-
“Enterprise architects need to work with the enterprise as if it were a family. If you look at a family, especially one with kids, they have their moments, but over time, they all start to embody a set of shared values.”
-
Couchbase Goes 2.0, Pushes SQL for NoSQL – NYTimes.com
“The bigger news for the industry most likely is UnQL, which Couchbase Co-Founder and SVP of Products James Phillips hopes will become the equivalent of SQL for unstructured databases. A standard query language could be very beneficial to the NoSQL space, which is characterized by many different products with different functions and different syntaxes.
Created by CouchDB creator Damien Katz and SQLite creator Richard Hipp, UnQL extends aspects of SQL to NoSQL databases. According to Phillips, it’s an expressive language that, like SQL, lets the database do “heavy lifting” instead of putting the burden on application developers to write certain functionalities into the application.”
-
MoMA’s ‘Talk to Me’ Focuses on Interface – Review – NYTimes.com
“The Museum of Modern Art’s “Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects” is one of the smartest design shows in years — by which I mean that it’s intelligent but also that it’s made for the texting, tweeting, social-networking, app-downloading, smartphone-wielding museumgoer.”
-
The Fertile Unknown: 77 Awesome Creativity Books
“The following are some of the books (both the classics and some newer ones) that have informed, inspired and/or resonated with me along my journey over the years. I’ve chosen each based on philosophy, context, concepts, principles, practices, or applicability. Some are more reflective and other more active. Since most would fit into more than one catagory it felt too reductive to break them down that way. I’m just listing them in no particular order for you to explore whichever calls to you.”
-
Jeff Bezos on innovation: Amazon ‘willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time’ – GeekWire
“If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company. AWS also started about six or seven years ago. We are planting more seeds right now, and it is too early to talk about them, but we are going to continue to plant seeds. And I can guarantee you that everything we do will not work. And, I am never concerned about that…. We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give up.
But. if you get to a point where you look at it and you say look, we are continuing invest a lot of money in this, and it’s not working and we have a bunch of other good businesses, and this is a hypothetical scenario, and we are going to give up on this. On the day you decide to give up on it, what happens? Your operating margins go up because you stopped investing in something that wasn’t working. Is that really such a bad day?
So, my mind never lets me get in a place where I think we can’t afford to take these bets, because the bad case never seems that bad to me.”
-
Why the shortage of cloud architects will lead to bad clouds | Cloud Computing – InfoWorld
“I’ve worked on cloud-based systems for years now, and the common thread to cloud architecture is that there are no common threads to cloud architecture. Although you would think that common architectural patterns would emerge, the fact is clouds do different things and must use very different architectural approaches and technologies. In the world of cloud computing, that means those who are smart, creative, and resourceful seem to win out over those who are just smart.”
-
Behind the Youthful Sales Surge for IBM Mainframes – Digits – WSJ
I’ll always have COBOL… “Just how hot is IBM’s most venerable computer line? Well, revenue from the high-end machines known as mainframes surged 61% in the second quarter, capping the best four quarters of growth for the segment in five years.”
-
Gartner Releases Their Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2011 | A Passion for Research
“Bottom line: The greater the hype, the more the analyst inquiries, and the faster a given technology ascends to the Peak of Inflated Expectations. After reading this analysis it becomes clear that vendors who strive to be accurate, precise, real and relevant are winning deals right now and transcending the hype cycle to close sales. They may not being getting a lot of attention, but they are selling more because enterprises clearly understand their value.”
Archives for July 2011
Link Collection – July 24, 2011
-
Big data vs. traditional databases: Can you reproduce YouTube on Oracle’s Exadata? | ZDNet
“…Cowen & Co. analyst Peter Goldmacher. In a 75-page report, Goldmacher walks through the database landscape and concludes that the consensus view that the growth of data will boost traditional database vendors is dead wrong. Goldmacher said:
We believe the vast majority of data growth is coming in the form of data sets that are not well suited for traditional relational database vendors like Oracle. Not only is the data too unstructured and/or too voluminous for a traditional RDBMS, the software and hardware costs required to crunch through these new data sets using traditional RDBMS technology are prohibitive…”
Link Collection- July 17, 2011
-
Preview of Storm: The Hadoop of Realtime Processing – BackType Technology
Curious to see what happens with Storm, post-Twitter acquisition of BackType
“There are three broad use cases for Storm:
1. Stream processing: This is the traditional realtime processing use case: process messages and update a variety of databases.
2. Continuous computation: Storm can be used to do a continuous computation and stream out the results as they’re computed. For example, we used Storm the other day to compute trending users on Twitter off of the Twitter firehose. Every second, Storm streams out the 50 users with the most retweets in the last few minutes with perfect accuracy. We stream this information directly into a webpage which visualizes and animates the trending users in realtime.
3. Distributed RPC: Distributed RPC is perhaps the most unexpected and most compelling use case for Storm. There are a lot of queries that are both hard to precompute and too intense to compute on the fly on a single machine.”
-
The challenges of streaming real-time data – O’Reilly Radar
“You would be shocked at the ratio of engineers who can’t build event-driven, asynchronous data processing applications, to those who can, yet this is a big part of this space.”
“…Jud Valeski: “Big data” as we talk about it today has been slayed by lots of cool abstractions (e.g. Hadoop) that fit nicely into the way we think about the stack we all know and love. “Big streams,” on the other hand, challenge the parallelization primitives folks have been solving for “big data.” There’s very little overlap, unfortunately. So, on the software solution side, better and more widely used frameworks are needed…”
Absence of Event = Event
In this week’s Active Information post, I riff off a quote by Jud Valeski the CEO of Gnip, on the dearth of event-driven talent:
“Beyond infrastructure issues, as engineers, the web app programming we’ve been doing over the past 15 years has taught us to build applications in a highly synchronous transactional manner…”
“…You would be shocked at the ratio of engineers who can’t build event-driven, asynchronous data processing applications, to those who can, yet this is a big part of this space.”
If you are a frequent reader here, you’ve seen the event constructs I published over there.
One that I didn’t include is the fact that the absence of an event can be an event. Chris Martins brought that up on Twitter.
In my initial event writing, I wrote of a system heartbeat example:
“…a business-to-business order gateway is supposed to be emitting System Heartbeat events every 15 minutes. The System Heartbeat events inform IT operations the gateway is up and running. The absence of a heartbeat event indicates a failure. If the order gateway is down, business customers are likely to place an order with a competitor.”
On Twitter yesterday, I mentioned an event-driven billing subsystem I’m currently working on. In that system, we’ll be generating a (standard) projected monthly invoice. The invoice generation starts when the party is approved for billing.
Invoice regeneration is triggered by a set of events, including a change in plan, the receipt of a payment, or the absence of the receipt of payment. In this subsystem, the absence of a receipt is a non-payment event.
So, yes. The absence of an event is absolutely an event.
Active Information: Data, rather than brute force and sheer will, wins races
The inspiration for my active information post this week is an article in the Economist that highlights the use of data, sensors, aggregators and analytics in competitive racing — motor sports and sailing. Telematics for the win.
Check out my post.
