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Concurrency and synchronization in POSIX Bourne Shell (sh or bash)

It seems like ages ago now that I found my customer had a process that connected to hundreds of Oracle databases to run predefined SQL for health checks. These databases were hosted all over the world and the SQL could take up to fifteen minutes to complete for a single database (with huge amounts of TNS timeouts). The end result was a CSV file that was ultimately formatted into a spreadsheet to provide management information. It took about a day to obtain this final result.

I thought there was a better way.

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NoSQL databases, now 'ACID' compliant?

A well-known problem with NoSQL databases in general is that they do not support the 'ACID' principals held dear by traditional RDBMS DBAs. The Register is reporting that this may soon change with FoundationDB. Atomicity ensures that a transaction is saved or undone, but never exists halfway between the two states. Consistency ensures that only valid data can be stored. Isolation of transactions prevents one transaction interfering with another.

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Oddfellows Arms winter beer festival 2013

Hot on the heals of the Chelmsford winter beer festival 2013 we have the Oddfellows Arms winter beer festival 2013. It starts on Thursday 28th of February and finishes on Sunday 13th March. The event will be held at ​Oddfellows Arms, ​192 Springfield Road, Chelmsford, Essex CM2 6JP. Telephone 01245 490514.

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Drupal 6 to 7 upgrade: "PHP Fatal error: Unsupported operand types in /usr/share/drupal7/includes/common.inc"

The scenario is a Drupal 6 website running on Debian GNU/Linux current stable is upgraded to Drupal 7 from backports in order to test its behaviour once the new Debian stable is released and Drupal 6 becomes unavailable.

On the Drupal 6 website there is a menu link created as a short-cut to log a user in and take them to the home page. This hides away the huge login block.

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Chelmsford summer beer festival 2013

It is now time to start preparing for the Chelmsford summer beer festival 2013. It starts at 12pm (noon) on Tuesday 9th of July and finishes at 11pm on Saturday 13th July. Just as last year, the event will be held at ​Admirals Park, Rainsford Road, Chelmsford, Essex CM1 2LY.

Please read on or see the official CAMRA site for further information.

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Whites Delicatessen closed?

After a brief period of absence I went to Whites Delicatessen (Whites Deli) at 27 Viaduct Road, Chelmsford today and found it to be closed. I wonder if this closure is permanent? It has only been open for just over a year. Their web site is down and a glance through the window shows building work in progress. If you have any information then please add a comment. Have they gone bust or is a major refurbishment under way?

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