With a name that even sounds like the beautiful love interest of a secret affair, Cassandra appears to be positioning itself to steal the hearts of those once in love with MySQL. Twitter is now set to replace its MySQLdatabase system with the open source home wrecker.

Cassandra was originally developed by Facebook and was released to the public via Google’s code repository in 2008. In 2009, the Apache Foundation added it to its project, and in February of 2010, Apache made it a top-level project. It is designed to work with large amounts of data by spreading the data across multiple servers. Its notable feature is that it has no single point of failure.

Twitter joined a growing list of major companies that have adopted Cassandra. Among them are Digg, Cisco, IBM. Cassandra is free and open source software released under the Apache License 2 and is available for download from Apache.org.

Photo: Flickr

Continue reading: Twitter the latest among big players to leave MySQL for Cassandra

When you have a small to medium-sized business (SMB), it is tempted to take lowest service offer, especially when a vendor makes big promises. There are plenty of database vendors on the market, and some of them offer very attractive custom proprietary packages or cloud computing solutions. But before you commit your data to what will likely be its permanent resting place, consider a few things:

1. If a vendor makes you custom database software and then goes out of business, what happens to your data?
2. If a vendor’s cloud computing infrastructure breaks down, what happens to your data?
3. If later on down the road, you want to transfer your databases to something more standard, will you lose data in the conversion?

The answer to all three is that some or all of your data could go up in smoke. That is why more businesses, even large ones are opting for free and open source solutions like MySQL or PostgreSQL. You can still hire someone to set it up and manage it, but when that company fades away, your data is still safe. Even if you opt for a cloud solution, having access to your open source databases means that you can pull them at any time and move them to another server with minimal data loss.

Photo: Flickr

Continue reading: Before you commit your data...

All Linux servers have a useful feature that is only one character long. The character is > , and it makes saving command output to files extremely easy. It can make interpreting long command output data much easier and less time consuming.

For example, if you wanted to list the entire contents of /usr/lib, you could always run ls /usr/lib, but what you will get are pages of files and directories, probably more than your terminal window will even buffer. To solve this, all you have to do is add a > to the end of the command, followed by the location and name of a new file that will hold the information.

For example, you could save the contents to a file in /home/user and call the text file “libraries”. This assumes that the file does not already exist. If it does, > will overwrite it. Enter the following:

ls /usr/lib > /home/user/libraries

If you already have a file created with data inside and just want to append more data onto the end, add a second >

ls /usr/lib > > /home/user/libraries

Photo Source: Flickr

Continue reading: How to redirect Linux command output to a file

Question: What are user agents, and why are they important?

Answer: In the context of web servers, a user agent is any network host that connects to the server. Most frequently, it is used to refer to web browsers, but it can be other things as well. Anytime a search engine spider or other robot connects to your server, it leaves a user agent identity as well.

It is important to know about user agents because they can tell you a lot about your web site’s visitors and what types of computers they are using. Typical user agent data can include: browser brand and version, operating system brand and version, platform name, machine or processor type, and language. Some browsers allow users to specify what information to send or to send none at all.

Web server statistical software records user agent data and will display it for you in charts and graphs. You can determine how many of your users use a particular browser or operating system and make business decisions based on that data. You can also see how many of your hits and visitors are actually coming from non-human user agents. Overall, it is a very useful tool to have, and all website owners, big and small, should make use of it.

Continue reading: Making Use of User Agent Data

One of the general unwritten principles of cloud computing and even general web hosting is that data is to be sent electronically through FTP, SFTP, HTTP, or any number of other methods. But this principle is unwritten for a reason. When it comes to humongous amounts of data, it is a principle that is best left to theory, even on a faster Internet connection.

Amazon’s solutions to this mass data transport problem has always been their Import/Export service. Essentially, a customer can ship data to their Amazon server through traditional mail service. The only problem was, until recently, the shipping was one-way. While it was called Import/Export, they only had the import half of it completed.

On their Friday blog post, Amazon Web Services announced that they now offer exporting of data from S3. You simply send them an email manifest and a storage device. They export the data to your device and send it back to you through the postal service for the price of $80 per storage device and $2.49 per hour. The service is currently only available in the US with European service expected in the future.

Source: The Register
Photo: Flickr

Continue reading: Amazon's Cloud Import/Export Service Now Exports

If you own an Internet business and haven’t backed-up your data lately, you’re simply encouraging a disaster waiting to happen. Whether you own a dozen servers or have a small shared hosting account, at any time something could go wrong and your data could become history.

Why should you care about backing-up? According to a government study, a staggering 93% of companies that lose their data for a period longer than ten days end up filing for bankruptcy within a year. Of that number, half file immediately.

Yet many people do not make back-ups, or expect their web host to do so for them. All reputable hosts archive data regularly, but this is at the server level. They generally do not permit customer access to these back-ups. I’ve heard many horror stories over the years about a site being hacked or a web host closing where the victim failed to appropriately back-up his data.

Do yourself a favor and avert disaster by performing regular back-ups. It may not be immediately useful, but some day you will need the back-up and be thankful for it.

Continue reading: Back it up once, back it up twice