I’m riffing on database design and modeling in an agile methodology. In the previous post here I suggested that we might cheat a little and design database schemas 2-4 weeks in advance of their use… further, I suggested that to maximize agility we should limit the design to a conceptual schema. In this post I’m…
One of the side-effects of the little cheat posted here is that, if we are going to design early we have to decide what we will design early… and this question has two complications. First, we have to ask ourselves how detailed do we design before the result becomes un-agile? Next, we have to ask…
In this post I am going to suggest doing a little design a little upfront and violating the purity of agility in the process. I think that you will see the sense. To be fair, I do not think that what I am going to say in this post is particularly original… But in my…
We are in the middle of several agile projects at the SSA… so I’ll start the year by sharing some related issues and solutions we are considering… I am going to try to suggest some ideas about refactoring databases that are a little different from some of the concepts in the book and blogs on the…
Hiya, My apologies for neglecting this blog… The SSA CIO job takes time. I have several database-specific blogs drafted that I hope to get to over the holidays… In the meantime here is a CIOish post on the problem of modernizing old IT infrastructure: https://cio.gov/modernizing-federal-it-part-1-catching-up-and-jumping-ahead/ While it is not specifically about database infrastructure… I think…
Here is a short story about distributed versus monolithic application design… Around 1999 Dan Holle and I started thinking about how to better deploy applications that used distributed computing. To be fair… Dan schooled me on his ideas for a better approach. We started with a thing called XML that had not yet released a…
Here is a quick review of tens years of data warehouse database competition… and a peek ahead… Maybe ten years ago Netezza shook up the DW DBMS market with a parallel database machine that could compete with Teradata. About six years ago Greenplum entered the market with a commodity-based product that was competitive… and then…
My last post (here) blathered about the effect that Hadoop must have on database vendor profits. An associate wrote me with the reminder that Hadoop is also impacting revenues and profits of ETL companies. If you think about Hadoop as both an inexpensive staging area for an EDW and as a parallel compute engine that can…
I have posted several times about the impact of the Hadoop eco-system on a several companies (here, here, here, for example). The topic cam up in a tweet thread a few weeks back… which prompts this quick note. Fours years ago the street price for a scalable, parallel, enterprise data warehouse platform was $US25K-$US35K per…
This post is a follow on to the video on Systems Architecture here (video). I’ll describe how HANA, the Platform not the Database, is cutting fat from the landscape. If you have not seen the video recently it will be worth a quick look as I will only briefly recap it here. The video, kindly…
Last year two associates from Greenplum suggested that I read a very smart academic paper titled “Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware” by Thomas Neumann. Having reiterated the idea of database supercomputing in my last blog (here)… I can now suggest this paper to you. In short this paper suggests that the classic…
Today I am going to focus on a topic that I’ve suggested previously without the right emphasis: the new database architecture that uses vector processing on compressed columns to significantly accelerate performance. This is the final post inspired by Bityota (bityota.com). They reminded me that the use of vectors, once implemented by only a few vendors,…
The SAP Business guy at Virtustream including EMC Federation
A melting pot for Enterprise Software, Analytics, Food, Sports, Politics and everything else that interests me
database research in the real world
Platform, Database and Storage Topics
Research into current database technology
It is about Architecture... not about Marketing...
