The way to think of this is through the migration path of desktop applications. All you have to do is imagine that Chrome OS windowing is widgety, like Adobe Air with that level of cool look and feel. If it's that good it will be a huge success. That's because what Google understands is that software engineering is undergoing a revolution - people are developing applications at scale for the web, not for the IT data center, mainframes, or for desktop PCs.
Think about it. If you were going to start a software development company today that you expect to have a million customers, it would be nothing like Autocad, or Teradata - a company that expects to ship a set of CDs to an IT department to install on their servers with InstallShield. You wouldn't be debugging the software for different hardware configurations and writing a huge document about minimum hardware requirements. No. You would be thinking about owning your own private cloud, the software never leaves and you attract subscribers.
With desktop computing, you had your own disk and your own word processor. That was WordPerfect, you collaborate with no one. Remember? Then you got the read only web, you paid your ISP for disk and used Dreamweaver to FTP your words up to your provider. Then you began to collaborate and you used Cold Fusion to manage content in a shared space. Now there's TypePad where the entire process is hosted for a service fee. All the software and all the disk is not owned by you but you collaborate with everyone. Just like you don't own Slashdot's disk or software.
The point is that software development in the abstracted web allows you to... well you already know this. So the right widgets to manage your cloud disk are all you need, that's what a cloud OS needs to have. The right tools to give you the ability to manage and control your space in the new paradigm. And for programmers a set of APIs that allow you to connect to massive cloud subsystems instead of things like USB peripherals.
Clouds are new in that they are elastic. In the 60s, you bought fractional computing of a fixed resource, like a couple floors of the Empire State Building. It was all zero sum. Now it is not.
Cloud providers are what enterprise IT would be if they grew up. Most corporate IT does not and will not even use IPV6 - talk about security. There are real cloud providers today that won't accept data unless it is encrypted and field encrypted too. That's more secure than 90% of enterprise data.
I've written more than 150 BI datamarts at companies whose names you know, and I guarantee you that almost none of them bother to encrypt any ETL streams and only half enforce password discipline.
Just applying nominal discipline to the migration of BI data will improve the overall security of corporate data. But you can best believe it will be tested.
What they're describing what I'd describe as an OLAP 2.0. They're taking similar capabilities (central data store, cubed data) and combining them with user generated content, sharing and the cloud.
The system looks extremely similar to an BI system.
I'd make an counter point to TFA: I actually think that this is probablly Business Objects / Microstrategy / Cognos's biggest dream: the system shows the power that effectively BI can provide an business with data which is effectively shared and public.
Google are making their business case: give vendor lots-of-money and they can gain the capability over your own data, but in an nicely managable manner (so your competitors won't be getting access to it).
It's not even OLAP 0.5.
Fusion Tables is to OLAP what Dreamweaver is to Typepad. It's a very elementary storage capability that demonstrates Google's ability to abstract what they do on the back end to 'tables'. It is so far from an OLAP or BI system as to be a joke. Oracle and Microsoft have nothing to fear just like Bloomberg has nothing to fear from Google Finance. There are three reasons.
1. It's not OLAP. As a very elementary and basic thing, you'd have to be able to do operations in an abstracted, dimensionally aware language across multiple entities. You should be able to say 'reduce all of my global warming statistics by 5%'. Fusion Tables doesn't come close to being able to do that, much less handle conditional logic.
2. There's no migration facility. Upload a spreadsheet? You couldn't even get a business that runs Quickbooks to upload their records sensibly into Fusion Tables, let alone an enterprise.
3. Everybody who actually does BI for a living is not impressed. There's no *reason* to move because this offers nothing *new*. There are fundamental reasons why good BI is hard. When open-source BI vendors like Pentaho start saying - hey we quit, then that's when it's time to pay attention.
Google would be wise to put in some facility to integrate these objects with the blogosphere, something nobody has yet done. When these little tables are containerized such that they can be embedded like YouTube videos, complete with visualization, that will be a success. Get it as good as a generalized Gapminder (pitifully slow at gapminder.com) and then we can talk; it will be more like OLAP but it still won't be real OLAP, much less enterprise OLAP.
--
I think there are some fundamental problems that Google has anyway, with regards to the size of data that works in parallel across their storage infrastructure that is going to screw up their ability to manage the nitpicky drips of data that matter in datasets of OLAPable interest.
Airset handles the incompatibility problem. There is a synch tool that allows it to talk to Outlook and you can export everything into ics. I'll be using it until Google or somebody else specifically implements a palm synch.
First of all, I don't know and I don't care whether or not these applications are available for OSX. I work with industrial strength databases with fat clients in environment where Macs never tread, enterprise apps. (Boo hiss, he makes real money!) I don't hate Macs, I just don't need em, and haven't missed them since my 7100 went belly up, though I will admit that Mac had the best nntp client ever. Wish I could remember the name.
Let me also add this. The problem with switching OSs is that it takes a long time to distinguish good software from bad. I expect that if I went OSX and bought Claris Works, I'd be very disappointed and rightfully so. So I would very much respect anyone touring me through that foreign territory and pointing out the better stuff.
UltraEdit32
I regularly do global search & replace where there are something like half a million changes in two seconds. I can easily edit flat files that are over 1GB in size, and it has a built-in FTP client. Wouldn't leave home without it. Yes it's better than BBEdit.
HashCalc
Perfect little utility for MD5 SHA-1 et al.
PasswordSafe
Keeps hundreds of passwords, well.. safe. Originally written by Bruce Schneier.
TrueCrypt
Good stuff. Works as advertised, industry standard.
ProcessExplorer
A must have for complete control of daemons lurking in your system.
TreeSize
Ranks all the files on your disk volumes. Great for determining which files are hogging disk and where.
and basically everything at OldVersion.com is good stuff.
others: Picasa, Ethereal, Putty, SnagIt, Ghost, Thunderbird, VMWare, Pappocom Sudoku, Blowfish Advanced CS, Softprime ASO, Nero, Dreamweaver, WS_FTP, WinRAR, Hamachi. Everything else are games & google, and then fat client business apps & dev tools.
This is actually a fairly smart move by Microsoft as much as it is an admission that they don't understand the space or the customer base. Not that they care - now that they have a more or less complete front-end and lovely middle tier, their technology is end to end now.
ProClarity has smart people who understand MDX better than just about anybody in the industry. MDX is the multidimensional equivalent of SQL and it handles things like cross-tabs (to be non-technical about it) very nicely. In fact when I last checked a couple years ago (I'm certified, thank you) they were the only people in the industry who had built a competent MDX code generator. Their developers have scoped out a complete API for the product and I have little doubt that the whole thing will fit very nicely into the.NETframework. This means that.NET geeks will have no obstacles to building integrated analyic products into anything with an MSSQL back-end. This is something a small tech company with all the smarts cannot market by itself, but that Microsoft can definitely market.
The ProClarity suite of products has many more features than the average MSSQL customer uses and will enable people with lightweight ( 3 years) experience in the BI space to build relatively competant applications. So as an entre into your generic IT shop, they've got a headstart. But it also is plenty extensible. I wouldn't be surprised if a bulked up ProClarity group within MSFT didn't start building analytics into Great Plains under the Microsoft Dynamics label.
It shouldn't take long for MS to integrate ProClarity into its product offering. All the hard stuff is already built.
This is a slap in the face of Panorama Software, the Israeli company that helped usher in 'Plato' some of the original technology behind MSAS - MS' multidimensional server now embedded with MSSQL. It's also something of a slap to the interal people behind Microsoft Reporting Services, which although not very good for high-end apps is a good me-too against Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion on the low end. It's reasonable to say, generically, that anybody who wants to run static format reports is a low-end analytical application anyway. Nobody expects much more who buys MSSQL anyway.
What's most interesting to me is whether or not ProClarity will continue to support MDX for Hyperion Essbase, the industry standard server for MDX on Linux & Unix boxes. Its got Yukon beat for scalability and does fabulous things on 64bit hardware. But as usual, the difficulty is getting people who understand high end BI to build with the pure technologies when so much of analytics is marketed in packages aimed at BPM and CRM etc. The last time I checked the ProClarity folks were very impressed with Essbase' Java API and how smoothly they were able to build. IE it worked the first time and did what it was supposed to do. The new MDX book out covers the differences between Essbase and MSAS, let's see how closely to the standards MSFT will remain.
Microsoft really had to do this since Hyperion has already released their System 9 integrated platform 6 months ago. Oracle just recently made their announcement within the past week, and I suspect that MSFT is announcing their strategy to make this another tentacle in their.NET multiverse. This puts a great deal of pressure on Microstrategy, Business Objects and Cognos who are selling middle tiers and front-ends but don't own their own database technologies, but you never know, SAP might try something and Informatica is something of a wild card in this. IBM? Well they have the technology but who knows if they really care?
All in all this is a good way to seed future Yukon buyers with stuff that Microstrategy used to get away with. Since all the Yukon buyers are going to wait anyway, piling on some of the ProClarity stuff won't hurt MS.
I can't tell you how annoying it is working with Hobbit sized controllers. I've had to horde XBox Duke controllers for years now, and with the 360 I'm going to have to retrain my hands to work with the new small controller. I don't even bother with PS2 because how anti-ergonomic the design is for men with large hands. Maybe the PS3 will be better, but man consoles suck.
Compare that with the luxury of a Saitek X52. Console designers need to wake up.
I'm a longtime power user; I have a Treo 650 and got it the first day. I've never used a Blackberry nor have I really wanted one. Push email is over-rated. As many phone calls and SMSs as I get, I really don't need one more distraction.
The 650 is great on battery. I can go two days easily with no charge and three if I don't have any conference calls.
It's true that memory management sucks on the Treo and when you get low it occasionally reboots, but since I'm a programmer I know that's my fault. If I simply purge old emails and messages I don't have a problem.
The browser and web access are great. I've even abandoned my more expensive EVDO. (However my car has sat-nav, otherwise I would use EVDO for Google Maps on the laptop, which is basically the only killer app besides open ports behind firewalls, not an issue for me these days.)
What I'm looking for is a balance between mobility, functionality and pocket space, with a little bit of redundancy for security's sake. I can keep files on the palm and infrared them to and from my laptop. I'm thinking about a PSP but it doesn't seem to be the choice for music. The palm LifeDrive is too small with regards to storage - I'd prefer something with 10GB and that way I'd take a simpler phone. The LifeDrive would be perfect with 20GB, wifi and bluetooth. Until that day the 650 is as good as it gets.
I've got Sudoku, a camera, videocam and voice recorder and access to Office files & PDFs on my phone. That says it all.
It's not about bad data, it's about bad code.
What goes on in corporate enterprise applications is basically this. You develop a schema, you submit it to a committee of architecture people, they spit it back to you and ask why are you using a varchar(50) when you could be using a char(7). You say that you think...they cut you off and tell you to come back when you KNOW.
You do this dance and then you submit your DDL and a staff DBA (not you) instantiates your databases, tables and stored procedures on a development box. Then you get to monkey with some test data and the cycle repeats itself until they deem that you are ready for QA.
By the time you're little app is ready for production, it has been vetted by dozens of intermediaries. This is when you submit to the Oracle God, the king of DBAs who has access to the Big Iron. And when you get here you have the privilige of running your app on something approaching an HP Superdome or an IBM SP, or if you're really fortunate, a full Teradata node.
Eventually such databases get hacked and your credit card numbers are all over the internet. But you can see why anybody's got a lot of nerve calling it MySQL. The hell it's your SQL. It's the corporate SQL, and the sooner you understand that, the better off you are.
It's rather astounding that there are so many young geeks who think Tron was lame. Of course it's lame by today's standards. But I was an actual programmer on the job in those days when it was considered incredible to get 300KB for your own program's memory. Tron was the first movie about programmers that made our style comprehensible. We were considered truly weird, and somebody as cool as Bruce Boxleitner to star as a programmer was considered a coup. That says a huge amount about the social acceptance of OGs (original geeks).
The ethic of programs of little fighters within a sometimes incomprehensible system was very appealing. The idea of old crusty programs bearing the likeness of their users was cool. The idea of independently minded security programs running around like white blood cells was also pretty fabulous. In terms of what actual programs could do at the time, Tron was inspirational to real programmers. I mean every program in Tron could communicate to every other program. Strong programs could defeat weak programs by learning new games at the instruction of stronger still programs, all without user intervention. A super program that could heal other programs that had crashed...
There were realistic in-jokes, like the Bit, the PacMan graphic in Stark's domain, the endless infinty of cubicles, and the fantasy that (arcade) gamers could pull chicks by getting high scores.
Tron was true the spirit of the then-emerging hacker ethic in many ways that other movies haven't really ever captured. In fact, I can't think of any other that captures more truly on an emotional scale how programmers think about their programs. In fact there is probably only one movie that has ever been cooler to hackers and that is Swordfish.
There may be millions of GenXrs listening to Blink182 through iPod earbuds, but that's crap audio for people who buy Telarc or Deutsche Grammophon CDs and listen through serious electronics. Sure it's nice to rip a CD and have music to listen to at work. Even so, I prefer to rip to AAC at 320. All that pop stuff on iTunes is candy - lightweight content at lightweight digital density, and serious music listeners can tell the difference.
I find it amazing that people who wouldn't think twice about spending 200 bucks on a double overkill graphics card for gaming listen to such lo-fi music through noisy electronics.
Well this is kind of my point. If the 20th Century was so deadly to global climate and it's going to take a very long time to recover, where is the urgency coming from?
As for elephants..well, you know I really don't know what we humans are supposed to do with elephants.
I think that the assumption that global climate change is happening too swiftly for us to do anything about it is the great myth.
I always ask people who believe that global warming is catastrophic why they don't move to Canada. It's because Canada is still too cold. My point exactly. If it took 100 years to raise the global temperature 5 degrees (and I think that's the extreme end of all predictions), it will likely take an equivalent amount of time to undo the damage. Barring that, it seems that the worse case will be that it's intemparate where it is now temparate. IE wheat for bread now grown in Iowa will have to be farmed from some hundred miles north. So will it take modern industry 100 years to move start farming elsewhere or do people believe that JR Simplot is so stupid that it won't realize it can't grow potatoes for McDonald's fries in Idaho until it's too late.
I don't think agribusiness is that stupid or our society is that slow and dumb that we'll forget where our food comes from. The planet is fine. You'll change your diet before we change the climate. You'll eat your spinach and you'll like it!
So label it off topic. The discussion is better suited to the Open Source vs Database Vendors thread. I realize that my comment was provocative, but the qualifying language couldn't be immediately reposted due to the internal moderator here.
My gripe has more to do with the idea that open source web programmers, relatively speaking, seem to have short attention spans, and as their toolkits have gone from perlCGI to Zope to Java to PHP and now to Ruby there is a scale of applications they simply don't seem to recognize. In the enterprise database world these are just flashes in the pan. We live with applications and databases for a long time and there's a good reason for that, serious multiyear investments of time and money. So when somebody says that Oracle might ruin a product, I'm saying what kind of product could it be if people give it away - certainly nothing that lives up to the standards of the demands of the enterprise database industry where Oracle earns its bread every day.
MQ Series is industrial strength middleware. It's what banks use to guarantee transactions happen. When JBoss is anywhere near that level of security and reliability then I think you'll hear a change in tune from enterprise proprietary software folks.
If SAP were to swap out Oracle from under their applications, it would be a project of gargantuan proportions. 75% of their customers wouldn't upgrade, they'd have to double their tech support, and for what? To build themselves a cheaper product? Get real.
I personally will shutup when open source databases perform better than proprietary ones, namely when MySQL approaches DB2 or when any open-source MDDB approaches Essbase (not bloody likely). The incentive to topple the giants has been out there for a decade, but I simply don't believe you can get that many people to work for free and be responsive to the needs of industrial applications.
We've seen Silicon Graphics fall and we've seen Sun reduced to something of a shadow of itself, but Teradata still rules.
In case somebody knows, because I don't, I might imagine that CERN or one of those physics joints might be using some some open source stuff in their data capture. Or maybe somebody behind the scenes at Google might confess that some significant portion of their databases are open-source, but I'm not convinced by 'most of the web', because nobody cares if 'most of the web' is up like a dialtone or a bank's transaction systems.
How do you get bigger than IBM and Oracle with JBoss? Simply because it's technically superior? You have to have superior sales and marketing to be a superior product, and only products make money - not technologies. JBoss needs to compete in the marketplace and it won't do so just because it was made by some cool guy named Marc.
One day all of you open-source weenies are going to realize that the world doesn't run on GPL.
Here's an honest but perhaps offensive question. I work with financial databases and enterprise software going back a dozen years or so. In the F100 companies I work with, I have never seen any MySQL or PostgreSQL or any free databases ever used for financial transactions or data warehousing. As far as I and my professional colleagues are concerned, MySQL is a toy. Which is to say that when it comes to crunching numbers on serious iron, it's not even considered.
I admit my bias which says that anyone who programs for backends of websites is not likely to build anything that challenges a real database (DB2, Oracle, Sybase, Teradata) very much in the same way that nobody who writes for Windows is taken seriously by people who write for Unix (Solaris, AIX, HP/UX).
So I ask the following question for somebody who might be familiar with a heavy duty commerce site. Where do you make the break? What size database?
I work primarily with multidimensional databases which are even more sophisticated and complex than RDBMS, so I even tend to scoff at DB2 and stuff like Microstrategy. My basic criteria is that if it can't do the equivalent of a 10 way join on an unbalanced snowflake with subsecond response time, it's not worth my time.
Anything with less than 50 million source level records for real-time querying I consider a small database. What's large for a MySQL guy?
My survey (>1000 participants over 3 years) says about 35% of people are racial bigots or straight up racist. So it's a fair guess that there's plenty enough racism to go around in IT - even though IT employees tend to be younger and smarter than average. There will continue to be until there's a political showdown. But that's a showdown nobody really wants to happen, which illustrates the greatness of MLK. He wasn't afraid of a showdown, no matter what the cost. Most people would just rather avoid conflict.
http://selectsmart.com/FREE/select.php?client=race man
I would also like to add that if IT people weren't mushroomed, there would be a lot fewer Indians, Chinese and Russians working. If you look at the *real* software industry where salesmen from Oracle, SAP, Peoplesoft and Siebel are making million dollar deals you'll find almost zero Asians. Blacks do better in sales than folks with accents and hard-to-pronounce names in English. Indians who succeed in front office and f2f IT and software businesses change or shorten their last names.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about it. If you were going to start a software development company today that you expect to have a million customers, it would be nothing like Autocad, or Teradata - a company that expects to ship a set of CDs to an IT department to install on their servers with InstallShield. You wouldn't be debugging the software for different hardware configurations and writing a huge document about minimum hardware requirements. No. You would be thinking about owning your own private cloud, the software never leaves and you attract subscribers.
With desktop computing, you had your own disk and your own word processor. That was WordPerfect, you collaborate with no one. Remember? Then you got the read only web, you paid your ISP for disk and used Dreamweaver to FTP your words up to your provider. Then you began to collaborate and you used Cold Fusion to manage content in a shared space. Now there's TypePad where the entire process is hosted for a service fee. All the software and all the disk is not owned by you but you collaborate with everyone. Just like you don't own Slashdot's disk or software.
The point is that software development in the abstracted web allows you to ... well you already know this. So the right widgets to manage your cloud disk are all you need, that's what a cloud OS needs to have. The right tools to give you the ability to manage and control your space in the new paradigm. And for programmers a set of APIs that allow you to connect to massive cloud subsystems instead of things like USB peripherals.
Clouds are new in that they are elastic. In the 60s, you bought fractional computing of a fixed resource, like a couple floors of the Empire State Building. It was all zero sum. Now it is not. Cloud providers are what enterprise IT would be if they grew up. Most corporate IT does not and will not even use IPV6 - talk about security. There are real cloud providers today that won't accept data unless it is encrypted and field encrypted too. That's more secure than 90% of enterprise data. I've written more than 150 BI datamarts at companies whose names you know, and I guarantee you that almost none of them bother to encrypt any ETL streams and only half enforce password discipline. Just applying nominal discipline to the migration of BI data will improve the overall security of corporate data. But you can best believe it will be tested.
Yes and no.
What they're describing what I'd describe as an OLAP 2.0. They're taking similar capabilities (central data store, cubed data) and combining them with user generated content, sharing and the cloud.
The system looks extremely similar to an BI system.
I'd make an counter point to TFA: I actually think that this is probablly Business Objects / Microstrategy / Cognos's biggest dream: the system shows the power that effectively BI can provide an business with data which is effectively shared and public.
Google are making their business case: give vendor lots-of-money and they can gain the capability over your own data, but in an nicely managable manner (so your competitors won't be getting access to it).
It's not even OLAP 0.5.
Fusion Tables is to OLAP what Dreamweaver is to Typepad. It's a very elementary storage capability that demonstrates Google's ability to abstract what they do on the back end to 'tables'. It is so far from an OLAP or BI system as to be a joke. Oracle and Microsoft have nothing to fear just like Bloomberg has nothing to fear from Google Finance. There are three reasons.
1. It's not OLAP. As a very elementary and basic thing, you'd have to be able to do operations in an abstracted, dimensionally aware language across multiple entities. You should be able to say 'reduce all of my global warming statistics by 5%'. Fusion Tables doesn't come close to being able to do that, much less handle conditional logic.
2. There's no migration facility. Upload a spreadsheet? You couldn't even get a business that runs Quickbooks to upload their records sensibly into Fusion Tables, let alone an enterprise.
3. Everybody who actually does BI for a living is not impressed. There's no *reason* to move because this offers nothing *new*. There are fundamental reasons why good BI is hard. When open-source BI vendors like Pentaho start saying - hey we quit, then that's when it's time to pay attention.
Google would be wise to put in some facility to integrate these objects with the blogosphere, something nobody has yet done. When these little tables are containerized such that they can be embedded like YouTube videos, complete with visualization, that will be a success. Get it as good as a generalized Gapminder (pitifully slow at gapminder.com) and then we can talk; it will be more like OLAP but it still won't be real OLAP, much less enterprise OLAP. -- I think there are some fundamental problems that Google has anyway, with regards to the size of data that works in parallel across their storage infrastructure that is going to screw up their ability to manage the nitpicky drips of data that matter in datasets of OLAPable interest.
Airset handles the incompatibility problem. There is a synch tool that allows it to talk to Outlook and you can export everything into ics. I'll be using it until Google or somebody else specifically implements a palm synch.
Let me also add this. The problem with switching OSs is that it takes a long time to distinguish good software from bad. I expect that if I went OSX and bought Claris Works, I'd be very disappointed and rightfully so. So I would very much respect anyone touring me through that foreign territory and pointing out the better stuff.
UltraEdit32
I regularly do global search & replace where there are something like half a million changes in two seconds. I can easily edit flat files that are over 1GB in size, and it has a built-in FTP client. Wouldn't leave home without it. Yes it's better than BBEdit.
HashCalc
Perfect little utility for MD5 SHA-1 et al.
PasswordSafe
Keeps hundreds of passwords, well.. safe. Originally written by Bruce Schneier.
TrueCrypt
Good stuff. Works as advertised, industry standard.
ProcessExplorer
A must have for complete control of daemons lurking in your system.
TreeSize
Ranks all the files on your disk volumes. Great for determining which files are hogging disk and where.
and basically everything at OldVersion.com is good stuff.
others: Picasa, Ethereal, Putty, SnagIt, Ghost, Thunderbird, VMWare, Pappocom Sudoku, Blowfish Advanced CS, Softprime ASO, Nero, Dreamweaver, WS_FTP, WinRAR, Hamachi. Everything else are games & google, and then fat client business apps & dev tools.
This is actually a fairly smart move by Microsoft as much as it is an admission that they don't understand the space or the customer base. Not that they care - now that they have a more or less complete front-end and lovely middle tier, their technology is end to end now. ProClarity has smart people who understand MDX better than just about anybody in the industry. MDX is the multidimensional equivalent of SQL and it handles things like cross-tabs (to be non-technical about it) very nicely. In fact when I last checked a couple years ago (I'm certified, thank you) they were the only people in the industry who had built a competent MDX code generator. Their developers have scoped out a complete API for the product and I have little doubt that the whole thing will fit very nicely into the .NETframework. This means that .NET geeks will have no obstacles to building integrated analyic products into anything with an MSSQL back-end. This is something a small tech company with all the smarts cannot market by itself, but that Microsoft can definitely market.
The ProClarity suite of products has many more features than the average MSSQL customer uses and will enable people with lightweight ( 3 years) experience in the BI space to build relatively competant applications. So as an entre into your generic IT shop, they've got a headstart. But it also is plenty extensible. I wouldn't be surprised if a bulked up ProClarity group within MSFT didn't start building analytics into Great Plains under the Microsoft Dynamics label.
It shouldn't take long for MS to integrate ProClarity into its product offering. All the hard stuff is already built.
This is a slap in the face of Panorama Software, the Israeli company that helped usher in 'Plato' some of the original technology behind MSAS - MS' multidimensional server now embedded with MSSQL. It's also something of a slap to the interal people behind Microsoft Reporting Services, which although not very good for high-end apps is a good me-too against Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion on the low end. It's reasonable to say, generically, that anybody who wants to run static format reports is a low-end analytical application anyway. Nobody expects much more who buys MSSQL anyway.
What's most interesting to me is whether or not ProClarity will continue to support MDX for Hyperion Essbase, the industry standard server for MDX on Linux & Unix boxes. Its got Yukon beat for scalability and does fabulous things on 64bit hardware. But as usual, the difficulty is getting people who understand high end BI to build with the pure technologies when so much of analytics is marketed in packages aimed at BPM and CRM etc. The last time I checked the ProClarity folks were very impressed with Essbase' Java API and how smoothly they were able to build. IE it worked the first time and did what it was supposed to do. The new MDX book out covers the differences between Essbase and MSAS, let's see how closely to the standards MSFT will remain.
Microsoft really had to do this since Hyperion has already released their System 9 integrated platform 6 months ago. Oracle just recently made their announcement within the past week, and I suspect that MSFT is announcing their strategy to make this another tentacle in their .NET multiverse. This puts a great deal of pressure on Microstrategy, Business Objects and Cognos who are selling middle tiers and front-ends but don't own their own database technologies, but you never know, SAP might try something and Informatica is something of a wild card in this. IBM? Well they have the technology but who knows if they really care?
All in all this is a good way to seed future Yukon buyers with stuff that Microstrategy used to get away with. Since all the Yukon buyers are going to wait anyway, piling on some of the ProClarity stuff won't hurt MS.
I'm never leaving the safety of Google Reader again.
Compare that with the luxury of a Saitek X52. Console designers need to wake up.
I'm a longtime power user; I have a Treo 650 and got it the first day. I've never used a Blackberry nor have I really wanted one. Push email is over-rated. As many phone calls and SMSs as I get, I really don't need one more distraction. The 650 is great on battery. I can go two days easily with no charge and three if I don't have any conference calls. It's true that memory management sucks on the Treo and when you get low it occasionally reboots, but since I'm a programmer I know that's my fault. If I simply purge old emails and messages I don't have a problem. The browser and web access are great. I've even abandoned my more expensive EVDO. (However my car has sat-nav, otherwise I would use EVDO for Google Maps on the laptop, which is basically the only killer app besides open ports behind firewalls, not an issue for me these days.) What I'm looking for is a balance between mobility, functionality and pocket space, with a little bit of redundancy for security's sake. I can keep files on the palm and infrared them to and from my laptop. I'm thinking about a PSP but it doesn't seem to be the choice for music. The palm LifeDrive is too small with regards to storage - I'd prefer something with 10GB and that way I'd take a simpler phone. The LifeDrive would be perfect with 20GB, wifi and bluetooth. Until that day the 650 is as good as it gets. I've got Sudoku, a camera, videocam and voice recorder and access to Office files & PDFs on my phone. That says it all.
It's not about bad data, it's about bad code. What goes on in corporate enterprise applications is basically this. You develop a schema, you submit it to a committee of architecture people, they spit it back to you and ask why are you using a varchar(50) when you could be using a char(7). You say that you think...they cut you off and tell you to come back when you KNOW. You do this dance and then you submit your DDL and a staff DBA (not you) instantiates your databases, tables and stored procedures on a development box. Then you get to monkey with some test data and the cycle repeats itself until they deem that you are ready for QA. By the time you're little app is ready for production, it has been vetted by dozens of intermediaries. This is when you submit to the Oracle God, the king of DBAs who has access to the Big Iron. And when you get here you have the privilige of running your app on something approaching an HP Superdome or an IBM SP, or if you're really fortunate, a full Teradata node. Eventually such databases get hacked and your credit card numbers are all over the internet. But you can see why anybody's got a lot of nerve calling it MySQL. The hell it's your SQL. It's the corporate SQL, and the sooner you understand that, the better off you are.
God, now I'm thinking that I have to get that ringtone.
I've never seen the DVD. I'm sure it was in the original.
The ethic of programs of little fighters within a sometimes incomprehensible system was very appealing. The idea of old crusty programs bearing the likeness of their users was cool. The idea of independently minded security programs running around like white blood cells was also pretty fabulous. In terms of what actual programs could do at the time, Tron was inspirational to real programmers. I mean every program in Tron could communicate to every other program. Strong programs could defeat weak programs by learning new games at the instruction of stronger still programs, all without user intervention. A super program that could heal other programs that had crashed...
There were realistic in-jokes, like the Bit, the PacMan graphic in Stark's domain, the endless infinty of cubicles, and the fantasy that (arcade) gamers could pull chicks by getting high scores.
Tron was true the spirit of the then-emerging hacker ethic in many ways that other movies haven't really ever captured. In fact, I can't think of any other that captures more truly on an emotional scale how programmers think about their programs. In fact there is probably only one movie that has ever been cooler to hackers and that is Swordfish.
There may be millions of GenXrs listening to Blink182 through iPod earbuds, but that's crap audio for people who buy Telarc or Deutsche Grammophon CDs and listen through serious electronics. Sure it's nice to rip a CD and have music to listen to at work. Even so, I prefer to rip to AAC at 320. All that pop stuff on iTunes is candy - lightweight content at lightweight digital density, and serious music listeners can tell the difference. I find it amazing that people who wouldn't think twice about spending 200 bucks on a double overkill graphics card for gaming listen to such lo-fi music through noisy electronics.
Well this is kind of my point. If the 20th Century was so deadly to global climate and it's going to take a very long time to recover, where is the urgency coming from? As for elephants..well, you know I really don't know what we humans are supposed to do with elephants.
I always ask people who believe that global warming is catastrophic why they don't move to Canada. It's because Canada is still too cold. My point exactly. If it took 100 years to raise the global temperature 5 degrees (and I think that's the extreme end of all predictions), it will likely take an equivalent amount of time to undo the damage. Barring that, it seems that the worse case will be that it's intemparate where it is now temparate. IE wheat for bread now grown in Iowa will have to be farmed from some hundred miles north. So will it take modern industry 100 years to move start farming elsewhere or do people believe that JR Simplot is so stupid that it won't realize it can't grow potatoes for McDonald's fries in Idaho until it's too late.
I don't think agribusiness is that stupid or our society is that slow and dumb that we'll forget where our food comes from. The planet is fine. You'll change your diet before we change the climate. You'll eat your spinach and you'll like it!
So label it off topic. The discussion is better suited to the Open Source vs Database Vendors thread. I realize that my comment was provocative, but the qualifying language couldn't be immediately reposted due to the internal moderator here. My gripe has more to do with the idea that open source web programmers, relatively speaking, seem to have short attention spans, and as their toolkits have gone from perlCGI to Zope to Java to PHP and now to Ruby there is a scale of applications they simply don't seem to recognize. In the enterprise database world these are just flashes in the pan. We live with applications and databases for a long time and there's a good reason for that, serious multiyear investments of time and money. So when somebody says that Oracle might ruin a product, I'm saying what kind of product could it be if people give it away - certainly nothing that lives up to the standards of the demands of the enterprise database industry where Oracle earns its bread every day. MQ Series is industrial strength middleware. It's what banks use to guarantee transactions happen. When JBoss is anywhere near that level of security and reliability then I think you'll hear a change in tune from enterprise proprietary software folks.
If SAP were to swap out Oracle from under their applications, it would be a project of gargantuan proportions. 75% of their customers wouldn't upgrade, they'd have to double their tech support, and for what? To build themselves a cheaper product? Get real.
I personally will shutup when open source databases perform better than proprietary ones, namely when MySQL approaches DB2 or when any open-source MDDB approaches Essbase (not bloody likely). The incentive to topple the giants has been out there for a decade, but I simply don't believe you can get that many people to work for free and be responsive to the needs of industrial applications. We've seen Silicon Graphics fall and we've seen Sun reduced to something of a shadow of itself, but Teradata still rules. In case somebody knows, because I don't, I might imagine that CERN or one of those physics joints might be using some some open source stuff in their data capture. Or maybe somebody behind the scenes at Google might confess that some significant portion of their databases are open-source, but I'm not convinced by 'most of the web', because nobody cares if 'most of the web' is up like a dialtone or a bank's transaction systems.
How do you get bigger than IBM and Oracle with JBoss? Simply because it's technically superior? You have to have superior sales and marketing to be a superior product, and only products make money - not technologies. JBoss needs to compete in the marketplace and it won't do so just because it was made by some cool guy named Marc. One day all of you open-source weenies are going to realize that the world doesn't run on GPL.
I admit my bias which says that anyone who programs for backends of websites is not likely to build anything that challenges a real database (DB2, Oracle, Sybase, Teradata) very much in the same way that nobody who writes for Windows is taken seriously by people who write for Unix (Solaris, AIX, HP/UX).
So I ask the following question for somebody who might be familiar with a heavy duty commerce site. Where do you make the break? What size database?
I work primarily with multidimensional databases which are even more sophisticated and complex than RDBMS, so I even tend to scoff at DB2 and stuff like Microstrategy. My basic criteria is that if it can't do the equivalent of a 10 way join on an unbalanced snowflake with subsecond response time, it's not worth my time.
Anything with less than 50 million source level records for real-time querying I consider a small database. What's large for a MySQL guy?
My survey (>1000 participants over 3 years) says about 35% of people are racial bigots or straight up racist. So it's a fair guess that there's plenty enough racism to go around in IT - even though IT employees tend to be younger and smarter than average. There will continue to be until there's a political showdown. But that's a showdown nobody really wants to happen, which illustrates the greatness of MLK. He wasn't afraid of a showdown, no matter what the cost. Most people would just rather avoid conflict. http://selectsmart.com/FREE/select.php?client=race man
I would also like to add that if IT people weren't mushroomed, there would be a lot fewer Indians, Chinese and Russians working. If you look at the *real* software industry where salesmen from Oracle, SAP, Peoplesoft and Siebel are making million dollar deals you'll find almost zero Asians. Blacks do better in sales than folks with accents and hard-to-pronounce names in English. Indians who succeed in front office and f2f IT and software businesses change or shorten their last names.