Erlang eXchange 2008

[G Bulmer]

Erlang eXchange 2008 was wonderful! A fantastic atmosphere, and a
palpable 'buzz' about Erlang. There were some superb projects,
especially the onScale Erlang DB presented by Alexander Reinefeld
(http://www.erlang-exchange.com/alexander-reinefeld). The onScale DB
appears to exceed the write throughput of Wikipedia (2000 writes/
second) with less than 1/16th the number of database servers (16 vs
270). Glerk! I need to dig into the detail, because that is just
amazing, and I've failed to find the papers about the work.

It seems that the source may be released as Open Source in July, keep
an eye out here: http://www.onscale.de/onscaledb.html

I think my presentation went well, though my slides came out awfully
dark (I should have checked :-(. Only a small number of attendees had
heard of DTrace, so I was pleased I'd included an overview.

During questions, one attendee asked if this meant they could observe
across Apache and MySQL and I was delighted to respond very
positively. Another attendee, and long-time Erlang user may be
willing, and have a little time, to identify some areas which would be
worth instrumenting. I undertook to go implement if they identified
the locations.

I also saw a very interesting presentation by Simon Thompson (http://
www.erlang-exchange.com/simon-thompson) about an Erlang refactoring
tool called Wrangler. It occurred to me that, while not in the spirit
of DTrace, the capabilities of his tool might be applied to refactor
Erlang to make it even easier to DTrace code. I accept this might only
be useful in development and testing, but it may overcome some of the
difficulties in the implicit structure and dynamic type system of
Erlang. I need to email Simon, and see if there is some way we could
help each other.

I've uploaded a PDF, and a quicktime movie of my slides. I've
simplified the Keynote builds before exporting to quicktime, and hence
reduced the size of the quicktime movie by 3x. There is no commentary,
but anyone could easily use the movie, and I can "fill in the blanks"
if anyone is interested.

GB