The world of databases is a fascinating topic. It is very diverse. Many of them are extremely complex systems, but there are also very simple ones. There are the general purpose ones, and ones that do only one thing good, but they do it excelent. Despite all of this we tend to pick them just like we order food in a restaurant:

• I’ll take the same as last time. It wasn’t ideal for what I wanted, but I could pick worse.
• Hmm… Everyone is taking this one, so I’ll take it also.

Well, maybe it is time to dig deeper into it?

Configuration as code movement isn’t anything new and is here to stay. I haven’t had time to actually do a from zero to the desired state configuration script until a few weeks ago. Below are my thoughts after three weeks with PowerShell Desired State Configuration.

In most cases .NET manages to solve the DLL hell problem pretty well, but sometimes it all falls apart, and when it does in best case scenario we see something like this:

Could not load file or assembly 'XXXX, Version=X.Y.Z.W, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=eb42632606e9261f' or one of its dependencies. 
The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)

The much worst case is this:

The method 'XXXX' was not found on the interface/type 'YYYY, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null'.

This post is an analysis of why this happens and how to diagnose it:

While I’m working on the next angle on how to speed up calculating similarities I started investigating how to get better telemetry from cookit. Getting telemetry is easy - making sense of it is the hard part. This also brought another pain point of current setup - logging and monitoring. Since cookit is my pet, nonprofit project it was time to do something.

In my ongoing series on calculating similarities one angle always seemed worth trying, and was pointed out many times on Reddit - use C++ and matrix manipulations. Similarity calculation fits very nicely into matrix representation, and there are algorithms targeting sparse matrix manipulation. So why did I delay it for so long? Because I had other angles I wanted to try and, from the looks of it required significant changes in the existing code base. But since last optimizations didn’t bring the time cuts I’ve expected, the time has come. Brace yourself.