• Highlights of a busy news week

    Updated: 2011-09-26 06:50:35
    I put up 14 posts over the past week, so perhaps you haven’t had a chance yet to read them all. Highlights included: My most important post of the week was a general guide to IT vendor strategy. That one has already spawned discussion at many companies, from the tiny to the multi-billion-dollar. The best [...]

  • Ingres deemphasized, company now named Actian

    Updated: 2011-09-25 12:48:18
    Ingres, the company, is: Changing its name to Actian. Deemphasizing Ingres, the product. Emphasizing a set of products that don’t exist yet (or at least aren’t shipping), namely lightweight mobile apps that are business-intelligence-plus-an-action, and technology for building them. These are called “Action Apps”, and are discussed on the Actian company blog. Positioning all this [...]

  • Workload management and RAM

    Updated: 2011-09-25 06:04:35
    Closing out my recent round of Teradata-related posts, here’s a little anomaly: Teradata is proud that Teradata 14′s workload management now explicitly manages I/O, to go with Teradata’s long-standing management of CPU. Teradata’s WLM still does not explicitly manage RAM. Aster is proud that Aster 5′s workload management now explicitly manages RAM, to go along [...]

  • Confusion about Teradata’s big customers

    Updated: 2011-09-25 04:50:02
    Evidently further attempts to get information on this subject would be fruitless, but anyhow: Teradata emailed me a couple of months ago saying something like that at that point they could count 16 petabyte-level customers. In response to my repeated requests for clarification, Teradata has explicitly refused to identify the metric used in reaching that [...]

  • A Smaller Wireless Device–Your Library Card

    Updated: 2011-09-24 01:54:13
    Via The Chicago Public Library’s Facebook page Posted by Rich

  • Some notes on Hadoop (mainly) and appliances

    Updated: 2011-09-23 08:59:42
    1. EMC Greenplum has evolved its appliance product line. As I read that, the latest announcement boils down to saying that you can neatly network together various Greenplum appliances in quarter-rack increments. If you take a quarter rack each of four different things, then Greenplum says “Hooray! Our appliance is all-in-one!” Big whoop. 2. That [...]

  • DataStax pivots back to its original strategy

    Updated: 2011-09-23 00:23:12
    The DataStax and Cassandra stories are somewhat confusing. Unfortunately, DataStax chose to clarify them in what has turned out to be a crazy news week. I’m going to use this post just to report on the status of the DataStax product line, without going into any analysis beyond that. Pro tip: If you choose to [...]

  • Hybrid-columnar soundbites

    Updated: 2011-09-22 19:06:30
    Busy couple of days talking with reporters. A few notes on hybrid-columnar analytic DBMS, all backed up by yesterday’s post on Teradata columnar: Oracle does not actually offer columnar I/O; the other three systems do. But see the “I won’t be surprised” part in yesterday’s Teradata post. Aster does not offer columnar compression; the other [...]

  • HP systems soundbites

    Updated: 2011-09-22 18:44:31
    It is widely rumored that there will be a leadership change at HP (Meg Whitman in, Leo Apotheker out). In connection with that, I found myself holding forth on points such as: HP needs to make outstanding enterprise systems again. They fell away from that target under Mark Hurd, but they surely can hit it [...]

  • Aster Database Release 5 and Teradata Aster appliance

    Updated: 2011-09-22 06:56:45
    It was obviously just a matter of time before there would be an Aster appliance from Teradata and some tuned bidirectional Teradata-Aster connectivity. These have now been announced. I didn’t notice anything particularly surprising in the details of either. About the biggest excitement is that Aster is traditionally a Red Hat shop, but for the [...]

  • Teradata Columnar and Teradata 14 compression

    Updated: 2011-09-22 06:25:42
    Teradata is pre-announcing Teradata 14, for delivery by the end of this year, where by “Teradata 14″ I mean the latest version of the DBMS that drives the classic Teradata product line. Teradata 14′s flagship feature is Teradata Columnar, a hybrid-columnar offering that follows in the footsteps of Greenplum (now part of EMC) and Aster [...]

  • Radio Boston talks about the Boston Public Library with Catherine Willis

    Updated: 2011-09-20 19:04:24
    Technical services manager and author Catherine Willis tells Radio Boston’s Adam Ragusea about some of the BPL’s McKim Building’s nifty architecture (Pneumatic tubes for communication? Guastavino vaults?). Willis pulled many neat photos together for a book on the library for the Images of America series. Some pictures accompany the Radio Boston piece. (Look, Ben, something [...]

  • So, Ben …

    Updated: 2011-09-20 19:04:23
    I know you were hoping for something about libraries, but as I rode home, I couldn’t help thinking about the rumor I heard about Antietem doing something special in the coming weeks for the 150th anniversary of the first year of the Civil War and how that’s great road trip fodder. Many libraries, including the [...]

  • Hurricane Irene East Coast Library Damage Roundup

    Updated: 2011-09-20 19:04:22
    The August 30 Library Journal has a very good roundup of the damage suffered by libraries on the East Coast by Hurricane Irene. It appears upper New York State and New Jersey suffered the most damage from flooding. One Vermont library lost 60 percent of its collection: “The Vermont state librarian is guardedly optimistic that [...]

  • PodCamp Boston September 24-25 Microsoft NERD Cambridge

    Updated: 2011-09-20 19:04:21
    PodCamp Boston 6 is being held on September 24-25, 2011 at the Microsoft NERD in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cost is $30.00 For those who need a reminder of what PodCamp is all about: “Podcamp is an unconference where newbies and advanced content makers alike come to learn more about and share their knowledge of podcasting, blogging, [...]

  • Needle is hiring database curators

    Updated: 2011-09-20 19:04:20
    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).

  • BarCamp Boston 6: April 9-10, 2011, Microsoft NERD, Cambridge, MA

    Updated: 2011-09-20 19:04:20
    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.

  • Knowledge Management, A truer definition

    Updated: 2011-09-20 19:04:19
    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 ...

  • Beyond Books: News, Literacy and Democracy in America’s Libraries April 6-7, 2011 MIT Cambridge Mass

    Updated: 2011-09-20 19:04:19
    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 [...]

  • Happy New Year!

    Updated: 2011-09-20 19:04:17
    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

  • Social technology in the enterprise

    Updated: 2011-09-14 07:04:36
    The recent Dreamforce conference (i.e, salesforce.com’s extravaganza) focused attention on “the social enterprise” or, more generally, enterprises’ uses of social technology. salesforce is evidently serious about this push, with development/acquisition investment (e.g. Chatter, Radian 6), marketing focus (e.g. much of Dreamforce) and sales effort (Mark Benioff says he got thrown out of a CIO’s office [...]

  • Blog Search: New LC Blog – What Issues/Trends Do You Want Us to Cover?

    Updated: 2011-09-13 16:22:00
    Change is afoot for the LC Blog. After many years of managing the LC Blog for us, we're giving Tony Karrer a much needed break. (We're actually hoping that will give him time to work on other projects for ASTD. ...

  • Open Source and Corporate Culture.

    Updated: 2011-09-12 12:00:59
    An often overlooked benefit of open source is its impact on corporate culture. Open source helps corporations engender an ethos of openness which impacts more than code itself. At Yahoo! where I work, and elsewhere, I see three aspects of these changes: Information abundance changes the economics of information management. OSS can commoditize and standardize [...]

Current Feed Items | Previous Months Items

Aug 2011 | Jul 2011 | Jun 2011 | May 2011 | Apr 2011 | Mar 2011