I’m partway back
As previously noted, I cut back temporarily on blogging (and taking briefings) a couple of months ago as my parents got sicker, then suspended work altogether a month ago when they died. I am immensely grateful to be in a line of work where choices like that are possible. Once again, I thank you all for your tolerance and kindness.
Last Monday night, Linda and I returned from Columbus, leaving behind an apartment that was hardly packed up at all. We have to go back the week of 12/6; then I’m going to see clients in California the week of 12/13, as I do about once per quarter; then of course come the holidays; there also is estate-related stuff to take care of even while we’re here; and by the way, year-end is when over half of all Monash Advantage members renew. So I surely will be on a limited blogging schedule for most of December as well.
I did, however, get a few posts done this weekend, finishing up one on MarkLogic that had been in the hopper for a while, and adding two rather substantive spin-off posts from that one as well. After the New Year, I would hope to be back up to full speed.
| Categories: About this blog | 1 Comment |
Data that is derived, augmented, enhanced, adjusted, or cooked
On this food-oriented weekend, I could easily go on long metaphorical flights about the distinction between “raw” and “cooked” data. I’ll spare you that part — reluctantly, given my fondness for fresh fruit, sushi, and steak tartare — but there’s no escaping the importance of derived/augmented/enhanced/cooked/adjusted data for analytic data processing. The five areas I have in mind are, loosely speaking:
- Aggregates, when they are maintained, generally for reasons of performance or response time.
- Calculated scores, commonly based on data mining/predictive analytics.
- Text analytics.
- The kinds of ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) Hadoop and other forms of MapReduce are commonly used for.
- Adjusted data, especially in scientific contexts.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing | 5 Comments |
Document-oriented DBMS without joins
When I talked with MarkLogic’s Ken Chestnut about MarkLogic 4.2, I was surprised to learn that MarkLogic really, truly doesn’t do anything like a join. Unlike some other non-SQL DBMS, MarkLogic has no SQL interface, no ODBC or JDBC. Nothing, nada. (MarkLogic has a Java interface for Xquery, but not for anything like SQL.)
| Categories: CouchDB, MarkLogic, NoSQL, Structured documents, Text, Theory and architecture | 6 Comments |
MarkLogic and its document DBMS
This post has been long in the writing for several reasons, the biggest being that I stopped working for almost a month due to family issues. Please forgive its particularly choppy writing style; having waited this long already, I now lack the patience to further clean it up.
MarkLogic:
- Is an ACID-compliant, document-oriented, non-SQL, XML-based scale-out DBMS vendor of non-trivial size and momentum.
- Still has the same technical approach I previously described.
- Recently posted an internally-written white paper with a lot of technical detail.
- Recently had a point release — MarkLogic 4.2 — a lot of which seems to be “Oh, you didn’t have that before?” kinds of stuff.
- Has given me permission to post most of the slides from same, the first few of which give a nice overview of the MarkLogic story.
- Claims 200+ each of customers and employees (that’s from a slide MarkLogic did ask me to remove from the deck).
- Is a client again.
- Not coincidentally, is interested in branching out past the vertical markets of media and government/intelligence, in particular to the financial services market.
- Has finally rationalized its company and product names so that both are now “MarkLogic.”
- Has finally grasped that if it is proud of its ACID-compliance it probably shouldn’t be trying to market itself as “NoSQL”.
Where I’m at now
My parents’ health issues didn’t work out as I hoped, and my parents wound up dying 53 hours apart. I’m dealing with the aftermath, and expect that to continue pretty much until Thanksgiving. Thus, for a while I’ve stopped taking briefings, writing my usual kind of blog posts, and all that stuff. I’ve been responding to quick client inquiries, but that’s about it.
Naturally, when I get back to work, there will be a massive backlog. Highlights include:
- My quarterly trip to California, in this case to see clients both old and new.
- Catch-up blogging.
- A white paper/webinar project.
- Monash Advantage renewals.
To make things simple, 2011 Monash Advantage terms and conditions will be completely unchanged from 2010. That’s never been the case before; if nothing else, I’ve raised prices every year. But even if I’d had more time on my hands, I might have made only minor tweaks this time around, as the current version seems to be working well for vendor (that would be me) and clients alike. If I find the time, I’ll edit the contracts for typos and so on.* But what you get and what you pay will be exactly as they have been this year, except to the extent I can persuade you to make better use of what’s always been on offer to you.
*First two on the hit list: “Action, MA” should be “Acton, MA”, and some people dislike the actually sensible reference to the year 2019.
Obviously, various schedules I was trying to work to are no longer operative. But I really, really want to move forward promptly on the Privacy 3.0 project I mentioned to some of you. All the other stuff — post-print journalism and so on — can happen when it happens.
| Categories: About this blog | 12 Comments |