Introducing Kyoto Cabinet

02 Jul 2011 at 17:47

Ahmed S. Farghal

Ahmed

4 Comments

Most developers tend to use a general purpose SQL databases for all kinds of data storage, which is okay most of the times but can add great overhead if you have a massive amount of data and when you want to minimize the deployment overhead. Different data storage databases exist to solve different programming problems, as developer, you should focus on the most efficient and scalable solution that fits your programming problem without taking the SQL database as a granted/generic solution.

I’ve started using Tokyo cabinet 2 years ago in one of the most sophisticated dispersed storage solutions I’ve ever seen/worked-on. I was astonished by the capabilities and performance of such lightweight database, developed by a Japanese engineer called Mikio Hirabayashi who also wrote QDBM previously. A couple of years later he and his brother (apparently) – Hatsuki Hirabayashi – Launched Kyoto cabinet, which is better than tokyo cabinet in almost every aspect. Those two brothers formed a startup called FAL Labs.

Koyoto cabinet is a lightweight concurrent key-value database that has some amazing performance characterstics, it can store one million records in 900ms (0.9s) in a hash database (HDB) and 1100ms (1.1s) in a B+ tree (BDB) database with minimal storage overhead of 4 bytes for BDB and 16 bytes for HDB! Continue reading →

Away from politics

19 Jun 2011 at 22:17

Ahmed S. Farghal

Ahmed

5 Comments

I’ve been envolved in politics before/during/after the Egyptian revolution and during that journey I was truly enthusiastic and waiting to see the new Egypt rising and shining. After then, I started feeling tensed and stressed, politics is a dirty game -most of the times- and I wanted to focus back on work since I was not doing very well in what I do best, work. As a result, I decided to stay away for sometime from politics and get back to work with all of my 7 senses, only then, I started feeling that this is just wrong!

We – Egyptian youth- kept complaining that we don’t have the chance to change the world because of the strict control of police and the old corrupted regime of Mubarak, now as we have that chance -partially- we should prove that we have an effective mission and that our strategy can really work for the country, that’s why I felt that it’s wrong that we leave politics to politics professionals who *might* be seeking their personal achievement and not necessarily be looking at the country’s future as we anticipate.

Between this and that, I think I should keep pushing in what I do best and what pushes Egypt forward and I decided to participate in OpenEgypt.

OpenEgypt is an initiative by some of the communities and non-governmental organization and open source advocates to force a movement to open source by the Egyptian governement to the whole country, as simple as having the Open Source as a strategy for Egypt.

I’m also excited because we’ve started working on a strategic plan that capitalizes on the successes of Malaysia and Brazil and the failures of France and Germany in this approach to build a pure Egyptian strategy towards Open Source. I’m very excited to be part of this and I hope to be helping from the perspective that I always loved and always worked in, aka. Technology :)

 

مجتمع موزيلا العربي و اجتماعه الاول في عمان بالأردن

16 Jun 2011 at 20:53

Ahmed S. Farghal

Ahmed

1 Comment

اذا كنت من المهتمين و الداعين للمصادر المفتوحة و حرية البرمجيات مثلي فأنت بالتأكيد تعرف متصفح فاير فوكس و الذي قد تختلف اسباب معرفتك به عن كونه من اقوى برامج تصفح صفحات الانترنت مفتوحة المصدر، لكن الذي قد لا تكون تعرفه جيداً هو “موزيلا” المؤسسه التي احضرت لك متصفح موزيلا فايرفوكس.

مقدمة عن موزيلا

مشروع موزيلا هو مجتمع عالمي من الناس الذين يعتقدون أن الانفتاح ، والابتكار ، والفرصة هم المفتاح الأساسي إلي إستمرارية قوية للإنترنت. لقد عملنا معا منذ عام 1998 للتأكد من أن شبكة الإنترنت تتطور علي نحو يفيد الجميع . ونحن معروفون بتطوير متصفح الويب موزيلا فايرفوكس. Continue reading →

noZom launches its first event in Egypt

04 May 2011 at 20:16

Ahmed S. Farghal

Ahmed

5 Comments

Everybody has been waiting for the launch of noZom in Egypt since we started talking about the idea a few months ago. We have been extremely busy building the NGO that will be the driving force of entrepreneurship in Egyptian provinces in the coming few years, moreover, kicking the Egyptian economy forward through information technology entrepreneurship and innovation.

In noZom we believe that innovation can come from every city in Egypt, provinces are deep wells full of talents waiting to be discovered. We are here to help them find the way into the light and transform their talents into successful businesses. We believe that the most interesting and successful entrepreneurs will not come from Egypt’s capital Cairo in the next decade. In the next decade Egyptian provinces will play a key role in moving the Egyptian economy to its prime time by embracing technology entrepreneurship into the youth culture.

Hereby, we are announcing the first noZom conference in Egypt and we will start by only 1 day event in Mansoura with a very exciting package of sessions that we hope you enjoy the most.

Event Invitation

The event will be held on 7th of May, 2011 in Prof. Dr. Rashad ElBadrawy’s hall, Faculty of Engineering, Mansoura University.

Event Schedule

The NoSQL Fuss

08 Apr 2011 at 18:55

Ahmed S. Farghal

Ahmed

5 Comments

For years we have been using SQL (relational) databases as the de facto standard backend for our applications, whether desktop apps or web apps, we were relying on relational databases as the only reliable solution for storing information that is searchable and consistent all the time. Enterprise-class database business was excelling because of the increasing need for a reliable consistent data store for mission critical businesses. But then everybody went to use those relational enterprise-grade databases without really studying whether the application requirements fits the features provided by the database or not.

Relational databases were originally used for their ACID promise then people started using it for everything as a general purpose data store. Impedance mismatch problems started to get more attention when developers started to focus more on object oriented design, then ORMs came to action to help integrating the relational SQL database model into object oriented application-layer and most of you will start saying; that’s when the hell started :)

So, what went wrong? Continue reading →

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