanding. Here’s some advice.

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