Comments on: Commodity Hardware, Commodity Software and Commodity People

By: acer

acer — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:54:02 +0000

very good!

By: Robert Brewer

Robert Brewer — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 00:57:15 +0000

I meant that when smart people become busy, they act like “commodity people”; that is, busy people also exhibit a low tolerance for complicated things, and want products which are more safe, easier to use, and more forgiving of errors.

Once you realize that, you might even start to think of “commodity people” as just “busy with something other than what you want them to be busy with”. Heck, they might even be smart.

By: peter

peter — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 22:40:27 +0000

Jan, Mark

Thanks I should take a closer look at S3 storage engine and CoachDB

By: peter

peter — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 22:39:52 +0000

Robert, By commodity people I do not mean Busy people. I think this is more question of Skill Set as Kevin notes but also about state of mind. Some people try to innovate and use crazy decisions which would people later call smart others would use classical approaches, or simplistic approaches.

The great example in this case is memcached. When it just came out a lot of people could say – what a crazy idea, database already uses memory well and can cache things, not to mention MySQL Query Cache. Many people I run into even now do not like to use memcache or other proved approaches like sharding because this makes things to complicated for them they would prefer to live in the wonderful world where you can throw queries at your single database and it will handle any load.

By: Jan

Jan — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 11:44:29 +0000

You might be interested in CouchDb (http://couchdb.org/). A few articles on my blog explain a bit more than the wiki-documentation.

Cheers,
Jan

By: Kevin Burton

Kevin Burton — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 01:03:15 +0000

Try calling it a commodity skillset……. doesn’t point the finger at people being commodity.

Kevin

By: Mark Atwood

Mark Atwood — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 20:22:54 +0000

Amazon S3 actaully deals with MIME-typed blobs. I’ve written a MySQL storage engine for it, available at http://fallenpegasus.com/code/mysql-awss3/

One of the things in my “working on” pile is a generic schema storage engine for S3, so that someone could just take an existing MyISAM table, and say “ALTER TABLE ENGINE=AWSS3″, and it would keep on working.

Also getting out of the SQL language sphere, S3 has some interesting key search sematics, and there are some very interesting large database key search REST APIs from utility computing providers that will be very interesting.

By: Robert Brewer

Robert Brewer — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 19:55:06 +0000

Use the phrase “busy people” instead of “commodity people” and all of the negativity just melts away…