Kingsley Idehen's Typepad

Will SQL Become The ETL Language Of Choice?

Will SQL Become The ETL Language Of Choice?

Will SQL replace proprietary tool languages as the ETL language of choice? Yves de Montcheuil asks this question over at DMReview.com.

[via Mark Rittman's Oracle Weblog]

 

One of those Duh? Moments. Of course, SQL should be the language of choice for Enterprise Transformation Language (Data is missing from this acronym; we are talking about data transformation at the end of the day) initiatives.

The Natural History of Software Platforms

A very interesting article by David Stutz about how software packages eventually become platforms.

CIA Open Source Notification System

CIA is a system for tracking open-source projects in real-time. People all over the world are constantly collaborating and creating software, creating a constant flow of new code and new ideas. CIA provides an easy way for people to observe this flow. Developers can see the latest changes to their code immediately, users can subscribe to see the latest bugfixes in their favorite programs. Everyone can take a chance to step back and look at open source development as a whole.

Read on..

Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! Making Sense Of It All.

By Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopia Technical Report

Information Architecture is the discipline dealing with the modern version of this problem: how to organize web sites so that users actually can find what they are looking for. Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps compare with the traditional solutions. The paper argues that topic maps go beyond the traditional solutions in the sense that it provides a framework within which they can be represented as they are, but also extended in ways which significantly improve information retrieval. The paper tries to show that topic maps provide a common reference model that can be used to explain how to understand many common techniques from library science and information architecture.

http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tm-vs-thesauri.html

See also (XML) Topic Maps: http://xml.coverpages.org/topicMaps.html

Software Hall of Fame: Dan Bricklin

Dan Bricklin comes to mind every time I encounter yet another addition to ever growing  miasma of flawed internet/ebusiness/web business plan insurance policies (nee. patents). The creator of the first electronic spreadsheet product (VisiCalc) writes a great essay about why VisiCalc wasn't patented.

 "The invention of the electronic spreadsheet itself is an act of genius for which Dan deserves enormous credit"
--Mitch Kapor, Creator of Lotus 1-2-3

From the industry hall of fame article about Dan is the following excerpt:

Bricklin is the father of the modern PC business software marketplace. The old master of the strange mix of art, science and commerce that is software development. It is no mistake Bricklin's first company was called Software Arts.

Besides creating the spreadsheet, Bricklin developed or played a role in the development of the early Digital Equipment Corp. word processor; a PC demo program that is still considered a breakthrough in corporate America for its prototyping capabilities; a pen-based spreadsheet that was 10 years ahead of its time; a snazzy, software print utility; and, most recently, a product, Trellix, that makes it easier to create, post and edit Internet documents.

Dan has moved on from Trellix.

DBMS Hall of Fame: Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison (love him or hate him) continues to impact the RDBMS market (-your-choice-itively). Here is an article that tells the inextricable story of Oracle and Larry Ellison. Some excerpts:

Whether it is attempting to buy a Mig jet fighter, building a $40- million house modeled on a medieval Japanese village or turning the industry on its head with his latest idea, Ellison is the antithesis of the gray-suited execs or antiseptic yuppies that seem to proliferate in Silicon Valley. What better man to start the database industry? Or the relational database industry, to be exact.

There always have been databases, of course. But they were unwieldy, hierarchical, flat-file-based creatures that depended on a team of programmers to extract meaningful information.

Ted Codd, an IBM Corp. researcher, had published a seminal paper in 1970 describing a "relational database" whereby data was separated out from applications and arranged in tables and columns and could be queried and joined though a variety of dimensions (the 12 rules of Codd). The new database described would, for example, allow queries into sales of a product by region sorted by month, without having to write a separate program.

Codd's paper, heavy on algebraic formulas, did not exactly set the industry on fire. It was six years before IBM and a team at Berkeley decided to start building a relational database.

It may have been six years before a product was available if not for Ellison and a company he started called Relational Software Inc. (RSI).

Digital Technology Hall of Fame: Charles Geschke

Adobe, Photoshop, Moveable Type are all part of our daily computing lexicon, and increasingly do in the digital net era. Conversely, I wonder how many know the name Charles Geschke? Well he (and John Warnock) are the ones that made this all happen (against many odds in the early days at Adobe).

"The enormity of the impact that this company has had on the way everything that is printed is produced cannot be measured," said Christopher Galvin, an analyst with Hambrecht & Quist LLC in San Francisco. And Geschke himself points out that this sphere of influence now includes Hollywood, television and, of course, the Internet.

Armed with his childhood penchant for disassembling the family's appliances and a trio of college degrees, he wound up at Xerox Corp.'s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a breeding ground for inventions that seemingly made billions for everyone except Xerox. He hired Warnock in 1978 and in 1980 founded PARC's Imaging Sciences Laboratory with the mission of marrying computer technology to Xerox's legacy printing products. The duo's Interpress page-description language became Xerox's internal standard, but the company refused to license it to others.

Frustrated with the inability to publicly showcase their creation, Geschke and Warnock left PARC and started Adobe in 1982, naming the fledgling company after the creek running behind Warnock's house. The original mission, Warnock recalled, was to go into a service business, "kind of like what Kinko's is today."

Development Tools Hall of Fame: Phillipe Kahn

Another historical article from the software industry archives about a software development tools pioneer and maverick.

Kahn, former chairman and chief executive of Borland International Inc., first shook the industry like a gale force wind in 1984 with SideKick for $49. He took on what he called the software robber barons who overcharged for their software. Later, he applied similar pricing principles and guerrilla marketing to languages, compilers and spreadsheets.

DBMS Hall of Fame: Prof. Michael Stonebraker

An interesting piece I stumbled across regarding one of the RDBMS industry's notable pioneers.

Today, technology areas that catch Stonebraker's eye include wireless and data integration on the Web.

Started Ingres project in early 1970s at Berkeley to develop relational databases. Ingres Corp. formed in 1980.

Another Berkeley project, Postgres, yielded object relational databases and spawned Illustra Information Technologies in 1992.

Became Informix's CTO in 1996, holding that post until September 2000.

Launched Cohera, a maker of federated databases, in 1999, based on a Berkeley research project, Miraposa.

Read on..

Demo Hell and back

This piece links to a great Mono presentation (bar the reference placement of MySQL/PostgreSQL in a box somewhat adjacent to ADO.NET (see slide 7). When ADO.NET should have be associated with Data Providers for ODBC, MySQL, PostgresSQL, and others for clarity (the natural goal of the presentation).

We have got to take time to understand the Data Access Layer, if we don't we will utlimately pay a hefty price (IMHO).

This blog post is also hillarious, especially if you have encountered the mercurial "Murphy" during live product demos.

So, today I went to hell. And then I came back. It was a short trip.

This year, I am giving a presentation on Mono at Brainshare in Salt Lake City, an intro to Mono for developers. I got a pretty good turnout with a few ximian people in the back (including Joe whom I saw for the first time without a hat).

 

So I plug in my PowerBook 12" as I always do but for some reason I have a hard time getting the projector to display its output. After struggling a little I resort to using the desktop provided by Novell, running Ximian Desktop 2 (and some version Suse Linux).

So I upload my presentation to www.frenchguys.com from my mac and then download it back to the desktop. Now I can make my presentation, which goes well. Then I get to a slide that just says : DEMO. Hmmm. Demo. I don't have Mono installed on that generic machine I was just given. I am going to need magic. So to magic I resort.

[via Monologue]