October 22, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item A Virtual Database World
Follow me on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/way0utwest
Forum Etiquette: How to post data/code on a forum to get the best help
My Blog: www.voiceofthedba.com
October 23, 2008 at 4:25 am
Pretty interesting stuff!
It opens up a whole can o worms when it comes to information security, and who gets to see what....
October 23, 2008 at 10:12 am
The volatility and possibility of recursive crossfeeding of such systems would border on dangerous.
Groupthink in people is bad enough. To enable it at the speed of light could be catastrophic.
Witness the current volatility in the stock market. I suspect the majority of this is caused by programmed trading reacting to programmed trading.
October 23, 2008 at 11:02 am
It's a fascinating idea but...
Suppose we were sharing information on a grid like we do electricity. What happens if that grid goes down. What happens if that grid gets hacked?
Electricity is a commodity that is the same for all consumers. When electricity comes to my house or business, I don't care that a neighbor or a competitor gets some of the electricity bound for me as long as he is paying for it. I would care if the neighbor or competitor got my data. Data needs to be treated and secured like a high-end asset instead of a commodity.
October 23, 2008 at 11:06 am
I think I'm seeing a lot of smoke and hype. OLTP and BI, be it real time or nightly batched, are related but different. I've been doing database for over 20 years now, and SQL Server since 4.21a, and in a lot of ways the database arena really hasn't changed that much. Yes, we have better hardware. Yes, we can store bigger stores. Yes, we now have very good RI. Yes, we have replication, HA, and DR. But these are extensions on what we've done before. We may have had to manually code and implement such things, but we've been doing this for years.
Not every company does BI or needs real-time analytics. For those that do, then maybe this will represent a real value. But I don't think this is going to be an industry-wide, fundamental paradigm shift.
We'll have to bookmark this article and revisit it in a decade. 😀
-----
[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
October 23, 2008 at 11:36 am
For all the "cloud-think", centralization, outsourcing, and information sharing, these ideas still remain merely tantalizing salespitch to the ones with the power-to-buy. However, in the end, any organization that thinks they can hand off their mindshare and not internalize (with the right human resources) those tools effectively, will find that it all comes to minimal and even horribly lost potential gains. I have rarely seen any gains realized simply by new technology, and certainly never by outsourced electronic solutions alone. Of necessity, these things must be used with foresight and understanding of the proper usage to have any real gains. None of these ever work as a bandaid. Most add complexity that requires more understanding, not less. The Feature-to-Complexity ratio still rules.
If an organization is to continue growth and profitability, it must own what it does, down to the last ones and zeros.
Traversing things like information security can cripple projects. The more that wrong-doers invent to defraud, the more the rest of the good have to do to add triple-hand-shake validation, virtual elbow bumps, and other shacklers to innovation and information sharing.
Data systems, even within a company, depending on size, often legally must remain independant with certain limited links for the analysts to condense and carefully disclose to those that must make the decisions.
October 23, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Wayne West (10/23/2008)
Not every company does BI or needs real-time analytics. For those that do, then maybe this will represent a real value. But I don't think this is going to be an industry-wide, fundamental paradigm shift.
Minor quibble: Every company does BI, whether they do it intentionally or not. Most companies don't do it well, whether they do it intentionally or not.
One interesting and completely unrelated qutoe that came up two weeks ago in a meeting with the data mining team and some folks from the industry solutions group in Services: "It's really hard to help non-practitioners understand data mining. They either look at the results of an iteration and say 'That doesn't make any sense!' or they look at the results of a model iteration and say 'Of course, that's obvious!'".
Sometimes experts lose sight of the fact that BI projects are usually trying to bottle their expertise for later reuse or resale... not provide anything novel. Helping people make better decisions is the point of storing or analyzing data, no? Specific technologies should be used as needed, but BI projects suffer from the golden hammer phenomena as much as any other technology project. Don't OLAP if you don't have to.
On the subject of virtualization, though, the ultimate goal is to make data and computing a utility. As much as we data professionals love databases, most developers and executives couldn't care less... I've had sessions with internal customers that wish they didn't have to worry about the database back end at all. They're eagerly awaiting SSDS and Red Dog to make the cloud their new playground so that they don't have to worry about provisioning hardware or managing services. They just want to ask for storage, capacity and throughput and voila it's magically there.
October 24, 2008 at 8:27 am
David Reed (10/23/2008)
Wayne West (10/23/2008)
Not every company does BI or needs real-time analytics. For those that do, then maybe this will represent a real value. But I don't think this is going to be an industry-wide, fundamental paradigm shift.Minor quibble: Every company does BI, whether they do it intentionally or not. Most companies don't do it well, whether they do it intentionally or not. ...
True, I was intending more from the implemented data warehouse perspective. You can do BI off of paper reports, it doesn't absolutely require DW.
-----
[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
Viewing 8 posts - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply