Updated: 2011-03-30 07:59:47
A few years ago, I suggested that database workloads could be divided into two kinds — transactional and analytic. The advent of non-transactional NoSQL has suggested that we need a replacement term for “transactional” or “OLTP”, but finding one has been a bit difficult. Numerous tries, including high-volume simple processing, online request processing, internet request [...]
Updated: 2011-03-30 05:05:34
Citrusleaf is the vendor of yet another short-request/NoSQL database management system, conveniently named Citrusleaf. Highlights for Citrusleaf the company include: 8 employees. $2 million in recently acquired venture capital. 1 1/2 – 2 1/2 years of total company history, depending on how you count. An undisclosed but nonzero number of paying customers, concentrated in the [...]
Updated: 2011-03-29 18:13:51
Yep. It’s that time of year again. Cherry blossom festival in DC. So up here we’re busy putting the final touches on another terrific tech unconference: BarCamp Boston 6. Maybe I’ll see you there.
Updated: 2011-03-29 18:13:50
Needle, the nifty data scraper + database builder + data wrangler tool I work on at ITA Software is looking for some folks to do what I do (basically).
Updated: 2011-03-25 16:20:12
In what is basically a great set of advice, David Skok evidently dropped the line If a marketing activity does not create a lead for you, then it doesn’t belong in your marketing machine. Or to rephrase that: Storytelling doesn’t matter. Well, if you believe and execute on that, your company will die (at least [...]
Updated: 2011-03-25 15:17:44
Something (I’ll drop in a link when allowed) made me recall the story of Software AG and the USSR. Apparently, the USSR attempted to acquire a lot of Western technology, including ADABAS. Software AG of North America cooperated with the Feds to try to catch the Soviet agent in indictable technological espionage — but then, [...]
Updated: 2011-03-25 01:41:56
Over a 24 hour or so period, Daniel Abadi, Dmitriy Ryaboy and Randolph Pullen all remarked on MySQL’s lack of hash joins. (It relies on nested loops instead, which were state-of-the-art technology around the time of the Boris Yeltsin administration.) This led me to wonder — why is this not a problem for Infobright? Per [...]
Updated: 2011-03-24 14:41:32
Analytic DBMS and other analytic platform technologies are much faster than they used to be, both in absolute and price/performance terms. So the question naturally arises, “When is the performance enough?” My answer, to a first approximation, is “Never.” Obviously, your budget limits what you can spend on analytics, and anyhow the benefit of incremental [...]
Updated: 2011-03-24 14:33:25
You can pitch a story that isn’t really news, for example calling attention to the success of a product you’d been shipping for a while. You can pitch a story with an embargo. Choose one. Asking for an embargo on information already in the public domain is really lame.
Updated: 2011-03-23 17:38:18
Cassandra company DataStax is introducing a Hadoop distribution called Brisk, for use cases that combine short-request and analytic processing. Brisk in essence replaces HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) with a Cassandra-based file system called CassandraFS. The whole thing is due to be released (Apache open source) within the next 45 days. The core claims for [...]
Updated: 2011-03-23 17:30:38
Forty-seven percent of corporate board members are dissatisfied with their ability to oversee the risks posed by information technology, according to survey by Oliver Wyman Group and the National Assn. of Corporate Directors.
Updated: 2011-03-22 05:13:59
Journalism That Matters, the American Library Association, the MIT Center For Future Civic Media, the Media Giraffe Project, New England News Forum and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Project are holding a two day event called Beyond Books: News, Literacy and Democracy in America’s Libraries on April 6-7, 2011 at the MIT Center For Future [...]
Updated: 2011-03-22 05:13:58
I like to wish j and her family, the other Scratchpad contributors and especially the Scratchpad readers a safe and wonderful Happy New Year! See you in 2011! Cheers Posted by Rich
Updated: 2011-03-22 05:13:57
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my selected Banned Books Week reading, intending to report back here with the results. No, it hasn’t taken me *that long* to read all of the books, just that long to have a moment at the blog to summarize them. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold: While this [...]
Updated: 2011-03-22 05:13:56
While a small corner store and Wal-Mart may both be retail businesses, the knowledge and skill set required to operate them successfully are vastly different. The operation of Wal-Mart is not simply a "supersized" version of the small business practices used by the corner store. Unlike the corner store, Wal-Mart ...
Updated: 2011-03-22 05:13:56
Snagging a few minutes to catch up on email brought me to a Newslib post announcing NPR librarian Kee Malesky will be on today’s (10/28) national radio call-in show Talk of the Nation to discuss her new book All Facts Considered. Rumor has it she’ll be on during the second hour*, which begins around 3 [...]
Updated: 2011-03-22 05:13:55
nbsp;Makeuseof.com has a free download called The (Very) Unofficial Facebook Privacy Manual that goes over tips on protecting your privacy including: * Making sure a comment meant for your friends isn’t seen by co-workers * Understanding what it means to upload content to Facebook * Control whether others can check you in to certain locations [...]
Updated: 2011-03-22 05:13:54
Greetings Heading for the 2010 Internet Librarian Conference in Monterey CA. This will be my second conference. Have to catch 3 connecting flights to get there from Boston though. More posts and pics when I get there! Posted by Rich
Updated: 2011-03-22 05:13:54
The 2nd Boston Book Festival is being held on Saturday, October 16, 2010 Copley Square Boston Ma 10 am-7 pm. And it’s free! Some of the authors include Dennis Lehane, Nicholas Carr, Hallie Ephron, A.M Homes, Nicholas Negroponte, Richard Cohen, Noni Carter, Gish Jen and Elyssa East For more information: http://www.bostonbookfest.org/ Posted by Rich
Updated: 2011-03-18 15:02:42
Emerging technologies offer insurance carriers an opportunity to be innovative with their products and services to improve cu -More-
Updated: 2011-03-16 15:28:14
Chief information officers in the personal-lines sector should concentrate on connectivity and business intelligence to enabl -More- Achieving optimized customer service for cross-channel profitability. This IBM thought leadership paper discusses the issues of channel conflicts in today's insurance industry as well as IBM's points of view on how to address this challenge, leveraging the IBM insurance industry solutions.
Updated: 2011-03-15 14:24:53
Oracle announced MySQL enhancements, plus intentions to use MySQL to compete against Microsoft SQL Server. My thoughts, lightly edited from an instant message Q&A, include: Given how hard Oracle fought the antitrust authorities to keep MySQL around the time of the acquisition, we always knew they were serious about the business. We’ll know they’re even [...]
Updated: 2011-03-13 08:43:14
I have a client who is hitting a 1000 column-per-table limit in Oracle Standard Edition. As you might imagine, I’m encouraging them to consider columnar alternatives. Be that as it may, just what ARE the table width limits in various analytic or general-purpose DBMS products? By the way — the answer SHOULD be “effectively unlimited.” [...]
Updated: 2011-03-10 08:23:18
It turns out that the slide deck I posted a couple of days ago underwent more changes than I expected. Here’s a more current version. A number of the changes arose when I thought more about how to categorize analytic business benefits; hence that blog post a few minutes ago with more detail on the [...]
Updated: 2011-03-10 07:26:01
When I tweaked the slide deck for Thursday’s Investigative Analytics webinar — I’ll post an updated version soon — the part that needed the most work was the section on “What business problems do you solve with this stuff anyway?” I’ve posted about that kind of thing at least five times in the past five [...]
Updated: 2011-03-08 21:37:41
Q&A: How Software Vendors View the Insurance Market (Part 3)PropertyCasualty360Alex Naddaff, vice president, professional services for Guidewire Software: While we see the majority of carriers taking the right steps from selection to implementation, pace and timing is more the issue. Overall carriers still need to better prepare ...and more »
Updated: 2011-03-07 20:39:32
Giving Insurance Software Vendors Their DuePropertyCasualty360To give you a sample, Joseph Pilkerton, founder and COO of FirstBest Systems, writes: “We strive to go beyond being a mere vendor to be a trusted advisor.” I'm sure we've all heard independent insurance agents use those words in describing their ...
Updated: 2011-03-07 19:19:37
Build it and forget it. -More-
Updated: 2011-03-07 05:33:16
Q&A: How Software Vendors View the Insurance Market (Part 1)PropertyCasualty360Joseph Pilkerton (Founder and COO, FirstBest Systems): Today, the biggest weakness is in the front office. While many carriers are working to replace aging policy admin systems, many actually need a front office overhaul. Hard-to-use Web sites and ...
