Link Collection – July 3, 2011

• A Simple Answer to “What Is Billing?” | Doug Newdick’s Blog

  “In my last blog post I talked about what #sexybilling was, or perhaps more accurately , what it might look like. It became evident from the comments though that I hadn’t really made it clear what I thought billing was, and so that sort of complicated the story. If we don’t know what billing is, how are we going to know what sexy billing is?”

  tags: billing

• How to get Ahead in Enterprise Architecture by Drawing Boxes – Simplicable

  “Last week I spoke with the chief architect of a large international retail bank. This bank was able to reduce their application map from 160+ systems down to 5.

  How (you may ask)? The answer is simple — by drawing boxes around them.”

  tags: entarch

• The real (potential) impact of SAP HANA

  “Much has been written about SAP HANA. The technology has been variously described as “transformative” and “wacko.” Well, which is it?”

  “In-memory databases take advantage of two hardware trends: a significant reduction in the cost of RAM, and a significant increase in the amount of addressable memory in today’s computers. It is possible, and economically feasible, to put an entire database in memory, for fast data management and query. Using columnar or other compression approaches, even larger data sets can be loaded entirely into main memory. With high-speed access to memory-resident data, more users can be supported on a single machine. Also, with an in-memory database, both transactional and decision-support queries can be supported on a single machine, meaning that there can be zero latency between data appearing in the system, and that data being available to decision-support applications; in a traditional set-up where data resides in the operational store, and then is extracted into a data warehouse for reporting and analysis, there is always a lag between data capture and its availability for data analysis.”

  tags: SAP HANA in-memory dbms active-information

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.