Donald Wilson, 82, Pioneer of a Database, Dies
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H. Donald Wilson prepared the original business plan for what became Mead Data Central and its pioneering Lexis-Nexis database.
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(InfoWorld) - Dr. Ambuj Goyal is one of IBMâs heavy hitters. A 25-year IBM veteran who joined the company as a researcher at the T. J. Watson Research Center, Goyal did early work in scalable databases that laid the technology groundwork for DB2, then led the research effort to create the Deep Blue chess computer. In 1996, Goyal was elevated to be vice president, servers and software, and director, computer sciences, where he set IBMâs long-term research direction and oversaw the work of 1,500 researchers worldwide. Now, as general manager of information management in the IBM Software Group, Goyal ensures the success of IBMâs Information On Demand initiative and its constellation of products. But in a recent interview with InfoWorld Executive Editor at Large Eric Knorr, Goyal still sounded like a scientist, expounding on the nature of information vs. data and the unique position IBMâs new Information Server occupies in the history of computing. InfoWorld: Consolidating, reconciling, and delivering information strikes me as one of the most difficult problems in IT.                                                     AmbujGoyal: This problem has existed for 20 years. When I was doing the announcement for Information Server last October, I talked about an inflection point that has come in information management. This is similar to an inflection point that occurred in 1996 when there were many techniques to create Web sites or do Web-based business: Java Virtual Machines, HTTP servers, commerce engines. There were many different techniques. A few companies created a concept called a Web application server, IBMâs being WebSphere. So if you wanted to leverage Web technologies to improve your business or do Web programming, you just get started with a Web application server. We are at a similar inflection point in 2006. We have myriads of techniques â metadata management, ETL (extraction, transformation, and loading) tools, data creation tools, Federation tools, cleansing tools, profiling tools. People use these tools to solve the information challenge. The application server had a foundation, which was JVM. Information Server now has a foundation, which is a metadata repository, or metadata bus. And we have restructured all the tools to come up with an information server, so companies donât need to decide whether they need this piece of technology or that piece of technology. They have an information challenge â they just start with an information server. IW: What about the skills to work with an information server? It seems a little difficult to find people who understand this area. Is that a problem in the market now? AG: It actually simplifies the problem because people were doing manual stuff around metadata. So what we have done is helped the business user say, âThis is how I define my customer and attributes of that customer.â They can talk business language. And then an information architect, who typically used to do ETL or SQL, can take the same business language and convert it into an appropriate information infrastructure programming tool. In the past they could never do that, and governance became a huge problem. The businessperson really meant X, and the information architect implemented Y. IW: But in all of these solutions, somebody is still sitting down in a meeting room, going through the incredibly tedious task of saying, âOK, weâre going to use this field and not that field, weâll express this value this way and not that way.â AG: Right, but our view is, over decades, this is how software and middleware have evolved. There was tedious work going on connecting system A to system B. You repeated it over and over again. Then out came a product that is an outgrowth of a repeated piece of work captured into a software product. In the late â90s, people used to use the WebSphere application server and would build customer portals. Many customers built and said, âLook, this is a waste of time. I would just like to have the base infrastructure to be able to do that.â So portals as a category evolved. We believe that people are still doing tedious work when dealing with information. Information Server and its tools are converting that tedious work into an information server category. Even analysts are starting to talk about this as a category because it is solving that tedious work, and tedious work has always resulted in a new category of software.
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One of the most respected engineering gateways on the web has just released four new databases providing free access to hundreds of online scientific and technical journals.
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Also: Ancestry.com puts 90M war records online. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Ancel Keys, the University of Minnesota scientist who invented the K ration diet used by soldiers in World War II and who linked high cholesterol and fatty diets to heart disease, has died at the age of 100.
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Sam  posts an interesting proposal.  This is better than the HTTP delta suggestion but still has a few issues.  The client needs to know the ETags before it can start performing differential fetches.  With date ranges you still preserve the initial archive query.  For example when you first subscribe to a feed you could fetch 30 days worth of posts.  If you like the feed you can even fetch *older* posts which could be really cool.  Also even if you still use faster checksum algorithm like CRC32 or Adler32 you still have an O(N) performance hit for your document.  If you have a btree on your post dates you will gave O(log(N)) for search for a much smaller string (64bit in most situations).  F ...
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In the next few weeks, Amazon.com plans to begin a "limited beta" of an online database called SimpleDB that is designed to enable users to run structured-data queries in real time.
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âBento,â says Stephen H. Wildstrom  âtakes the essence of FileMaker Pro, a database-management program aimed at small- and midsize businesses, and marries it to Macâs new Leopard operating system. The result is a powerful organizing tool anyone can use.â
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Google Index Database to be Archived?  TechDirt reports that the San Jose Mercury News is running an article about Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive - Archive.org. While he's been profiled many times before, the one interesting tidbit to slip out this time is that Kahle has asked Google to donate their database ...
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A 76-year-old man faces murder charges in the death of a woman whose body was found in 1984 but not identified until 2003. A computer database and DNA testing helped crack the case.
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Maurice Wilkins, 88, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962 along with the two scientists credited for describing the structure of DNA, Francis Crick and James Watson, died Tuesday at a London hospital.
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Maxime A. Faget, 83, a retired NASA aeronautical engineer whose innovative designs contributed greatly to manned spacecraft from Mercury to the space shuttle, died of cancer Oct. 10 at his home in Houston.
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A file described as the database for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Web site shows up for sharing.
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Editors: Shlomo Reifman and Samantha N. Wong Researchers: Joshua Brandt, Fei Mei Chan,  Andrew T. Gillies, Soo Jeong, Edward Knudsen,  Artie Kwok, John Ray and Jody Yen Programmer: Carl Subick
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The founder of hard-drive maker Seagate was one of the pioneers, and one of the regular guys, of the tech industry.
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Professor Maurice Wilkins, who helped unlock the structure of DNA with Crick, Watson and Franklin, has died aged 88.
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The company ships its first database update in more than four years. Was it worth the wait?