The arrow of time

In addition to simple data caching, there are some interesting advanced features made possible by Bullet Cache's unique features. Data sharing between applications (or between application instances) is a very important one, especially for the PHP environment (and other CGI-like environments). This post is a part of series on Bullet Cache use cases.

Use cases for Bullet Cache are numerous - on the one hand it is a very convenient (and fast) memory cache server, but on the other it implements some advanced features which make it applicable in surprisingly many different scenarios. This post starts a series of descriptions on some of the real-world use cases which fit Bullet Cache suprisingly nicely, and some of these are already described in the Bullet Cache User's manual.

I'm preparing for the 1.0 release of Bullet Cache and have squashed the last (known) bug which plagued it, so I'm cautiously optimistic that it deserves the "1.0" label. It's been very fun working on it and though none of this is terribly exiting news, I'd like to share a few things I've encountered while making it...

The last few nights I have been working on something very interesting: encrypted data types for PostgreSQL. The goal here is to introduce transparent data encryption for applications which need to protect "data at rest", i.e. while the data is stored in the database within the file system. I didn't find any such mechanism (pgcrypto only offers security primitives which can be used on the application side) so I wrote pgenctypes.

Those who were present at BSDCan 2011 have probably seen or heard about the unveling of BHyVe, the native hypervisor for FreeBSD. FreeBSD is very much lacking virtualization features (not counting jails) and this is in any case excellent news for the project! Interested users are now invited to test it!

I've just uploaded the first Release Candidate version of Bullet Cache! It is basically feature complete and done, and I'm happy to say that it looks like I have a small number of users and also some feedback on the project - so keep it up :) At this point I'd like to shortly talk about what made me write Bullet Cache - which also leads to why it was done the way it is and what are its main strengths. For the impatient, these are flexibility in cached data expiry and performance, but read on for the details...

I went to the customs office to pick up a package, ended up told that I need more papers than I brought in, specifically a PayPal bill printout which I didn't have. Now, the usual thing to do would be to return home, print it out, then return back to the customs office and proceed from there. What I did instead was amazing - from the point of view that almost nothing of that infrastructure even existed a few years (and especially decades) ago.