Eisenhower Interstate System in the style of H.C. Beck’s London Underground Diagram
Originally uploaded by Senex Prime
Larry Ellison’s is easily one of the greatest strategists in the software industry (ever). Let’s all hope that his role at Oracle comes in handy for MySQL and Solaris to receive continued support and deserved upgrades at their new home.
The NoSQL movement still has a lot more ground to cover before capturing the full attention of IT managers and developers over using RDBMS-based systems (ie: MySQL). Oracle still has time dress MySQL up, or trash it, in favor of a NoSQL-based data management suite.
Michael Stonebraker (co-creator of Ingres and PostGres), in the 70’s, critized the usability, scalability, and performance of RDBMS-based systems. His reasons being that:
In the data warehouse market, a column store beats a row store by approximately a factor of 50 on typical business intelligence queries. The reason is because column stores read only the columns of interest to the query and not all of them. In addition, compression is more effective in a column store. Since the legacy systems are all row stores, they are vulnerable to competition from the newer column stores.
… In the online transaction processing (OLTP) market, a lightweight main memory DBMS beats a row store by a factor of 50. Leveraging main memory and the fact that no DBMS application will send a message to a human user in the middle of a transaction, allows an OLTP DBMS to run transactions to completion with no resource contention or locking overhead.
… In the science DBMS market, users have never liked relational DBMSs and want a non-relational model and query facility.
… Text applications have never used relational DBMSs. This was pointed out to me most clearly by Eric Brewer nearly 15 years ago in the early days of Inktomi. He wanted to use a relational DBMS to store the results of Web crawling, but found RDBMS to be two orders of magnitude slower than a home-brew system. All the major Web-search engines use home-brew text software to serve us search results. None use relational DBMSs.
He has predicted their demise and saw the dawn of a new era decades ago:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/08/NoSQL-and-the-End-of-RDBMS-Era
All is not so gravy yet for the NoSQL movement:
http://bjclark.me/2009/08/04/nosql-if-only-it-was-that-easy/
I wouldn’t be surprised if Oracle jumped on the NoSQL train in order for it to compete with open-source packages in the enterprise.
DBA’s need to start planning on migrating and learning architectures of the already (thriving) open-source projects such as:
http://www.mongodb.org
Or, a hybrid solutions such as HadoodDB:
http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.html
Switching gears back to Oracle’s acquisition of SUN: Business Week magazine came out with an article clarifying why the European Union will not stop Oracle from taking over SUN:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2009/tc2009093_421812.htm
Let’s all keep our eyes open for January 19, 2010, as the EU’s set date for making a final decision on the case which will determine if Oracle goes forward with MySQL (hopefully) as a hybrid solution — like HadoopDB.
I enjoy using open-source technologies, but Oracle pumps out extraordinary enterprise-ready solutions that far outweigh free alternatives by features, documentation, and security.
Take what I say with a grain of salt; I am no guru, of course. I am simply enthused to see competition which will hopefully benefit programmers and end-users.
Reference
[1] Oracle Poster on SUN Acquisition to Customers: http://cache0.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/oracle.jpg
WARNING: Highly Addictive!
I apologize once again for using http://www.feedly.com to illustrate how to manage news streams. The previous entry I had made was about using it to manage RSS feeds to job listings on popular sites:
http://israelany.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/job-hunting-feedlys-way/
This time around I demonstrate how to leverage it to read and stay informed about the latest articles, tutorials, and industry news.
The way I structure my start pages is by selectively inserting relevant and highly educational content from prominent sites such as:
http://stackoverflow.com/tags
http://serverfault.com/tags
http://superuser.com/tags
http://delicious.com/tag/
But, remember, you can also add VIDEO (and audio) feeds; so, that means YouTube content as well (ie: http://www.youtube.com/user/googletechtalks)
Here, below, are some UI snapshots of (some) of my content. Feedly can mash the feeds up and show only the most popular / favored items based on your preferences: http://www.feedly.com/home#preferences
Productivity
Shalom!
He made several great points on rewarding systems and the theory of diminishing returns. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Official Bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Beckstrom
AppSec DC 2009 is a free (open-source) conference that will be held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center (801 Mount Vernon Place NW Washington, DC 20001) on November 10th through 13th 2009. This is where some of Information Security’s top talent shows up to discuss and present “what is” and “what’s next” in the information assurance and application security fields.
Registration: https://guest.cvent.com/EVENTS/Register/IdentityConfirmation.aspx?e=26bc4c77-e1ef-4bad-be46-eb7b0124276c
Schedule: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_AppSec_DC_2009#tab=Schedule
Mark your calendar! Hope to see you there.
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