The CANDIS Blog

I read this entry over on David Wolf’s blog before my recent trip back down under about power usage and IT infrastructure.

Silicon Hutong

And the topic did strike a “Hey this is real man!!!” kind of chord with me. A cathartic resonance that shall never come from me with respect to the greater greenhouse effect crap while the infallible science is still not in. Nor came to me for any other “agenda” or “crusade of the world” that seemed to so very trouble all those students over in the Arts and Law faculties. That seemed to have so much time on their hands, relative to us poor saps in Engineering and Business school.

Politics aside, wastage for the sake of wastage though is not very good. And I have a rather poignant insider’s look at this issue that also manages (in my mind at least) to cross paths with this issue about China’s talent gap, or indeed this also about the talent gap.

What does resource wastage and power requirements have to do with a talent gap, or as they lament now in overly taxed and anti-entrepreneurial Australia – the “Brain Drain”?

Allow me to explain.

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Ever had a situation like this:

Select from database ID where name = RICHARD;

Returns and ID of 55 for example.

Then go and do a query like this:

Select * from some_other_table where ID = 55;

Returns, “Sorry does not exist, time to die…..”

Well apparently indexes when corrupt – which is NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN – can cause PostgreSQL to go all stupid and not do a table lookup for real. This happened to me. So I found this:

PlanetPostgresql

Turns out that a reindex and a full vacuum can do wonders – even though a full vacuum is not needed with autovacuum and indexes can’t get corrupted…..or so they say.

I have now added a system wide reindex maintenance plan for PostgreSQL every night. I know that MS-SQL server has an option for this with their maintenance jobs inside enterprise manager. Maybe someone should make an enterprise manager for PostgreSQL too?