Linden Lab's systems administrator, Charity Majors has been with the company for a while - since 2004, in fact - but we've not heard much from Majors previously. That's a shame, because Majors' latest post detailing the process behind the recent Second Life central database upgrade is a real treat. We've not seen its like for a couple of years, sadly.

The story of the recent database upgrade (which was originally attempted in 2007, with less than stellar results) is frank, detailed and informative.

It's really rather a pity that Majors isn't writing blog posts on policy and economic metrics, because Majors puts almost all the other Linden Lab bloggers to shame for precision and clarity.