I’ve wanted to write a book for a while – mainly because people seemed genuinely interested in the presentations I have given over the past several years at the ApacheCon conferences. While my academic background and most of my project background is in the area of high-availability and resource allocation in clusters (i.e. load-balancing), it seemed that a book on it would either be too high level or too applied. The problem with high level conversation is that you end up boring people to death who are practical and not providing enough hands-on information to those that are engineers.
So, I was implementing this thing… It seems that all my discussions start like this. Sigh. So, I was implementing this caching systems for file signatures. I needed a hashing algorithm with excellent distribution and low calculation cost. My first assumption was that MD5 didn’t meet my needs due to its computational costs… I was surprised.I found a great exploratory article on hashingthat assisted my search for the perfect[-enough], cheap[-enough] hash.
So, there are a lot of databases out there. I’ve used more than a handful. Commercial, Proprietary, Free, Open, etc. The two databases I’ve used most are Oracle and MySQL and let me say that I like them both immensely. However, recently we considered putting database support into a commercial, proprietary application and MySQL concerned and confused me.Recently, SPFv1has been popular – likely due to the recent publication of SPF records by Internet giant AOL.
