Posts by Ian Michael Gumby

A database solution is more than database software

What are you talking about!

The normalization that you see in a mobile phone's contact database is not the fault of the database, but that of the database designer and the app developer.

It is also a problem with how people interpret "normalization" of data.

Many forget that their is a context for the data. So that its a combination of the context and the data. Also its not the precise data itself, but the data elements that should be normalized.

In this case, the contacts database may just put a link to a table to store the addresses and if they are going to keep just one copy of the address, then they need to track the link count when they delete a record.

What you're experiencing is poor interaction between a database DBA and the app developer.

Sun's open sourcing of Java: avoid the red herring

Snooze fest...

Sorry to say it, but again the author is pointing out the obvious. Open Sourcing the java language does nothing in terms of technical achievement, other than buying Sun some PR.

As the author correctly points out, business users will standardize on known distributions and JVMs. (Sun or IBM) for example.

What this really does is to give Sun some PR and some "street cred" as being part of the Opensource community.

In terms of control or influence, it does very little.

Its a well written article, yet it states the obvious and doesn't answer the question of how a company will make money in an open source market place.

Note that there will be those to shoot from the hip and cry "services", but then again, the majority of them haven't tried to run either a services group or company... ;-)

Its a strange, dangerous world that we live in these days.

But hey! What do I know? ;-)

-G

IBM gets handle on unstructured data

Not really. But it is a fluff piece.

I think the main acronym is DIYBI or "Do it Yourself" BI (where BI Is the industry term "Business Intelligence".)

Nelson is actually one of the better guys in the lab, but I do agree that this article was a boring fluff piece.

I think the point is that IBM is extending their BI vision and that since more "unstructured" enterprise data is being captured, there needs to be a way to drill down and find meaning in that data.

I think that IBM is on the right track, however, a lot of the "unstructured" data is industry if not enterprise specific, and trying to create a "standardized toolkit" is about as far as you can go. Really it would be more of a toolkit recognizin g the patterns of the "unstructured" data.

Using the Google-ing of webpages to find information as an example, the tool kit could comprise of some HTML structure knowledge and indexing scheme. It is this form of "intelligence" which is needed.

Of course IBM would need to rethink their extensibility beyond the limited capabilities found in DB2's extenders and apply this DIYBI to IDS first which has a robust enough engine to decrease the time to market and time to value....

But hey! What do I know? I'm just Gumby. ;-)

Databases in academia

This author should be flogged...

The author of a previous comment is right. This is an advertisment.

When you see a quote like the following:

"He chose Microsoft SQL Server (although he says any reasonable relational database would have done) to store the data, because he considers its query and analysis facilities to be unparalleled today..."

You can see that this article is pure hype.

The author loses all credibility in his *astonishment* that

"Although computers are widely used in theoretical physics and such research, the tools taken as routine in business are being overlooked in academia – if Mark hadn’t taken a PhD with John Parker and then moved into databases (he’s in the Department of Applied Computing at the University of Dundee) this research would have been based on shuffling index cards in a card index box (or, at best, on something like a spreadsheet)."

Researchers of a myriad of disciplines have been using computers and databases for statistical analysis as well as cataloging data for a number of years.

Nothing new here except for the lowering of standards at the Reg. Especially the RegDeveloper.

But hey, what do I know?

I've been working with databases since the early 80s. ;-)