Metaphors amok
It all started when I disputed James Kobielus’ blogged claim that Hadoop is the nucleus of the next-generation cloud EDW. Jim posted again to reiterate the claim, only this time he wrote that all EDW vendors [will soon] bring Hadoop into their heart of their architectures. (All emphasis mine.)
That did it. I tweeted, in succession:
- Actually, I vote for Hadoop as the lungs of the EDW — first place of entry for essential nutrients.
- Data integration can be the heart of the EDW, pumping stuff around. RDBMS/analytic platform can be the brain.
- iPad-based dashboards that may engender envy, but which actually are only used occasionally and briefly … well, you get the picture.*
*Woody Allen said in Sleeper that the brain was his second-favorite organ.
Of course, that body of work was quickly challenged. Responses included: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehousing, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Fun stuff, Hadoop, Humor, MapReduce | Leave a Comment |
The client that was confused about security
The competition for April Fool’s Day humor is brisk, as I documented in 2010 with two lists of excellent pranks. So I went against the grain that year, offering a collection of strange-but-true stories — such as how I came to have heartthrob James Marsters autograph a shirtless picture of himself, why I regretted that graduating athletic powerhouse Ohio State University at age 16 cost me my NCAA eligibility, and the sore butt I got from spending an afternoon with Bill Gates’ girlfriend, herself a well-known industry figure.
That post seemed to go over well, even if I’m a little disappointed at how few people joined in with stories of their own. So I’m opting for strange-but-true this year also, just more aligned with the usual subjects of my blogging. And thus, without further ado, here’s the story of
The client that was confused about security
| Categories: Fun stuff | Leave a Comment |
Notes and links October 3 2010
Some notes, follow-up, and links before I head out to California: Read more
| Categories: GIS and geospatial, Google, HP and Neoview, Humor, Kickfire, Netezza, Solid-state memory, Teradata, Web analytics | 3 Comments |
Some interesting links
In no particular order: Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Fun stuff, Hadoop, Humor, In-memory DBMS, MapReduce, Memory-centric data management, Open source, Oracle, SAP AG | 2 Comments |
The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay
I often write of Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole, an engineering approach that ensues when parts of a system are out of balance. Well, the flip side of that is the One-Hoss Shay, as in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ marvelous poem. (Here’s a version with Howard Pyle illustrations.) Read more
| Categories: Humor, Theory and architecture | Leave a Comment |
Netezza nails April Fool’s Day
Netezza has nailed April Fool’s Day this year. 
(Their site will revert to normal after April 1, so I may later edit this post accordingly.)
Related links
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Fun stuff, Humor, Netezza | Leave a Comment |
Pranks, apocryphal and otherwise
I’ve been posting a bit about pranks of various kinds, mainly geeky ones. But so far I’ve only covered real pranks, rather than the much funnier imaginary ones.
The classic of that genre, of course, is a certain database-oriented xkcd comic strip. (If you haven’t instantly guessed what I’m talking about, you must see that strip.) And in a similar vein, I further offer six examples of xkcd’s “My Hobby” strips. (The last two are not for the sexually squeamish, but the others are pretty G-rated.)
One thing I just learned about xkcd — if you mouse over the strip, you get another joke. Some are almost as funny as the main strip. So even if you have already seen the database-classic xkcd linked above, you might want to revisit it. 
In a very different vein is Dadhacker’s list of real or imaginary past shenanigans, (Edit: The original link is fried, but here’s a partial replacement) which starts:
I am not permitted to replace a coworker’s reference books (including his Knuth, Sedgewick, and C++ reference manuals) with several linear feet of steamy hardback romance novels.
I will not name my variables after nasty tropical diseases, or executives who are under indictment for fraud.
Elevators are not toys, nor should they ever be wired into the corporate net.
Funny and vaguely prankish (and not for the language-squeamish) is this non-xkcd comic about NoSQL. And finally (definitely also for the non-squeamish), see the first long comment in this Reddit thread, which seems to have successfully pranked a whole lot of readers.
| Categories: Fun stuff, Humor, NoSQL | 3 Comments |
Boston Big Data Summit keynote outline
Last month, Bob Zurek asked me to give a talk on “Big Data”, where “big” is anything from a few terabytes on up, then moderate a panel on cloud computing. We agreed that I could talk just from notes, without slides. So, since I have them typed up, I’m posting them below.
Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole
Developing a good software product is often a process of incremental improvement. Obviously, that can happen in the case of feature addition or bug-fixing. Less obviously, there’s also great scope for incremental improvement in how the product works at its core.
And it goes even further. For example, I was told by a guy who is now a senior researcher at Attivio: “How do you make a good speech recognition product? You start with a bad one and keep incrementally improving it.”
In particular, I’ve taken to calling the process of enhancing a product’s performance across multiple releases “Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole” (rhymes with guacamole)*. This is a reference to the Whack-A-Mole arcade game, the core idea of which is:
- An annoying mole pops its head up
- You whack it with a mallet
- Another pops its head up
- You whack that one
- Repeat, as mole_count increments to a fairly large integer.
| Categories: Data warehousing, Exadata, Fun stuff, Netezza, Oracle, Theory and architecture | 19 Comments |
Not-so-great moments in planning
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Fun stuff, Humor, Microsoft and SQL*Server | Leave a Comment |