Beyond BigTable - Spanner

BigTable is a distributed storage system designed to work in very large distributed systems where you have petabytes of data on thousands of servers. It is currently used in over 100 projects such as Google Earth, Google Maps, Blogger, Orkut, and many more.

However, there is some current work at Google on a new storage and computation system called Spanner. Some of its main characteristics:

• Automation: moves and replicates data based on usage and constraints patterns.
• Use of hierarchical directories (instead of rows as it is in BigTable).
• Support of distributed transactions
• Fine grained access control on the data
• String consistency across tablet replicas
• Scale to 10M machines and 1k petabytes of data, across 1000s of locations

There is a keynote talk by Jeff Dean of Google on "Design, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems" that talks about large distributed systems and includes topics on BigTable and Spanner. You can view the slides of the presentation here.

Current and upcoming Android Phones

WiseAndroid has gathered a list of 50+ Android Phones that are currently on the market or will become available in the near future. TechCrunch provides images for (some of) the phones. Thank you for the effort!

Performance Comparison of Major Web Browsers

Six Revisions has published a performance comparison of the major five web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera, and Safari) in terms of JavaScript speed, CPU usage under stress, DOM selection, CSS rendering speed, page load time, and browser cache performance. Bottom line, Google Chrome 3.0 wins in four out of the six performance indicators, coming third and second in the DOM Selection Speed (won by Opera) and Page Load Time (won by Firefox) tests.

Free Java and Java EE eBooks

A list if free eBooks on Java and Java EE technologies: http://www.interviewjava.com/2009/09/ebooks-on-java-javaee-technologies.html.