Scalable Data is Hard!
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Adam Bosworth complains  about the current lack of quality and scalable databases in our industry.  "About five years ago I started to notice an odd thing. The products that the database vendors were building had less and less to do with what the customers wanted."  "It is this. Users of databases tend to ask for three very simple things:"  "1) Dynamic schema so that as the business model/description of goods or    services changes and evolves, this evolution can be handled seamlessly in a    system running 24 by 7, 365 days a year ..."  "2) Dynamic partitioning of data across large dynamic numbers of machines. A    lot people people track a lot of data these days. ..."  "3) Modern indexing. ...
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Continuing the thread on commoditization of scalable server software, the third installment. Yesterday, Matt Tucker from the OpenFire community, said: "I'm not sure that S3 magically kills off the scaling priests. It certainly makes it easy to turn on more storage resources, but writing an application to scale efficiently across multiple virtual machines is no easy task." To which I responded... It won't make scaling obsolete, but what it does do is commodify it. Right now I can't buy a Jabber server that scales without also hiring someone who will scale it for me. But in a few years I should be able to buy a Jabber server that, when it needs more CPUs, just asks for them all transparently to the user, the same way my word processor asks the OS for more memory today. I remember word processors that didn't do memory management, you got a 64K buffer and that's it. One document. When you filled it up, you started another. Technology will go forward and scaling won't be a black art, it'll be something built into the software you license.
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An introduction to XML and DocBook: what is it and why should I learn yet another data format?
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There's a lot of data out there, but using it wisely is a challenge. In this Executive Briefing, we look at the theory and practice of data-driven decision making. We hear from experts and examine successful implementations of information management technologies.
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InfoWorld - It's hard to argue against data portability. After all, who could oppose giving people control over the data they load, publish, and store on Web sites?
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Even though the practice was common in mainframes of old, convincing today's data center operators to pipe water through racks filled with expensive servers and invaluable data is not always easy.
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(Source: Plasmon)  In this white paper, Heidi Biggar of Enterprise Strategy Group discusses the ideal solution that creates a multi-tiered active archive for cost-effective, long-term accessibility to compliance data.   According to Biggar, organizations cannot continue keeping non-transactional data on primary storage systems. Archive platforms make better economic sense. Download this white paper to learn more!
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Do people normalise database designs in phones? Blog I was interested to read Ian Murphy's story about SQL Anywhere. Despite the availability of embedded databases, it seems to me that the database (in the DBMS sense) hasn't really come to mobile devices like phones yet. This is largely because of resource constraints - they're back in the 1970s mindset before enterprise databases really took off, using clever file systems for data storage (remember VSAM?).â¦
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It's hard to be faithful when you're as big as Microsoft is.
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Unprecedented amounts of data will need to be secured in new, untested ways. What's the best course to pursue in such uncharted territory?
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In a follow-up to a previous blog post, Alexey Zakhlestin shares a few more thoughts on the project and the proper object hierarchy's going for.   actually, I changed it completely 3 times already in my thoughts. I finally "see the light"(tm) and will implement it on a weekend. I think about converting SCGI-part to a simple "driver" and move all http-related stuff to a separate driver-agnostic set of classes. This way, I would be able to implement FastCGI as anther driver without altering applications. If you have any better ideas - let me know.   He also includes a link to another sample application that uses the functionality to create a pie chart (including some benchmarks) with the help of the eZ components framework.
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Citing need among its customers and the broader market, Netezza announced on Monday that its Netezza Performance Server, a data warehousing appliance for BI (business intelligence) analytics, will soon be scalable to the petabyte level.Systems capable of that scale will be available beginning in the middle of this year, according to the company. The increased performance will be made possible in part through the company&#39;s recently announced Compress Engine, for advanced compression, according to Netezza. The new systems will also support multiterabyte per hour data-loading, the company said.Netezza, based in Framingham, Massachusetts, has regularly announced performance improvements since launching its appliance in 2002. That initial version could handle up to 6TB of data, according to the company. That leapfrogged to 27TB in 2004 and 100TB in 2005, Netezza said.&quot;We have a number of customers who are now at or approaching that upper range,&quot; said Phil Francisco, the company&#39;s director of product marketing.Francisco said the new systems will preserve the company&#39;s existing pricing model. Low-end systems start below $200,000 and scale up from there, with support coming at additional cost, he said.Richard Winter, a consultant with Winter Corp. in Waltham, Massachusetts, said the BI market is ripe for more powerful data-crunching products. &quot;Every time you turn around you see another industry that&#39;s facing a tidal wave of data and they need to understand what this data is saying,&quot; he said. &quot;Many of them have data volumes in this range that they haven&#39;t been able to afford to analyze, as much as they&#39;d like to. ... [Netezza] can deliver that analytic capability, and at a very attractive price.&quot;James Kobielus, an analyst with Forrester Research, said Netezza is now aiming for the highest end of the data warehousing market, going after the likes of Teradata.&quot;Being able to scale up to a petabyte in context of an NPS deployment will go a long way toward getting Netezza in that inner circle of vendors,&quot; he said.The company may face certain problems of perception when attempting to poach such vendors&#39; customers, however. &quot;Their chief challenge is the fact that they&#39;re a startup,&quot; Kobielus said. &quot;They&#39;re definitely not as old and mature as the IBMs and Teradatas.&quot;Netezza also may have limited appeal to customers that would prefer a one-stop shopping approach for their BI-data warehousing needs. Instead, Netezza has partnered with BI vendors such as Business Objects.In addition, heightened competition may be around the corner for the firm, according to the analysts.&quot;Over the course of the year you&#39;ll also see some appliance-type offerings from the major players like Teradata and Oracle,&quot; Winter said. &quot;They&#39;ll compete down the road.&quot;Kobielus said he sees Microsoft making a particularly strong push in coming months.&quot;I am confident Microsoft will have some really important announcements this year,&quot; he said. &quot;Definitely look out for those guys.&quot;
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The popular technology promises to make computing easier, but it takes time to get up to speed.
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Why a standard single-file SQL format is necessary and how SQLite can get us there.
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The benchmark consists of three workloads designed to demonstrate the performance of a storage configuration during the execution of business-critical applications that require large-scale, sequential movement of data. The
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Avoiding crisis in the rain-forest Meat Cast Ah, data center efficiency. The big vendors have embraced this topic like an admin embraces a bag of Dorritos.â¦
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'Identity reconstruction' still possible Large databases do not adequately protect sensitive personal information, according to a statistics professor in the US, who says that individuals can still be identified despite attempts to anonymise them.â¦