DDJ, December 2008
Database Development


FEATURES

The Man Who Sold the Sky
Michael Swaine
Greg Wyler's mission is to make the Internet accessible and affordable to the "other three billion" people in the developing world, enriching lives and ensuring fair and equal access to information throughout.

Performance on Rails
Jeremy Weiskotten
Jeremy presents strategies for identifying common performance problems in Ruby on Rails applications—and shares ways to fix them.

LINQ-to-SQL and T-SQL
Dino Esposito
LINQ-to-SQL, an API for working with data in a SQL Server database, fully supports the LINQ syntax for running queries.

A Remote Java RMI Registry
Oliver Haase, Juergen Waesch, and Bo Zhao
Our authors present a custom registry that objects can register with remotely.

Beyond B-Trees
Konstantin Knizhnik
Of all the indexes that can order records in database-management systems, only B-Trees indexes are offered universally.

File Descriptors and Multithreaded Programs
Sergey Babkin
Sergey applies design patterns to parallel programming.


COLUMNS

Effective Concurrency
Herb Sutter
Understanding parallel performance. How do you know when good is good enough?

The Agile Edge
Scott W. Ambler
There's nothing simple about complex requirements and agile projects. Still with a discipline and a little luck...


DEPARTMENTS

Friday Night Fish Fry
Jonathan Erickson
We hear a lot about Java and C++, but that doesn't mean they're the only languages developers are using.

Alia Vox
Charles E. Leiserson
Making a case for a concurrency platform.

Developer Diaries
edited by Michael Swaine
Profiles of programmers, descriptions of developers.

Conversations
Jonathan Erickson
Paul Grabscheid has thoughts on the direction that databases are going.

Swaine's Flames
Michael Swaine
Michael looks at tech strategies for hard times. (Panhandling programmers? Riding the Rails?)