Automation is nothing new to industry. It has a long tradition on the factory floor, where its constant objective has been to increase the productivity of manufacturing processes. Only with the advent of computers could the focus of automation widen to include administrative and information-handling tasks. More recently, automation has been extended to the more intellectual tasks of production planning and control, material and resource planning, engineering design, and quality control. New challenges arise in the form of flexible manu facturing, assembly automation, and automated floor vehicles, to name just a few. The sheer complexity of the problems as well as the state of the art has led scientists and engineers to concentrate on issues that could easily be isolated. For example, it was much simpler to build CAD systems whose sole objective was to ease the task of drawing, rather than to worry at the same time about how the design results could be interfaced with the manufacturing or assembly processes. It was less problematic to gather statistics from quality control and to print reports than to react immediately to first hints of irregularities by inter facing with the designers or manufacturing control, or, even better, by auto matically diagnosing the causes from the design and planning data. A heav- though perhaps unavoidable - price must today be paid whenever one tries to assemble these isolated solutions into a larger, integrated system.

The further rise of electronic publishing has come to change the scale and diversity of grey literature facing librarians and other information practitioners. This compiled work brings together research and authorship over the past decade dealing with both the supply and demand sides of grey literature. While this book is written with students and instructors of Colleges and Schools of Library and Information Science in mind, it likewise serves as a reader for information professionals working in any and all like knowledge-based communities.

The infrastructure-as-code revolution in IT is also affecting database administration. With this practical book, developers, system administrators, and junior to mid-level DBAs will learn how the modern practice of site reliability engineering applies to the craft of database architecture and operations. Authors Laine Campbell and Charity Majors provide a framework for professionals looking to join the ranks of today’s database reliability engineers (DBRE). You’ll begin by exploring core operational concepts that DBREs need to master. Then you’ll examine a wide range of database persistence options, including how to implement key technologies to provide resilient, scalable, and performant data storage and retrieval. With a firm foundation in database reliability engineering, you’ll be ready to dive into the architecture and operations of any modern database. This book covers: Service-level requirements and risk management Building and evolving an architecture for operational visibility Infrastructure engineering and infrastructure management How to facilitate the release management process Data storage, indexing, and replication Identifying datastore characteristics and best use cases Datastore architectural components and data-driven architectures

Undergraduate and first-year graduate students engaging in engineering research need more than technical skills and tools to be successful. From finding a research position and funding, to getting the mentoring needed to be successful while conducting research responsibly, to learning how to do the other aspects of research associated with project management and communication, this book provides novice researchers with the guidance they need to begin developing mastery. Awareness and deeper understanding of the broader context of research reduces barriers to success, increases capacity to contribute to a research team, and enhances ability to work both independently and collaboratively. Being prepared for what's to come and knowing the questions to ask along the way allows those entering researcher to become more comfortable engaging with not only the research itself but also their colleagues and mentors.

When it comes to choosing, using, and maintaining a database, understanding its internals is essential. But with so many distributed databases and tools available today, it’s often difficult to understand what each one offers and how they differ. With this practical guide, Alex Petrov guides developers through the concepts behind modern database and storage engine internals. Throughout the book, you’ll explore relevant material gleaned from numerous books, papers, blog posts, and the source code of several open source databases. These resources are listed at the end of parts one and two. You’ll discover that the most significant distinctions among many modern databases reside in subsystems that determine how storage is organized and how data is distributed. This book examines: Storage engines: Explore storage classification and taxonomy, and dive into B-Tree-based and immutable Log Structured storage engines, with differences and use-cases for each Storage building blocks: Learn how database files are organized to build efficient storage, using auxiliary data structures such as Page Cache, Buffer Pool and Write-Ahead Log Distributed systems: Learn step-by-step how nodes and processes connect and build complex communication patterns Database clusters: Which consistency models are commonly used by modern databases and how distributed storage systems achieve consistency