Given the Coronavirus going around, meetups and user groups world wide has been canceled.

The upside of this, however, is that we are starting to see a lot more virtual meetups. Last week I spoke in SF meeting from my home, and in a couple of weeks I’m going to speak at a meetup in Romania.

I wanted to take this opportunity to call to other user groups. If you want to continue hosting sessions and can do this online, I would be very happy to talk at your events.

This offer is open for the duration of the Corona Times as well as afterward, by the way. Just drop me a line.

In a couple of weeks I’m going to be speaking in the DotNet Iasi group about modeling in a non relational world.

NoSQL databases are becoming increasingly more important. However, the vast majority of developers have learned to model and work with data only in a relational context.
Relational modeling inside NoSQL database is not only sub-optimal, but it is also frequently actively harmful.
In this session, Oren Eini will discuss modeling techniques in a non-relational system, how to take advantage of the database's capabilities and get the most out of it for your system.

This is open to the public, so anyone can register.

The coronavirus is a global epidemic and has had impact on the entire world. It has shaken the foundations of our society and has made things that would seem like bad science fiction a reality. The fact that most of the world is now under some form of quarantine is something that I would expect to see in a disaster movie, not in real life. And if we are in a disaster movie, I would like to jump over to the next scene please, and to formally submit a protest to the writers’ union.

Like everyone else, we have had to adjust to a very different mode of operations. Hibernating Rhinos is a distributed company, in the sense that we have teams working in different countries and continents. However, the majority of our people work in one of two offices (in Israel and in Poland). We have recently moved to a brand new office space which I’m incredibly proud of, which now sits empty. Given the needs of the current times, we have shifts to fully remote work across the board. Beyond the upheaval of normal life, we see that many customers and users are facing the same challenges as we do.

For that purpose, I have decided to offer all RavenDB customers two months of free support, to help navigate the challenges ahead. A lot of organizations are scrambling, because the usual workflow is interrupted and things aren’t as they used to. In these trying time, we want to make it as simple as possible for you to make use of RavenDB. 

This offer applies to support for RavenDB on your own machines as well as RavenDB Cloud.

With the hope that we would look back at this as we now look at Y2K, I would like to close by urging you to be safe.

Every now and then I’ll run into a problem and say, “Oh, that would be a great thing to give in a job interview”. In addition to the Corona issue, Israel has been faced with multiple cases of hung parliament. Therefor, I decided that the next candidate we’ll interview will have to solve that problem. If you are good enough to solve conflicts in politics, you can solve conflicts in a distributed system.

Here is the problem, given the following parliament’s makeup, find all the possible coalitions that has 61 or greater votes.

• Likud – 36 seats
• KahulLavan – 33 seats
• JointList – 15 seats
• Shas – 9 seats
• YahadutHatura – 7 seats
• IsraelBeitenu – 7 seats
• AvodaGesherMeretz – 7 seats
• Yemina – 6 seats

There is a total of 120 seats in the Israeli parliament and you need 61 seats to get a coalition. So far, so good, but now we come to the hard part, not all parties like each other. Here is the make up of the parties’ toleration to one another:

As you can see, the parties are ranked based on how probable they are to seat with one another. Note that just this listing of probabilities is probably highly political and in the time since the last election (all of a week ago), the situation has likely changed.

All of that said, I don’t really think that it is fair of a job candidate to actually solve the issue at an interview. I’m pretty sure that would require dynamic programming and a lot of brute force (yes, this is a political joke), but the idea is to get a list of ranked coalition options.

If you want to try it, the initial parameters are here:

And hey, we won’t get a government out of this, but hopefully we’ll get a new employee .

I wanted to point you to this article by Alex Klaus that discusses the differences between RavenDB and CosmosDB. It is a thorough writeup and cover quite a bit of ground.

And as a small hint, Hibernating Rhinos will have an announcement shortly about exciting news with regards to CosmosDB.

Due to the Coronavirus issue that has been going around, my March 18 session has been moved to be online only.

You can register to the event here, we’ll also be sharing it live in the RavenDB facebook page.

As a reminder, the talk is: Building a Grown Up Database

A database is a complex, often fussy beast. For years, Oren Eini has made his living by fixing performance issues of various kinds. After seeing the same mistakes happen again and again, Oren decided to build his own database where these problems will never arise.
In this Webinar he will talk about the kind of features that make RavenDB a grown up database:
-- It doesn't need a full-time babysitter
-- Uses AI automatic indexing and self optimizing engines
-- Understands the operational environment and adjusts to it without the need for a human in the loop
-- High Availability
-- Secured development

I was on the Wave of Change podcast and had a really good conversation with Tony that range from 8” floppies to the usability of blockchain to distributed system design and architecture.

I’m really looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Listen to it here.

The recording of my webinar couple of weeks is available. I think it was a great session and would love your feedback.

Mor Hilai wrote an interesting article that compare the user interfaces you get with the most common document databases.

I think he did a great job discussing the differences between the three databases.

We run a hackathon in the office this past week which was quite a lot of fun. The idea was to build a simple GC for an API build in C.

Here is the original code. This is a (poorly written) C API that leaks memory by design. The idea was to build some form of a GC to handle the leaks.

Here are my attempts:

• Ref counting
• Mark & sweep collector

We then used the opportunity to go a little bit into how the GC in .NET works as well as looked into how boehm GC works.

If you go over the code, please note that it isn’t meant to be idiomatic C and that it was written in a rush. It is meant to be a skeleton for understanding, not anything you’ll actually use.