PatHelland's WebLog

Hello, Friends! Lots has happened since I last blogged. For almost two years, I've worked on Cosmos, some of the plumbing for Bing. It stores hundreds of petabytes of data on tens of thousands of computers. Large scale batch processing using Dryad...

Sorry I haven’t been blogging for a while. Last Fall, I switch to work on Bing Infrastructure and have been very, very busy (and having a wonderful time). The projects I’m working on include COSMOS and Autopilot. COSMOS is a petabyte store (working towards...

Trip Report – HPTS (High Performance Transaction Systems) Workshop – Oct 25 th -28 th , Asilomar, Pacific Grove, CA. ( www.hpts.ws ). This is Part 1 of the trip report… I am chiseling my way through my notes and expect this to take a couple more blog...

So, about a year and a half ago, I was working in Developer Division and there were lots of discussions about different kinds of components… it seemed that everyone was talking past each other and meant really different things about they meant by a component...

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I am very impressed with a recent paper from my friends at the Berkeley RAD Lab called: Above the Clouds: a Berkeley View of Cloud Computing . it seemed to me that it would be important for these concepts to be...

My friends at the UC Berkeley RAD Lab have written a wonderful paper on Cloud Computing. It can be found (with a video interview and some other stuff) at http://abovetheclouds.cs.berkeley.edu . I strongly recommend looking at their work! - Pat

I know this is a LONG time ago but these slides were never made public before and there's some interesting (and still relevant) stuff in this collection. At the time, it was confidential but that is no longer the case. In August of 2001, the SQL Service...

So, I'm starting to figure out how to put stuff up on Windows Live Skydrive and I have beginning out here . I've only spent a few hours on this and there's lots more old stuff to add soon. I will send another blog post when this is in better shape. ...

Sunday, January 4th through Wednesday, January 7th was the Conference on Innovative Database Research (CIDR) at Asilomar. First, let me talk for a minute about Asilomar . It is located in the forest right off the beach in Pacific Grove, CA (right next...

I just submitted the final (photo-ready) version of a new paper called "Building on Quicksand" to the Conference on Innovative Database Research . This is a paper I coauthored with my friend, Dave Campbell. We submitted an earlier version (to try to get...

Mark Dunn of .NET Rocks asked me to do an interview at TechEd EMEA last week. We chatted about one of my talks called "If You Have Too Much Data, then Good Enough Is Good Enough". The link to the interview is here . Thanks, Mark! It was fun! - Pat

This was filmed at TechEd NA in Orlando last June. I received the link to the video today. It was a nice chat with Patrick Weikle about the inevitability of Many-Core Processors and how this will inevitably drive us to parallel computation. The link is...

Well, those folks at TechEd EMEA continue to be nice to me. Looks like I get to do four talks for the architecture track AND the closing general session. It is quite an honor to be told I can make up whatever I feel like and they will let me present it...

I didn't think I wanted to blog about this but it's been rattling around inside of me so I thought I would share it! Life is short and life is precious... none of us know when our time is up and we all need to hold close what is dear to us. Monday evening...

Blogging on the bus again!! This was written on August 18th and 19th but it's taken a few weeks to get around to editing the photos... No computer stuff in this blog, just personal fun! So, on Wednesday, August 13th, Lisa and I flew to Chicago to attend...

So, one morning a few weeks or so ago, my colleague, Ruwen Hess , stuck his head in my door and commented on an Article on Gmail and User Confidence he had just read. He also pointed out a very interesting Article on the S3 failure from July 20th (which...

Here is a first draft of a new presentation. I gave it a couple of months ago just after TechEd and thought I would share it as I try to write up some of my thoughts on RIAs. I plan to rework this a bit more and present it again at TechEd Europe. The...

One last personal post and then I'll get to the work stuff. Last Friday we got off the ship... Saturday was moving the office with Bob... Sunday we went to a SeaFair party!!! I've lived in Seattle for 14 years and never really paid any attention to SeaFair...

So, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I am starting in the SQL team this week after the one week vacation. My friend, Bob, came over on Saturday with his pickup truck and we moved everything from building 42 to building 35. The Microsoft moving organization...

I'm starting this blog entry on the bus riding to work on Monday, Aug 4th... it's taken all the bus rides until today, Thursday, to finish. There's NO computer stuff in this post... This is a vacation travelogue! Wow! We had a good time in spite of Lisa...

Since I returned to Microsoft in March of 2007, I've worked in the Developer Division on a project in the area of RIAs( Rich Internet Applications). This is a fascinating space in which lots of fun stuff is happening. I've been privileged to work on a...

Well... I was lucky enough to get invited to Foo Camp (which was last weekend) and I figure "What the heck! Let's do it!". Foo Camp is held at the O'Reilly headquarters in Sebastopol, CA which is 1 to 2 hours (or more depending on traffic) north of San...

First of all, I've put off writing this for a while since I wanted a term for "controllers" that does not feel pejorative. I really mean this characteristic in a healthy and natural fashion! So, it's my belief that the people working in IT fall into...

A while back, the fine folks at TechEd EMEA sent me a link to the video of me presenting last November... I screwed up and didn't blog this. The powerpoints are at Blog of the Powerpoint of Irresistible Forces and the PDF version of the powerpoints are...

I've been busy with a number of things; one of them is helping to prepare for the official Tribute to Jim Gray. There will be an all day gathering at UC Berkeley on May 31st (see here ). This will include a general session (in which I am honored to have...