Oren Eini

aka Ayende Rahien

Oren Eini

CEO of RavenDB

a NoSQL Open Source Document Database

Get in touch with me:

oren@ravendb.net

+972 52-548-6969

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Comparison page for RavenDB and MongoDB

May 27 2006

How to build an mission critical system

time to read 2 min | 239 words

The most mission critical system that I built was one to handle sentences calculations for my prison. The result of a failure in the system would mean that either a terrorist would walk away, or that an innocent guy will be in jail for no reason.

In both scenario, yours truly would have found himself taking a trip to the other side of the bars.

That is pretty mission critical, I say. Any software that can land me in jail is mission critical in my book, anyway.

The problem that I was never a developer in the army, so I had a really locked down computer, with no way to do anything to it (no USB, Floppy, CD, etc), the network was heavily monitored, etc.

That left me with a basic windows + office setup, to create my system. I put some thought into, and then wrote the whole thing in Excel and VBScript. It does reporting, calculations, warning, and whatnot. A scheduled task or two later, and I had scheduled report to HQ as well.

I has been two years since I had written this “system”, and it is still in use today. In fact, it got passed around to other prisons who are using it as well.

It is Excel, and the code there stinks (17 types of different warrants, and no OO for inheritance, welcome to the big CASE statement), but it actually never had a bug. Scary.

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FUTURE POSTS

Partial writes, IO_Uring and safety - 15 hours from now
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20 Jan 2025 - What does this code do?
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RECENT COMMENTS

Dmitry, Yes, but this is _known_ to be a 64 bits system - since we are allocating 3GB (not possible in 64 bits). Note t...

By Oren Eini on Answer: What does this code do?
That's why it is a good idea to compare the return value of `write` to the buffer size. "size_t" can be 32-bit on some system...

By Dmitry on Answer: What does this code do?
There's a reason we miss `write_exact` and `read_exact` from the standard library. In fact, I am surprised the chunk is actua...

By Pyth0n on Challenge: What does this code do?
kpvleeuwen, I agree, unfortunately I don't have anyone to ask off the top of my head. Thanks, I fixed the headers.

By Oren Eini on Performance discovery: IOPS vs. IOPS
It could be interesting to reach out to storage firmware developers and ask what write patterns they think would be useful ex...

By kpvleeuwen on Performance discovery: IOPS vs. IOPS

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