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CCP Prism X

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Arrynoss
Doomheim
#1 - 2011-09-22 14:21:14 UTC  |  Edited by: Arrynoss
In homage to a Database engineer doing his best to converse with the community outside of the norms of daily life looking after the hamsters, here is the Prism X poem/rap. Depending on your ghetto likings:



Eve Dev's in the house, replying to all the posts you see,

Yet no one seems to care for referential integrity,

All we see is buff the Gallente and Incursions from Sansha's Nation.

Yet where are all the questions on second normalisation?

So less about a Megathron let's talk about an Index,

Who cares about Gallente, let's hear it for Prism X,

Hear it for Prism X,

Hear it for Prism X.

So why don't all you Caldari's

Start asking bout' Structured Query's?

Let's Hear it for Prism X.



It's been all about 1000 dollar jeans and overpriced monocles,

Where's all the discussion attributes and tuples?

So whilst all the love goes out to the new, forum friendly CCP,

Just remember who's fondling with that Foreign Key.

So whilst your spending all your Aurum on the NeX,

Take 5 minutes and let's hear it for Prism X,

Hear it for Prism X,

Hear it for Prism X.

So why don't all you Caldari's

Start asking bout' Structured Query's?

Let's Hear it for Prism X.
Tethys Atreides
The Audacity of Huge
#2 - 2011-09-22 14:30:56 UTC
All your database are belong to Prism X.
Grideris
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#3 - 2011-09-22 14:42:42 UTC
Oh mighty CCP Prisim X. Please bless us with tales of mighty challenges the sacred EVE Database has overcome with you at the helm.

On a serious note, can we seriously get some stats from the DB? Just to see how much we are making it cry/laugh at our feeble attempts to cause pain. Numbers are so very tasty.

http://www.dust514.org - the unofficial forum for everything DUST 514 http://www.dust514base.com -** the** blog site with everything else DUST 514 you need
CCP Prism X
C C P
C C P Alliance
#4 - 2011-09-22 15:07:12 UTC
ShockedSmileBig smileLol

Thank you, I really do appreciate that. Bookmarks like these are handy when I have half a thread raging at me for some douchebaggery of mine. Blink

As to the stats, I'm really not comfortable with throwing them out willy nilly. Perhaps it's something I can approach the community managers and my own superiors about releasing every now and then if there is interest. I do go over full trace snapshots every now and then, to see if anything weird is up, and send a report to my superiors. Haven't done it in a while though because the "how many things are burning" / "how much stuff do I have to do" ratio is very low at the moment.

And the DB doesn't really cry anymore (from my PoV that is. I don't consider HW or internal SQL Server faults to be the DB crying. P.S. There are no internal faults in SQL Server!).. so it might not be all that interesting. It used to cry a lot under certain circumstances when I started here as I was a 100% increase to the DB Devs here and we had also only had a single DBA. Now there's three of us (although one, belongs to CORE rather than EVE Software. But the Captain still counts as he works a whole lot for us.) and three of the DBAs. We're five years down the line from then and a lot of the legacy problems have now been ameliorated. Most of the stuff that pops up in these traces is stuff that I missed when reviewing code.

Which was, in all honesty, the best practice we ever adopted to avoid deployment issues from the DB. Rigid reviews to enforce the coding conventions and technical guardianship as soon as possible. Stuff still slides every now and then and does cause problems but I doubt you guys ever notice much of it because, all in all, there aren't oodles and noodles of already existing problems to be compounded by the newly surfaced one. Of course this is the best practice from my point of view. The DBAs down in operations have also done a great deal of work to ensure smooth deployments which used to suffer a whole lot from stats invalidating all over the cluster, query plans thus becoming very wonky and the server refusing to start up in a timely manner. And there's of course a lot of other work that has gone a long way to make my job a whole lot easier than it was. I won't pretend like it's all been in the database.. that would be blatant douchebaggery. Blink

Now.. I'm giving 13:1 odds on the SQL Server crashing about half an hour after I post this.

CCP Prism X

Programmer on Team Gridlock & Expert Ranter
Alexandra Alt
Doomheim
#5 - 2011-09-22 15:24:45 UTC
Obviously I have no idea how's the infrastructure set up, but I had always this doubt in my head you might be able (want to) answer, have you tried PostgreSQL ? I mean, in a real comparison between MSSQL/Postgres performance comparison with the same hardware ?

Truth be told, I'm no MSSQL fan, maybe a little biased against it for several reasons (being MS and all, only runs on windows etc) thus I have no idea how it fairs vs a similar hardware (or equal) in a linux dist vs postgres.

Best regards, and keep the good work.
Efraya
V0LTA
OnlyFleets.
#6 - 2011-09-22 15:27:04 UTC
This thread is full of win.

[b][center]WSpace; Dead space.[/center] [center]Lady Spank for forum mod[/center][/b]
ChromeStriker
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#7 - 2011-09-22 15:35:36 UTC
Posting in "We love CCp Prism X" thread

+10 internets for you Prism

No Worries
CCP Prism X
C C P
C C P Alliance
#8 - 2011-09-22 15:48:32 UTC
Alexandra Alt wrote:
have you tried PostgreSQ.


I wasn't here back when these decisions were being made so I don't know if they actually made any comparisons or even looked into an alternative. The decisions, as I understand it, came down to the price of the license and the fact the MS was very keen on having a single sharded MMO to point at and say "Look, they are using our stuff and doing fine! We're totally competitive."

There are some things in TSQL that bother me.. or more appropriately there are some thing NOT in TSQL that bother me. There are some aspects of the MSSQL server internals that bother me. However, having worked exclusively in this environment for five years I'm quite certain that I'd rip out my dreadlocks if I were to switch all the sudden. That's not necessarily a bad thing as some of them are quite ratty and I'd rather be dealing with something challenging than doing gruntwork (as you can see I'd also rather post on the forums than do gruntwork) as time simply flies by when you're focused.

And there is simply no way we'd ever migrate a production DB to a new model. It's not practical, the ROI is probably negative when it comes to wasted time and lost experience/knowledge and MS have been nothing short of awesome whenever we needed them. The only thing I could complain over is that my record of keeping TQ unstable would be much higher if some MS dude wouldn't have found a very glaring newbie mistake I made in a very cowboyish way with absolutely no papertrail behind it. That was another "Eureka" moment in our DB process handling.. don't allow me to do papertrailless cowboy stuff like that again. Pirate

CCP Prism X

Programmer on Team Gridlock & Expert Ranter
Alexandra Alt
Doomheim
#9 - 2011-09-22 15:56:51 UTC
LoL, I can completely relate to:

Quote:

The only thing I could complain over is that my record of keeping TQ unstable would be much higher if some MS dude wouldn't have found a very glaring newbie mistake I made in a very cowboyish way with absolutely no papertrail behind it.


I do understand all that, and if I were in a decision position in that case would share the same opinion when it comes to change, the question was really a curiosity I had.

I do know some DBA's that had the huge problem of having to work on several DB's at the same (oracle/postgres/mssql) and the general consensus was mssql was the little brat still in school not wanting to learn constantly grounded in a corner, while oracle/postgresql were the lamp genies with infinite wishes.

I do work with Postgresql right now for about 7 years and tiny by with MySQL) and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Thanks, keep up the good work, and I would love to see a few stats myself, just to feed the geeky side of me.
CCP Stillman
C C P
C C P Alliance
#10 - 2011-09-22 16:25:31 UTC
CCP Prism X wrote:
don't allow me to do papertrailless cowboy stuff like that again. Pirate

We don't. Because we love you Big smile

Just a random dude in Team Security.
Chribba
Otherworld Enterprises
Otherworld Empire
#11 - 2011-09-22 16:30:16 UTC
Prism X best Prism.

/c

★★★ Secure 3rd party service ★★★

Visit my in-game channel 'Holy Veldspar'

Twitter @ChribbaVeldspar
CCP Xhagen
C C P
C C P Alliance
#12 - 2011-09-22 17:21:45 UTC
Contributing to Prism X's ego stroking forum thread.

CCP Xhagen | Associate Producer | @strangelocation
Taedrin
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#13 - 2011-09-22 17:33:00 UTC
Prism X is responsible for many great things.

He promised us a skill queue after ghost training got nerfed (which we got, although the credit went to the CSM instead)
He nuked all of those nasty insta bookmarks for us.
He put Tarminic in his place.
He totally pwns ISK buyers with help from GM Nova
He posts on the forums

What's not to like about him?
Byshop Kayl
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#14 - 2011-09-22 17:34:45 UTC
As an Oracle/MySQL/MSSQL DBA, I have nothing but respect for a person -forced- to use MSSQL. Twisted

 "Sanity is the playground of the unimaginitive." -- Anonymous "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results." -- A. Einstein
Mara Tessidar
Perkone
Caldari State
#15 - 2011-09-22 17:38:51 UTC
Ordinarily I wouldn't give much praise to a dev but the last time I can remember the database causing Tranquility to crash frequently was shortly after Apocrypha was released, which means Prism is doing something right.

Also, LONG LIVE J. TURBEFIELD
mkint
#16 - 2011-09-22 17:42:55 UTC
CCP Prism X wrote:
don't allow me to do papertrailless cowboy stuff like that again. Pirate


Did you slaughter a bull in the server room with your bare teeth? You did, didn't you? There are forms to fill out for that, you know.

Maxim 6. If violence wasn’t your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.
Barakkus
#17 - 2011-09-22 19:46:12 UTC
CCP Prism X wrote:
Alexandra Alt wrote:
have you tried PostgreSQ.


I wasn't here back when these decisions were being made so I don't know if they actually made any comparisons or even looked into an alternative. The decisions, as I understand it, came down to the price of the license and the fact the MS was very keen on having a single sharded MMO to point at and say "Look, they are using our stuff and doing fine! We're totally competitive." Pirate


Price really isn't an issue since PostgreSQL is free, but on your scale of operations you'd probably have to go for the Enterprise version, which is somewhat pricey, but not nearly as expensive as the same scale MS deployment.

I've been working with PostgreSQL for a few years now. It's really good at handling massive amounts of data, but you can't cluster it. All the clustering solutions are rather weak for failover and performance compared to other platforms. The ability to truly "cluster" is getting there and is pretty damn close to where it needs to be, but it's taken a long, long, long time to get there. Most "clustering" methods require query replication through a pooling application as opposed to the database servers handling it themselves. If you go with the database initiated replication, you end up with slaves that are read only, and are basically hot standbys.

A lot of people that need to handle massive amounts of data (sometimes in the order of multiple terabytes) use PostgreSQL, including NASA, governmental institutions, financial institutions etc.

There is something to be said for getting support as well. You can get support from EnterpriseDB, but I doubt it's the same level you are getting from MS. Other than that, you basically have to figure it out yourself or wait for a response from one of the mailing lists. The main developers for PostgreSQL are very good about answering all the posts on the various mailing lists and getting bugs worked out, but it's not 24/7 support. One nice thing about PostgreSQL is the fact you can compile it from source, and debug it yourself, if you really want to get down in the guts of it. From a business standpoint, that's not so effective when trying to solve an issue quickly.

http://youtu.be/yytbDZrw1jc
AureoLion
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#18 - 2011-09-22 19:53:05 UTC
Posting in a "Hail the man who makes the machine work" thread.
Byshop Kayl
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#19 - 2011-09-22 20:00:26 UTC
My shop uses Oracle, MSSQL, and MySQL. A few years ago when we started using MySQL, we weighed it against Postgres, and in the end Postgres was 3x - 8x slower than MySQL out of the box. (Before tuning and indexing).

Has it changed all that much in the last few years?

 "Sanity is the playground of the unimaginitive." -- Anonymous "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results." -- A. Einstein
Zagam
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#20 - 2011-09-22 20:27:47 UTC
CCP Xhagen wrote:
Contributing to Prism X's ego stroking forum thread.

Y'all are going to have to get new doors, so PrismX can go home today.... unless you lock him in the server room or something...

(that said, I have to admit I enjoy seeing all of the devs posting, and showing a sense of humor)
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