Scaling read performance with rqlite 5.1.0
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, with SQLite as its storage engine. v5.1.0 is now out, and supports scaling reads via newly available read-only nodes.
Philip O'Toole
Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
Philip O'Toole
Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
Philip O'Toole
rqlite 5.0.0 released
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, with SQLite as its storage engine. v5.0.0 is now out, and is the first major upgrade in over 2 years.
Logging and Monitoring systems are hard to code
This is a post following up on my Monitorama Baltimore 2019 talk. Logging and Monitoring systems — Observability Systems, if you prefer — often seem to struggle to meet the needs of their users.
rqlite 4.6.0 released
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source distributed relational database, with SQLite as its storage engine. v4.6.0 is now out has many new database management features. You can download the release from GitHub.
Observing Observability at Devopsday
It was great to speak at devopsdays in Galway. I really enjoyed bringing my recent Monitorama 2019 talk to my home town. A video of the talk has now been posted.
devopsdays Galway
I will be joining my colleague from Google, Nathen Harvey, to speak in Galway at devopsdays on November 18th and 19th. I’m really looking forward to returning to my home town, and bringing my Monitorama Baltimore 2019 talk to the…
Observing Observability
Monitorama Baltimore 2019 was a great experience, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to speak. I spoke about why Observability and Monitoring sytems struggle to meet their goals, and why they are so hard to build. The slides and video…
Monitorama Baltimore 2019
I have been accepted to talk at Monitorama Baltimore this year. I’ll be speaking about my experience building Observability systems at many different companies, and how might those lessons be applicable to other teams and groups. Check out the full…
Enabling CircleCI testing for gorqlite
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source distributed relational database, with SQLite as its storage engine. gorqlite is a Go client library, originally written by raindog308. While the client library doesn’t adhere to the Go database standard, it is still starting to get some…
Continuing the WordPress bring-up on GCP
Following up on my earlier post, it has been pretty straightforward to so far to migrate this blog from Rackspace to GCP. It’s going pretty much as expected, but the architecture is going to be slightly different than I initially…
go mod in rqlite
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source distributed relational database, with SQLite as its storage engine. The 5.0 branch of rqlite now has standard dependency management. Thanks to Elliot Courant, this pull request adds go mod support.
Meaningful Uptime Measurements for the Cloud
Another interesting paper came my way, thanks to the Morning Paper mailing list. Nines are Not Enough:Meaningful Metrics for Clouds discusses a topic that I deal with regularly in my role at Google. SLIs, SLOs, and SLA are easy to…
How I handle my Gmail load at Google
As an Engineering Manager at Google, I get a lot of email — everyone does. Google — at least my group — doesn’t make heavy use of IM-like tools internally, and I’m happy about that. Combined with traffic from the…
rqlite 4.5.0 released
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source distributed relational database, with SQLite as its storage engine. v4.5.0 is now out and supports passing a root Certificate Authority cert to the CLI. You can download the release from GitHub.
Using Commutativity for Faster Replication
I recently came across a new paper co-authored by John Ousterhout, one of the original authors of the Raft protocol. In it John, and his co-author, describe an approach which can double the throughput of some popular replicated distributed key-value…
Learning data engineering
Sometime ago I was asked where to begin to learn data engineering. It was a broad question, and it took some to understand what exactly I was being asked.
rqlite 4.4.0 released
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source distributed relational database, with SQLite as its storage engine. v4.4.0 is now out and allows the Raft election timeout to be set. You can download the release from GitHub.
Batching in Go
The batching of data or computation amortizing a fixed cost over multiple units — is a very common pattern in many computers systems. It’s particularly prevalent in networking and CPU memory accesses. But the implementation of batching includes many subtleties…
Jimmy Carter and the Failures of Management
I’m not old enough to remember Jimmy Carter in office, but I did see him speak once in 2013. With a B.Sc., and some training in nuclear power, his background was always somewhat interesting to me — particularly how someone with a…
rqlite 4.3.1 released
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source distributed relational database, with SQLite as its storage engine. v4.3.1 is now out and includes some cluster management fixes. You can download the release from GitHub.
rqlite at the Pitt CS Club
I recently had a chance to speak about rqlite, the distributed, lightweight database built on SQLite, at the University of Pittsburgh Computer Science Club. It was a good evening as I spoke about distributed systems, the problems they solve, and how rqlite…
Go race detection and failing fast
Go remains one of the languages I’m most productive in. Its combination of the rigour of static typing, but fluidity of Python, makes it both robust and easy to code in. It’s also got some innovative features that help you…
rqlite moved to Circle 2.0
I’ve moved continuous testing of rqlite to CircleCI 2.0. The initial work I did with hraftd was helpful, though rqlite was definitely more involved. Testing is significantly quicker with the new, container-based, version of CircleCI, which should help noticeably with…
Deploying Vallified on GCP
Since I recently joined Google Cloud Platform (GCP), I thought it’s time to get some practical experience with the platform. As a result I’m going to migrate this blog from Rackspace to GCP — specifically I’ll use GCE for WordPress, and…
Moving to CircleCI 2.0
CircleCI, which I used for much of my open-source integration testing, has released version 2.0. Support for 1.0 is finishing in August 2018, so it’s time to migrate my projects. I’ve started with hraftd. It was pretty easy, but I…