Gunnar Morling

Gunnar Morling

Random Musings on All Things Software Engineering

Gunnar Morling

Gunnar Morling

Random Musings on All Things Software Engineering

Recent posts

Mar 18, 2024

A Zipping Gatherer

The other day, I was looking for means of zipping two Java streams: connecting them element by element—​essentially a join based on stream offset position—​and emitting an output stream with the results. Unfortunately, there is no zip() method offered by the Java Streams API itself. While it was considered for inclusion in early preview versions, the method was removed before the API went GA with Java 8 and you have to resort to 3rd party libraries such as Google Guava if you need this functionality.

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Feb 20, 2024

Last Updated Columns With Postgres

In many applications it’s a requirement to keep track of when a record was created and updated the last time. Often, this is implemented by having columns such as created_at and updated_at within each table. To make things as simple as possible for application developers, the database itself should take care of maintaining these values automatically when a record gets inserted or updated.

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Feb 10, 2024

Filtering Process Output With tee

Recently I ran into a situation where it was necessary to capture the output of a Java process on the stdout stream, and at the same time a filtered subset of the output in a log file. The former, so that the output gets picked up by the Kubernetes logging infrastructure. The letter for further processing on our end: we were looking to detect when the JVM stops due to an OutOfMemoryError, passing on that information to some error classifier.

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Feb 4, 2024

1BRC—The Results Are In!

Oh what a wild ride the last few weeks have been. The One Billion Row Challenge (1BRC for short), something I had expected to be interesting to a dozen folks or so at best, has gone kinda viral, with hundreds of people competing and engaging. In Java, as intended, but also beyond: folks implemented the challenge in languages such as Go, Rust, C/C++, C#, Fortran, or Erlang, as well databases (Postgres, Oracle, Snowflake, etc.), and tools like awk. It’s really incredible how far people have pushed the limits here. Pull request by pull request, the execution times for solving the problem layed out in the challenge — aggregating random temperature values from a file with 1,000,000,000 rows — improved by two orders of magnitudes in comparison to the initial baseline implementation. Today I am happy to share the final results, as the challenge closed for new entries after exactly one month on Jan 31 and all submissions have been reviewed.

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Jan 1, 2024

The One Billion Row Challenge

Update Jan 4: Wow, this thing really took off! 1BRC is discussed at a couple of places on the internet, including Hacker News, lobste.rs, and Reddit. For folks to show-case non-Java solutions, there is a "Show & Tell" now, check that one out for 1BRC implementations in Rust, Go, C++, and others. Some interesting related write-ups include 1BRC in SQL with DuckDB by Robin Moffatt and 1 billion rows challenge in PostgreSQL and ClickHouse by Francesco Tisiot. Thanks a lot for all the submissions, this is going way beyond what I’d have expected! I am behind a bit with evalutions due to the sheer amount of entries, I will work through them bit by bit. I have also made a few clarifications to the rules of the challenge; please make sure to read them before submitting any entries. Let’s kick off 2024 true coder style—​I’m excited to announce the One Billion Row Challenge (1BRC), running from Jan 1 until Jan 31. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is deceptively simple: write a Java program for retrieving temperature measurement values from a text file and calculating the min, mean, and max temperature per weather station. There’s just one caveat: the file has 1,000,000,000 rows!

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Dec 17, 2023

Tracking Java Native Memory With JDK Flight Recorder

Update Dec 18: This post is discussed on Hacker News 🍊 As regular readers of this blog will now, JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) is one of my favorite tools of the Java platform. This low-overhead event recording engine built into the JVM is invaluable for observing the runtime characteristics of Java applications and identifying any potential performance issues. JFR continues to become better and better with every new release, with one recent addition being support for native memory tracking (NMT).

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Nov 14, 2023

Can Debezium Lose Events?

This question came up on the Data Engineering sub-reddit the other day: Can Debezium lose any events? I.e. can there be a situation where a record in a database get inserted, updated, or deleted, but Debezium fails to capture that event from the transaction log and propagate it to downstream consumers?

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Feb 28, 2023

Finding Java Thread Leaks With JDK Flight Recorder and a Bit Of SQL

The other day at work, we had a situation where we suspected a thread leak in one particular service, i.e. code which continuously starts new threads, without taking care of ever stopping them again. Each thread requires a bit of memory for its stack space, so starting an unbounded number of threads can be considered as a form of memory leak, causing your application to run out of memory eventually. In addition, the more threads there are, the more overhead the operating system incurs for scheduling them, until the scheduler itself will consume most of the available CPU resources. Thus it’s vital to detect and fix this kind of problem early on.

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Jan 15, 2023

Getting Started With Java Development in 2023 — An Opinionated Guide

27 years of age, and alive and kicking — The Java platform regularly comes out amongst the top contenders in rankings like the TIOBE index. In my opinion, rightly so. The language is very actively maintained and constantly improved; its underlying runtime, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), is one of, if not the most, advanced runtime environments for managed programming languages. There is a massive eco-system of Java libraries which make it a great tool for a large number of use cases, ranging from command-line and desktop applications, over web apps and backend web services, to datastores and stream processing platforms. With upcoming features like support for vectorized computations (SIMD), light-weight virtual threads, improved integration with native code, value objects and user-defined primitives, and others, Java is becoming an excellent tool for solving a larger number of software development tasks than ever before.

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Jan 5, 2023

Oh... This is Prod?!

I strongly believe that you should avoid connecting to production environments from local developer machines as much as possible. But sometimes, e.g. in order to analyse some specific kinds of failures, doing so can be inevitable. Now, if this is the case, I really, really want to be sure that I’m aware of the environment I am working in. I absolutely want to avoid a situation as in the catchy title of this post, when for instance you realize that you just ran some integration test against a production environment. In the context of working with the AWS CLI tool this means I’d like to be aware of the currently active profile by means of coloring my shell accordingly. Here’s how I’ve set this up using iTerm2 and zsh.

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