I focused on the troubleshooting & performance analysis sides of my internship this week.  I worked with another performance engineer to do some load test analysis and completed introductory work on performance monitoring.  I also spent a good deal of time shadowing my supervisor to learn some system troubleshooting and build processes.  It’s amazing how valuable good log files can be… a lesson I’ll be taking forward into my own programming projects.

Continuing along with my database research from last week, this week I learned about MDX, a query language for OLAP databases.  OLAP cubes are n-dimensional (as opposed to relational databases, which are 2-d) and are often used in analytics and business intelligence.  At a high-concept level, MDX queries essentially slice a geographic region from a hypercube– this is a similar technique to clustering methods I learned in Data Mining last quarter, and is really cool stuff if you geek out on information theory like I do.

I also experimented with some of Visual Studio 2012’s new features, played around with the ASP.Net profiler, and made further revisions to my previous suite of web performance tests which will make them more useful in load testing.

Oh, and I went undefeated for my first four matches in the employee Magic league– not bad for an intern!