Free Range Keyboard

Hazelcast, Terracotta and IMDGs

For years I've been wanting Terracotta to come up with a comprehensive and polished IMDG (In Memory DataGrid) solution using their fantastic technology. It seems like such an obvious use case, but it's never really happened. Obviously, you can distribute a map with Terracotta but a real IMDG needs much more. You can achieve it all with TC but it requires a lot of manual work. The closest thing they have right now is tim-searchable and it still not the full stack. I headed about a product some time ago called Hazelcast but when I looked at it, it was REALLY rough around the edges, but I took another look last night and it seems to have come along quite nicely. It has full write-through and write-behind capabilities and the grid is fully queryable. I was always a little leery of their pure partitioning scheme which seemed to ignore the benefits of data locality to each instance, but they do now have a “near cache” concept that can help alleviate that issue to some degree. From a technology standpoint, it's light years behind Terracotta and I would presume that translates to lower performance, but there are thresholds of performance that are more than sufficient for different apps and it seems like Hazelcast may be well above the threshold that many apps would find acceptable. I’m going to check it out sometime in the next week or two.

Houston RV Show

Whoops! It’s been a little longer than I anticipated since I last posted. I suspect that now that my initial information gathering frenzy has passed, my updates to this blog may be a bit more spread out.

My parents came to visit last weekend and we spent the better part of Saturday at the Houston RV show. While I had a lot of fun, it wasn’t nearly as informative as I had hoped it would be. There were a number of manufacturers that were either unrepresented or underrepresented: I was most disappointed by the lack of any Winnebago units. Holiday World is the only dealer in Houston but either I missed their Winnebago units (unlikely) or they didn’t bring any to show. The same goes for Newmar. The only Newmars I saw were from a dealer out of Dallas and they were the super high end models. Sure, they’re nice to look at but more than a little impractical for my purposes. On the fifth wheel side, Heartland was well represented and there were a few Carriage  units on the floor, but that was about it for what I’d consider the fulltiming models. I was really hoping someone would have a few DRV units there.

Tiffin was reasonably well represented. Not that I have any intention of buying new, but their motorhomes certainly seem reasonably priced for what you get. There was a beautiful 42’ tag-axle Phaeton with tons of extras like a stacked washer/dryer and a dishwasher at a price that seemed much lower than I would have expected. The Zephyr, while a little more fancy, didn’t really impress in comparison. Of course, theses are just purely surface impressions. The Zephyr has more and better heating and cooling components, a much better engine, etc.

Strangely enough Monaco/Holiday Rambler (the defunct version, not the new Navistar brand) was on full display at the show. In fact there were more 2006-2008 motorhomes from Monaco on display than any other brand. The dealers seemed pretty desperate to unload them; of course their “show” prices were still pretty laughable even with this desperation.

Overall, we had a great time but I can’t say I’m any wiser now than I was before stepping on the show floor. There was nothing there to change my mind about any conclusions that I had already made with regards to brands, models, or floorplans. Maybe next year!