Sharding a database, twice richtet sich an Alle und wird in English gehalten.
There comes a time in the life time of a database, the database takes too many resources (be it disk space, number of I/O transactions, or something else) to be handled by a single box.
Sharding, where data is distributed over several identically shaped databases is one technique to solve this.
For a high volume database I used to work with, we hit this limit about a dozen
years ago. Then we hit the limit again two years ago.
In this talk, we will first discuss how we initialized switched our systems to make use of a sharded database, without any significant downtime.
One of my colleagues, let's call her M, has a rather deep dislike of toes. At least that is the conclusion I would draw from the frequency with which she steps on them. It is not that she is malicious, but as she strives towards an unachievable level of perfection casualties are inevitable. Her frustration with one less enthusiastic or less intelligent (I like to think I am just "more chilled") is also just as inevitable. Suffice to say, I have to wear emotional boots with steel toe caps to meetings where she attends wearing her ideological stilettos.
While I am suitably armoured, other colleagues are less protected. Ash, (the poor fellow) providing a verbose and detailed outline of a problem he was facing, stood no chance.
Data Structure
"If you can't decide," M said helpfully, "you have either got insufficient data, or insufficient competence...which is it?"
You should be planning to attend the Summer PCC 2026 (Austin, TX / Virtual), which, as consistently promised, will take place on July 3rd and 4th. A CFP and paper call will be available soon.
Videos from this past Winter PCC (December 17–18) will be made available after our Summer PCC.
2026 is sure to be as productive and busy for The Perl Community+ as 2024 and 2025.
Cheers,
Brett Estrade (OODLER)
+The Perl Community is a 501(c)(3) organization based in Austin, Texas, USA. It is dedicated to the advancement of Perl 5 through its committees, including AI Perl, Perl::Types, and the Science Perl Committees, as well as publications like the Science Perl Journal. (Registered DOI Prefix: 10.63971)
Sydney Perl continues regular meetings with our next in February
Please join us on Tuesday 24th Feb 2026 at Organic Trader Pty Ltd. Unit 13/809-821 Botany Road Rosebery
6:30pm to 9pm.
Chances are folks will head to a nearby Pub afterward.
I will talk about my 5 years working at Meta Platforms and 6 months at Amazon Inc. specifically contrasting their engineering culture, and generally discussing what Google calls an SRE culture. Contrasting my experiences at Big Tech to "Middle Tech".
Getting there:
Come in the front door marked
"Konnect" then take the first door on the right, and up the stairs to
Level 1.
Mascot station + 20 minute walk or 358 bus to Gardener's Road if you
don't want to walk so far.
Or Waterloo Metro station + 309 bus to Botany Road after Harcourt Parade.
We agree with the general idea of an improved PRNG, so we encourage Scott to continue working on the PR to get it into a polished state ready for merge
TLS in core still remains a goal for the next release cycle. Crypt::OpenSSL3 might now be in a complete enough state to support a minimal viable product “https” client to be built on top of it, that could be used by an in-core CPAN client
Now that I am retired, I have a bit more time for personal projects. One project dear to my heart would be to demonstrate strong features of Perl for programmers from other backgrounds. So I'm planning a https://dev.to/ series on "beautiful Perl features", comparing various aspects of Perl with similar features in Java, Python or Javascript.
There are many points to discuss, ranging from small details like flexibility of quote delimiters or the mere simplicity of allowing a final comma in a list, to much more fundamental features like lexical scoping and dynamic scoping.
Since I'm not a native english speaker, and since my knowledge of Java and Python is mostly theoretical, I would appreciate help if some of you would volunteer for spending some time in proofreading the projected posts. Just send an email to my CPAN account if you feel like participating.
I've heard this for years, well since I started. You probably have too. And honestly? For a long time, I didn't have a great rebuttal. Sure, Perl's fast enough for most things, it's well known for text processing, glueing code and quick scripts. But when it came to object heavy code, the critics have a point.
We are happy to announce that Otobo also is part of our event!
Die Rother OSS GmbH ist Source Code Owner und Maintainer der Service Management-Plattform OTOBO.
Gemeinsam mit der Community entwickeln wir OTOBO kontinuierlich weiter und sorgen dafür, dass das Tool zu 100 % Open Source bleibt.
Unsere Kunden unterstützen wir mit partnerschaftlicher Beratung, Training, Entwicklung, Support und Managed Services.
https://otobo.io/de/unternehmen/karriere/
I've released a new version of SBOM::CycloneDX with support for the OWASP CycloneDX 1.7 specification (ECMA-424).
This release includes the new elements introduced in 1.7, with a focus on:
Enhancements to Cryptography Bill of Materials (CBOM)
Citations: references and sources for evidence/metadata
Intellectual Property Transparency: references to associated patents (number, jurisdiction, link, assignee) for compliance / due diligence needs
New experimental "SBOM::CycloneDX::Lite" interface:
A lightweight module designed to generate BOMs with a simpler API, using the most common CycloneDX properties.
Examples included in the distribution (use them as a starting point to build your own applications/tools that generate BOM files):
"x509-to-cbom" : generates a CBOM from an X.509 certificate
"rpm-to-sbom" : generates a SBOM from installed RPM packages (on RHEL-based)
The goal of this module is to help the Perl community generate BOM files more easily, improving security and compliance across the ecosystem and making the software supply chain more transparent.
We discussed the recent p5p thread about the proposed class :abstract attribute. Paul wants to write that because it’s a simple addition on current code and avoids design complications about roles. Aristotle doesn’t wish to introduce a new special-purpose feature now that will become redundant when a more general one is available later and wondered whether it can be introduced as roles that currently only support a small subset of features. No call has been made.
The class discussions also extended to looking at the meta module and API, and the common idea between the two that it would be useful to get more people to use them and discuss future ideas. We would like people to step forward here.
We have PR #24059 to implement the retraction of the deprecation of being able to call undefined import methods (and the reinstatement of a default-enabled warning for that case), thanks to haarg. We are keen to get it merged so we will provide feedback soon.
The maint-votes process came up. We pondered whether we can conceive of something less obscure and will post to the list about this.
vitroconnect implementiert Schnittstellen und Geschäftsprozesse für eine Reihe von marktführenden Unternehmen über die eigene Brokerage Plattform. Darüber hinaus können auch frei konfigurierbare White Label Bündelprodukte geliefert werden. Seit 2011 ist vitroconnect mit seinen Kund:innen aus der Telekommunikation gewachsen: Auf der vitroconnect Plattform werden aktuell über 100 Partner verwaltet. vitroconnect ist die größte netzunabhängige Brokerage-Plattform für TK-Breitbandanschlüsse in Deutschland.
(I make no apologies for the ChatGPT images in my recent blog posts, by the way. No artists are missing out on being paid: I wasn’t going to hire an artist to illustrate these blog posts which will be read by like three people.)
A while back, I wrote MooseX::XSAccessor which you can add to Moose classes to inspect your attributes and try to replace the accessors with faster XS-based ones. Now I’ve done the same for constructors (new) and destructors (DESTROY) with MooseX::XSConstructor.
There are probably still bugs, but initial benchmarks look promising:
An Analysis of The Perl and Raku Foundation's 2024 Finances
In October 2024, I published an article analyzing the financial situation of The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF). Since then, I have left the board, and my life is now largely unrelated to Perl. I no longer have insight into TPRF's internal decision-making but I got a few suggestions to continue, so this article again analyzes TPRF's finances using publicly available data for the 2024 calendar year. There is an unavoidable delay between when nonprofit tax returns are filed and when they become public.
Executive Summary
Assets at end of 2023: $200,215
Revenue in 2024: $86,845
Expenses in 2024: $188,037
Assets at end of 2024: $101,525
Despite a strong increase in donations, TPRF spent more than twice its revenue in 2024, resulting in a $98,690 loss and a halving of its assets.
