2021-12-11 21:33 UTC

Using Primary Key Parts In A Secondary Index Of An InnoDB Table

Recently, I was asked what would happen if a primary key was explicitly put into a secondary index of an InnoDB table. For example, given a table employees, ... read more

2016-02-21 19:37 UTC

The Cost Of Consistency: When 9ms Is 1s Too Much

The CAP theorem remains one of the most important tools in my software developer's toolbelt. Used correctly, it can help create services and products that can offer an excellent user experience and protect revenue during partial failures. Used incorrectly, it can lead to a poor user experience and loss of ... read more

2016-02-07 23:24 UTC

Pessimistic Optimism: The Case Of Unexpected Deadlocks

Despite the fact I've been developing software in one way or another for almost 20 years, I'm constantly surprised how things work, and, once the frustration wears off, I'm intrigued when things break. Lucky for me, over the last few weeks, I've been surprised, frustrated, and intrigued by what, on ... read more

2014-01-11 15:48 UTC

Perceiving The Effects Of Cache Coherency In Spin Locks

The "test-and-test-and-set" algorithm is a fairly well-understood solution to reducing latency in spin locks. In particular, the algorithm is often employed to reduce the latency exhibited in the similar "test-and-set" algorithm. Understanding how and why a seeming-superfluous read results in lower latency is rather interesting. ... read more

2013-07-22 05:01 UTC

Downcasting Longs To Ints On x86

Last week, my esteemed colleague and close friend asked a remarkably straight-forward question about downcasting a long to an int in Java. I'll admit the question caught me off guard. While the JLS offered the correct answer, I couldn't help but ponder what's actually happening in the machine. ... read more

2013-03-18 00:53 UTC

The Concurrency Of ConcurrentHashMap

Java's ConcurrentHashMap is an excellent point of study when learning about Java's Memory Model. It employs numerous techniques to provide lock-free reads while still guaranteeing safe publication of objects. This article represents my attempt to take the magic out of the ConcurrentHashMap implementation. ... read more

2013-01-22 02:54 UTC

Escape Analysis & Stack Allocated Objects

In 1999, a paper, Escape Analysis For Java was to appear in the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications. This paper outlined an algorithm to detect whether an object, O, escaped from the currently executed method, M, or current thread, T. This paper ... read more

2013-01-02 05:20 UTC

Impact Of Local Variable Declaration Location

Does the location of a local variable's declaration result in performance changes of a method? For example, will a String variable, s, declared outside of a loop exhibit "better" performance than when declared inside a loop? In Java, looking at a class' bytecode explains, irrefutably, why the answer is ... read more

2012-12-17 06:33 UTC

Safe Publication Of Transient Members

A very common (and quite dangerous) tripping point I find in concurrent Java code is that of unsafe member publication of otherwise safely-published objects. Of course, concurrent code is difficult to get right and I occasionally find myself identifying the same mistake in my own code---but usually only after a ... read more

2012-07-28 22:35 UTC

Redirecting "derby.log" To An SLF4J Logger

More and more, I find myself using Apache Derby as an embedded database for personal projects. One inconvenience, however, is the persistent derby.log file than inevitably gets created at startup. It can, of course, be disabled entirely, but I'd like Derby errors to be put into my application logs, currently ... read more