News For Dev-ops

Amazon Quick introduces Quick Essentials for enterprises. The plan makes it easier for organizations to get started with all the features of Quick such as AI-powered chat, Research, Flows, and Apps, and lets users view and interact with Quick Sight dashboards and reports and then manage adoption at the desired pace. In AWS Regions where Amazon Quick is available, Quick Sight Reader users are upgraded to Quick Essentials at no additional per-user cost. With Quick Essentials, Quick Sight Readers can ask their dashboards questions in plain language, like what drove a revenue dip in March, and dig into the details with follow-up questions. They can turn the answer into a document, presentation, or spreadsheet for their team. When they need more context, Research pulls from their data, files, and the web into a detailed report with citations. If they need the same update every week, Flows can build it and send it automatically. When they need a tool that doesn't exist yet, like a requ...

The Windows 2000 launch in San Francisco was accompanied by an expo, and a large number of Windows 2000 team members were dispatched to run the various booths and stations, give informal presentations on the new features of Windows 2000, and answer technical questions from the various attendees. And from among the people who were sent to the expo, a smaller group was selected to attend the launch event itself in person. Related reading : A ticket to the Windows 95 launch . After a few of us arrived early at the Civic Auditorium for the launch event, we had to entertain ourselves until the doors opened. There was some speculation as to who the celebrity host would be, since it hadn't been announced. One of my colleagues tried to sneak into what looked like a VIP tent.¹ I, on the other hand, went exploring. I found an unlocked door that took me into the empty upper level of the main auditorium. I took a seat and tried not to be noticed. The stage was set up with a 10-meter tall...

Under the Hood: The Research Behind Microsoft SQL, part 2 Here’s a scenario that used to be genuinely frightening: you kick off a bulk load of a few hundred million rows in a single transaction. Somewhere in the middle, the server goes down. Not because of your load, just an unlucky reboot. When SQL Server comes back, it has to undo everything that transaction did before anyone can touch those tables. Row by row (I think I’ve heard probably Bob Ward say “row by agonizing row” to describe this). Working backwards through the log. That exact thing happened to an Azure SQL customer, and the team wrote it into the opening of their paper: “Unexpected failure occurred while one of our customers was attempting to load hundreds of millions of rows in a single transaction. The database required 12 hours to recover while the corresponding tables were completely inaccessible.” Twelve hours. The paper is Constant Time Recovery in Azure SQL Database (VLDB 2019), and it explains how recover...