I guess most of you now know out of my earlier postings that I recently bought a MBP.

Me and a MPB? Now this sounds curious indeed and there were for sure a few curious view and question I had to stand. But I really wanted to find out about why others think about them as better, by enjoying something new at the same time.

Not really being sure about I later would like it, deciding for a specific model was a someway hard job for me.

Wanting it portable and being aware that buying too small or modestly never is a good choice, the smaller Macbook wasn’t a choice for me ever. On the other hand this large and heavy 17" chopping board seemed a bit to oversized to me. Thinking about to carry it together with cameras and stuff all time during vacation trip gave me some nightmares for sure.

So I finally focusing on a 15" model and looking into the specs, I decided about it is not worth to buy the bigger one. Everything added it more, except the video card memory, easily could added in later by myself easily.

So happy with me and my choise I finally bought the smaller 15" MBP and right from the first second I liked and enjoyed working with it. Getting familiar with it was easy doing and therewith set and found I recently decided to switch over with my video cutting projects to it as well.

Knowing about memory would become an issue then, I checked the Apple pages for more RAM… and found out about their horrible prices!! …..  Checking specs of RAM chips I quickly was sure about normal SO-DIMM would do. So finally yesterday on my way home I made a d-tour visiting a local hardware shop and buying two normal 2GB 667 SO-DIMMs (less than half the Apple offer).

Shortly half a hour later they were fit in and working.

Now (and for sure it would have to be someone else not me) not being able to resist digging deeper as well, I had a closer look at things. And I have to confess that not only the visible parts of the MBP are well designed. Looking behind and voting it, it is a "puter" … not more and not less, but the quality and manufactoring standard is high and … as a friend of me said once …. it’s a sexy feeling to own and work with one!

Virtualization is one of the today’s  key words of modern .IT. Today hardware and software vendors do offer virtualization solutions for nearly everything and all.

Regardless it is a CPU, your memory or hosting package, the disk access or finally an middleware or application runtime layer it needs to share and virtualize, the ready to use managing framework for it is already developed and offered on the market.

Even Apple, this so far manufacturer of nice and trendy hardware for geeks - "Show me one person not being aware about this brand new  iPhone 3G!" -  is now part of the game. Finally since opening their world, no longer using own hardware for their MACs and porting OSX to Intel CPUs things like Parallels and VMware are part of the big game and the world has changed.

But …. What does this mean for customers and application owner. Do we have to forget about all? Or perhaps to throw away all our nice but old applications and sites?  …. What kind of world we developers have to work in tomorrow?

Good Question!

Following actual market researches, lower costs for application development, system integration and application maintenance,
accelerated integration of applications, more flexible adaptation of existing applications to future changes in technology and, not least, the ability to develop and market new products and services more quickly – are just some of the many benefits that
companies are expecting from a new approach to application design resulting from the introduction of service-oriented architectures (SOA).

Will this influence the work of small business owners? Such one or two man shows designing special and individual tailored customer solutions?

For me the answer is YES. Perhaps not today and with a bit of luck not right tomorrow (the reprieve to learn about!). But certainly in a predictable time frame we all will have to deal with it …… Why?

Experts are in agreement that an infrastructure that is not flexible quickly comes up against its limits, resulting in logistical, as also performance problems. Today only a service-oriented software design (using web service technology, for example) involves the development of modular, reusable software units that can be distributed across different systems. And therefore is able to deal with common hassles and business impacts like software upgrade, maintenance, server crashes and downtimes in a reasonable and appropriate way.

Early this year I changed my hosting provider because of feeling more and more disappointed about their leak of professionalism. For years my former hosting partner offered a solid hosting at a fair and reasonable price to me - At the end and shortly before I left they just and basically had ignored and /or missed to do their homework!

Two years ago I was able and willing to wait a few hours until my mail host was up and running again. Today I’m no longer and I really  insist in receiving all my sms, emails and micro blog postings instantly without any service interruptions.

 I basically expect - as for my feeling all customer do - my site and services up and running all time! There is no way for me to think about missing inquiries and business I might loose out of some service disruption.

The new provider I decided for does now offer grid-Services to me. Oh!! … How exciting you may now throw into our discussion.

Sure there are still issues and hassle to deal with, but since then my pages were never down for more than a few minutes and my emails came always through - Not to speak about the plenty of more resources I do now get at a similar rate like before!

You see?! There are impacts on our daily business. And virtualization and a service orientated application design does for sure have a serious impact and direct impact on our all business.

Thats my opinion and my 5ct on the topic! You have another one?

Recently I got involved into some application performance problem. Now it’s funny to hear how sure everybody is when it comes to performance issues that it is not the application and the programming itself.

Everything was checked twice, nothing had been changed since ages and the application part in question did always work reliable …. What to do?

Sure, it must be an database issue and the dba is in charge to solve solve the problem by tweaking the db and therewith rescue the world for all.

Hmmmmm …. ok with everybody that sure I first kept my mouth shut, logged in into the system and checked the cpu and memory usage.  A cpu usage of 37% on a stable level over a longer period of time, a database server process consuming 1,6GB of memory …. really not an all day thingy.

So I asked the developers what the application would do there right now?! Nothing specific they said! Running a  simple query  which usually completes within milliseconds. Ah .. ok …. but it didn’t look that was it would complete in milliseconds right now.

Ok then, having some point to start with I picked up the query, had a look at the tables , substituted the bind variables with values they gave me, did run the query and asked the database for the execution plan … All fine!!

So I finally I had the idea to simply count the variance and frequence of the stored primary key attributes.

And see there with the right value used within the where clause chosen for filling the bind variables  the whole execution plan changed! No index where used anymore  and a full table scan was performed!

Someone should really know about his or her data stored within the db and it not …. remember some simple mathematic operations which even the database will do for you!

I left as quiet as I came, as for it was anyway very calm in the room ….