It has been a long while before I can find a bit time to write something on my blog. Working in an enterprise does not seem too easy for me. Maybe I am a bit over-committed to my work. :)
Monday, 2008-12-15, Copenhagen
Are big companies reducing offshore workers to save the domestic employees? Well, in the financial crisis time, this may happen in certain cases. Offshore software development has been proved to be working well by many cases. And people are aware of all the possible issues and problems to do offshore. Once the benefit is reducing too much, it will be for countries like China, India to re-think their strategy of gaining economy growth on IT development. Well, maybe oursource their work to USA?
Do you like Google Books? Well, it is a good tool based on great ideas. But there are still copyright issues. Recently Google has settled several such issues with Association of American Publishers in order to clear out the way for itself to provide online access to copyrighted books.
Microsoft is releasing parts of its Oslo modeling initiative in its recent Professional Developers Conferences. Seems that IBM rational tools will face more challenges in the near future. MS is quite good at providing friendly toos for developers. Hopefully the Oslo tools will bring more impressive experiences than the IBM tools.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
What's new in week 44, 2008
Wednesday, 2008-10-29, Copenhagen
A few key words on establishing a SOA portfolio in an enterprise. First one needs to have SOA service enablement and orchestration. And there should be police and performance management, esp. the run-time management. And a proper governance model is also compulsory.
The European Parliament has adopted a series of new measures designed to increase the competition in the EU telecoms market and provide consumers with a wide choice of services.The EU assembly voted in favor of a proposal to force telecoms companies to split their network and retail services and run them as separate businesses that will provide competitors easier access to networks. This can be a great news to those small retail-based business that has more brilliant ideas on mobile-based services.
A few key words on establishing a SOA portfolio in an enterprise. First one needs to have SOA service enablement and orchestration. And there should be police and performance management, esp. the run-time management. And a proper governance model is also compulsory.
The European Parliament has adopted a series of new measures designed to increase the competition in the EU telecoms market and provide consumers with a wide choice of services.The EU assembly voted in favor of a proposal to force telecoms companies to split their network and retail services and run them as separate businesses that will provide competitors easier access to networks. This can be a great news to those small retail-based business that has more brilliant ideas on mobile-based services.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
What's new in week 41, 2008
Sunday, 2008-10-12, Copenhagen
It seems that Microsoft and HP are very confident on their business. Both giant IT vendors have announced buying-back large amount of their stocks. In this economy down time, these two are trying to boost their investor confidence.
After years of efforts, MicroStrategy is now recognized by Gartner in the leaders' quadrant in business intelligence platform. The wonderful idea of using Magic Quadrant has made Gartner the leading consulting firm of the IT market. But how can they be sure about these quadrants? It's just a business company, even not as responsible as CNN (which is already well-known for selling lies to fool people)
Here I found something very interesting: The 9 biggest cloud storage vendors.
1. Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition is a file storage and backup service that's priced starting at $2 per month per user, plus $0.15 per GB per month of storage used, $0.10 per GB of data uploaded and $0.17 per GB of data downloaded. For more on Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition, see Jason Brooks' review "Jungle Disk Aids Amazon Storage."
2. Box.net Enterprise is a file sharing and storage service that's priced starting at $15 per user for 15GB. For more on Box.net Enterprise, see Chris Preimesberger's story "Symantec Acquires Online Backup Service."
3. MozyPro is an online backup service that's priced starting at $3.95 plus $0.50 per GB per month for desktop licenses, or $6.95 plus $0.50 per GB per month for server licenses. For more on MozyPro, see Chris Preimesberger's story "EMC Upping Prices for MozyPro Online Backup."
4. Carbonite is an online backup service that's priced starting at $49.95 for a one-year, unlimited subscription. For more on Carbonite, see Larry Seltzer's column "Backup Becomes a Standard PC Feature."
5. Egnyte is an online backup and file sharing service that's priced starting at $15 per user per month, with unlimited storage for accounts with three or more users.
6. Swapdrive is an online backup service that's priced starting at $36 per month or $360 per year for 1GB. For more on Swapdrive, see Chris Preimesberger's story "Symantec Acquires Online Backup Service."
7. Evault is an online backup service whose Web site doesn't disclose pricing information. For more on Evault, see Chris Preimesberger's story "Why We're Starting to Trust Storage in the Cloud."
8. Windows Live SkyDrive is an online file storage service that's priced starting at nothing for 5GB of file storage. For more on Windows Live SkyDrive, see Frank Ohlhorst's story "Microsoft's Pie in the Sky Play with SkyDrive."
9. Symantec Online Backup is an online backup service that's priced starting at $9.99 for 10GB of storage. For more on Symantec Online Backup, see Brian Prince's story "Symantec Builds Out SAAS Business with Remote Access Control.
It seems that Microsoft and HP are very confident on their business. Both giant IT vendors have announced buying-back large amount of their stocks. In this economy down time, these two are trying to boost their investor confidence.
After years of efforts, MicroStrategy is now recognized by Gartner in the leaders' quadrant in business intelligence platform. The wonderful idea of using Magic Quadrant has made Gartner the leading consulting firm of the IT market. But how can they be sure about these quadrants? It's just a business company, even not as responsible as CNN (which is already well-known for selling lies to fool people)
Here I found something very interesting: The 9 biggest cloud storage vendors.
1. Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition is a file storage and backup service that's priced starting at $2 per month per user, plus $0.15 per GB per month of storage used, $0.10 per GB of data uploaded and $0.17 per GB of data downloaded. For more on Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition, see Jason Brooks' review "Jungle Disk Aids Amazon Storage."
2. Box.net Enterprise is a file sharing and storage service that's priced starting at $15 per user for 15GB. For more on Box.net Enterprise, see Chris Preimesberger's story "Symantec Acquires Online Backup Service."
3. MozyPro is an online backup service that's priced starting at $3.95 plus $0.50 per GB per month for desktop licenses, or $6.95 plus $0.50 per GB per month for server licenses. For more on MozyPro, see Chris Preimesberger's story "EMC Upping Prices for MozyPro Online Backup."
4. Carbonite is an online backup service that's priced starting at $49.95 for a one-year, unlimited subscription. For more on Carbonite, see Larry Seltzer's column "Backup Becomes a Standard PC Feature."
5. Egnyte is an online backup and file sharing service that's priced starting at $15 per user per month, with unlimited storage for accounts with three or more users.
6. Swapdrive is an online backup service that's priced starting at $36 per month or $360 per year for 1GB. For more on Swapdrive, see Chris Preimesberger's story "Symantec Acquires Online Backup Service."
7. Evault is an online backup service whose Web site doesn't disclose pricing information. For more on Evault, see Chris Preimesberger's story "Why We're Starting to Trust Storage in the Cloud."
8. Windows Live SkyDrive is an online file storage service that's priced starting at nothing for 5GB of file storage. For more on Windows Live SkyDrive, see Frank Ohlhorst's story "Microsoft's Pie in the Sky Play with SkyDrive."
9. Symantec Online Backup is an online backup service that's priced starting at $9.99 for 10GB of storage. For more on Symantec Online Backup, see Brian Prince's story "Symantec Builds Out SAAS Business with Remote Access Control.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
What's new in week 40, 2008
Sunday, 2008-10-05, Copenhagen
For most companies in US and western and northern EU countries, where are the best-fit outsourcing places? Well, there can be a few in the list. India, Canada, China, Philippines, Ireland, Russia, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania. Even though India has been topping the list for the past years, one can start observing that countries like Canada, Ireland, and those in the eastern European area are able to start attracting more focuses.
The power of social computing is exploding. IBM recentlt opened its social software research center in Boston area. After so many years of focus on top IT solutions, many people in the industry are now thinking in improving the social ways of IT life.
How should we reflect from the technology's role in the Wall Stree crisis? Well, of course there are more business or economic reasons for the crisis, technology still takes certain responsibility as there are many risk-management systems used by these financial institutions. Even though we can blame the algorithms or methodologies used inside these software, the quality of information fed into these systems is also one of the biggest problems. As the old programmer saying has it, Garbage In, Garbage Out.
For most companies in US and western and northern EU countries, where are the best-fit outsourcing places? Well, there can be a few in the list. India, Canada, China, Philippines, Ireland, Russia, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania. Even though India has been topping the list for the past years, one can start observing that countries like Canada, Ireland, and those in the eastern European area are able to start attracting more focuses.
The power of social computing is exploding. IBM recentlt opened its social software research center in Boston area. After so many years of focus on top IT solutions, many people in the industry are now thinking in improving the social ways of IT life.
How should we reflect from the technology's role in the Wall Stree crisis? Well, of course there are more business or economic reasons for the crisis, technology still takes certain responsibility as there are many risk-management systems used by these financial institutions. Even though we can blame the algorithms or methodologies used inside these software, the quality of information fed into these systems is also one of the biggest problems. As the old programmer saying has it, Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
What's new in week 37, 2008
Wednesday, 2008-09-10, Copenhagen
HP is quite serious about its competition with IBM and MS on all types of software and hardware systems. It has recently launched project and portfolio management tools into its business product suite. Seems that enterprises now have quite a few (more than 3) choices to go when only giant vendors are considered.
Seems that Google is becoming a place where people meet and discuss their ambitions and leave and create their own company and sell their company with a big number. One example is the new engine called Cuil ("cool" as it is pronounced) which is designed by former Google members. This new search engine is claimed to provide even more information with less hardware spending. Let's see how this start-up goes and when Google will acquire it.
Friday, 2008-09-12, Copenhagen
Sun is definitely joining the cloud computing team. It recently annouced the preview release of JavaFX, which is its rich client platform for building rich internet applications (RIAs). After Microsoft and Adobe, Sun is becoming another vendor that provides the basic programming facilities for building cloud computing applications.
Look out! Amazon is crazy about getting people to use its cloud computing web services. Long after its Elastic Cloud and Simple Storage Service offers, it launches the Mechanical Turk, which is a website that let non-programmers to create basic tasks of certain web services with requirements and let other people (such as a part-time programmer) to finish the rest of the work.
Sunday, 2008-09-14, Copenhagen
When enterprises grow bigger, it become more and more important to have better understanding of its IT architecture and assets. Meta recently annouced a road-mapping tool, called "Mega IT Planning," to help enterprises to manage IT architecture. Looks like that many architects will be interested in the tool.
The Web-collaboration-tool market is far away from being mature. Google and Microsoft SharePoint are among the leading ones. Central Desktop is another software provider who tries to compete with the giants in this market. As claimed by its CEO, Central Desktop provides more collaboration functionalities than Google Apps while requires less resource than SharePoint. It seems that Central Desktop is trying to find a balance between the "thin" functionalities of Google App and the "fat" requirements of SharePoint.
HP is quite serious about its competition with IBM and MS on all types of software and hardware systems. It has recently launched project and portfolio management tools into its business product suite. Seems that enterprises now have quite a few (more than 3) choices to go when only giant vendors are considered.
Seems that Google is becoming a place where people meet and discuss their ambitions and leave and create their own company and sell their company with a big number. One example is the new engine called Cuil ("cool" as it is pronounced) which is designed by former Google members. This new search engine is claimed to provide even more information with less hardware spending. Let's see how this start-up goes and when Google will acquire it.
Friday, 2008-09-12, Copenhagen
Sun is definitely joining the cloud computing team. It recently annouced the preview release of JavaFX, which is its rich client platform for building rich internet applications (RIAs). After Microsoft and Adobe, Sun is becoming another vendor that provides the basic programming facilities for building cloud computing applications.
Look out! Amazon is crazy about getting people to use its cloud computing web services. Long after its Elastic Cloud and Simple Storage Service offers, it launches the Mechanical Turk, which is a website that let non-programmers to create basic tasks of certain web services with requirements and let other people (such as a part-time programmer) to finish the rest of the work.
Sunday, 2008-09-14, Copenhagen
When enterprises grow bigger, it become more and more important to have better understanding of its IT architecture and assets. Meta recently annouced a road-mapping tool, called "Mega IT Planning," to help enterprises to manage IT architecture. Looks like that many architects will be interested in the tool.
The Web-collaboration-tool market is far away from being mature. Google and Microsoft SharePoint are among the leading ones. Central Desktop is another software provider who tries to compete with the giants in this market. As claimed by its CEO, Central Desktop provides more collaboration functionalities than Google Apps while requires less resource than SharePoint. It seems that Central Desktop is trying to find a balance between the "thin" functionalities of Google App and the "fat" requirements of SharePoint.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Notes for Chapter 5 of "Beyond Software Architecture"
Chapter 5 "Technology in-licensing"
This chapter talks about how different technologies can be integrated into a software architecture by licensing. A general point is that using code or components by licensing can save the energy and time of the key technical employees. On the other hand, it is important to have lawyers to clarify the relevant issues when licenses are involved.
There are many risks/rewards for using licensed technologies. One should keep all these in mind when being at the front of such decisions. Actually this is not only about component-based software. An OS can be a licensed technology to an enterprise. Such considerations of risks/rewards still apply here.
Another thing to be careful with is the software itself may have a different pricing model that conflicts with the licensed technologies. Here the software architecture matters. It should be designed to solve the conflict.
Open source technology is always a good consideration, but one has to bear in mind the pros and cons behind it. Every open source software license is different.
This chapter talks about how different technologies can be integrated into a software architecture by licensing. A general point is that using code or components by licensing can save the energy and time of the key technical employees. On the other hand, it is important to have lawyers to clarify the relevant issues when licenses are involved.
There are many risks/rewards for using licensed technologies. One should keep all these in mind when being at the front of such decisions. Actually this is not only about component-based software. An OS can be a licensed technology to an enterprise. Such considerations of risks/rewards still apply here.
Another thing to be careful with is the software itself may have a different pricing model that conflicts with the licensed technologies. Here the software architecture matters. It should be designed to solve the conflict.
Open source technology is always a good consideration, but one has to bear in mind the pros and cons behind it. Every open source software license is different.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
What's new in week 35, 2008
Tuesday, 2008-08-26, Copenhagen
Open source tools have been evolving to the era that enterprises are starting to use them in mission-critical tasks. Open source community has started working on three emerging areas, VOIP, CRM, and mobility, which brings more challenges to the commercial vendors. Linux is another striking example against Windows system.
Intel recently launched its new Centrino 2 platform which offers better performance at a low power consumption. Well, let’s wait and see what AMD says about it.
Cloud computing is also coming into the security market. In addition to all existing online virus –detection services, vendors are looking into the online-backup market. To put your files into the cloud may be the only safe thing if one cannot trust her/his own computer system. Companies like Webroot, HP Upline, and SOS Online Backup are in this field.
Open source tools have been evolving to the era that enterprises are starting to use them in mission-critical tasks. Open source community has started working on three emerging areas, VOIP, CRM, and mobility, which brings more challenges to the commercial vendors. Linux is another striking example against Windows system.
Intel recently launched its new Centrino 2 platform which offers better performance at a low power consumption. Well, let’s wait and see what AMD says about it.
Cloud computing is also coming into the security market. In addition to all existing online virus –detection services, vendors are looking into the online-backup market. To put your files into the cloud may be the only safe thing if one cannot trust her/his own computer system. Companies like Webroot, HP Upline, and SOS Online Backup are in this field.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
What's new in week 32, 2008
Sunday, 2008-08-10, Copenhagen
Seagate has recently released 1.5 TB desktop hard drive and a 0.5 TB drive for laptop. With the great growth of information in different enterprises. Hard drive technology seems to be always important in terms of both technology and business.
Many enterprises have been realizing the importance and benefit of collaborative intelligence. A lot of collaboration tools are coming into the business world. Despite the big vendors, cloud computing sites, such as SocialText, are bring the concpets to SMBs and private customers.
One of the major IT services companies, InfoSys has reported a strong increase in net income in Q1 of 2008. It seems that, despite the economy down in the western world, the big asia countries are still benfiting from the low service prices. Well, when economy is down, every western enterprise is searching for ways of saving the budget. To go to the eastern world is one of the solutions.
Big enterprises to start using open source databases? Well, maybe not for mission-critical applications. But if we look at the price lists from the giant vendors, why not throw away the vendors' offer and hire a few talent guys who know the open source tools much better?
Seagate has recently released 1.5 TB desktop hard drive and a 0.5 TB drive for laptop. With the great growth of information in different enterprises. Hard drive technology seems to be always important in terms of both technology and business.
Many enterprises have been realizing the importance and benefit of collaborative intelligence. A lot of collaboration tools are coming into the business world. Despite the big vendors, cloud computing sites, such as SocialText, are bring the concpets to SMBs and private customers.
One of the major IT services companies, InfoSys has reported a strong increase in net income in Q1 of 2008. It seems that, despite the economy down in the western world, the big asia countries are still benfiting from the low service prices. Well, when economy is down, every western enterprise is searching for ways of saving the budget. To go to the eastern world is one of the solutions.
Big enterprises to start using open source databases? Well, maybe not for mission-critical applications. But if we look at the price lists from the giant vendors, why not throw away the vendors' offer and hire a few talent guys who know the open source tools much better?
Monday, July 28, 2008
What's new in week 31, 2008
Monday, 2008-07-28, Copenhagen
Microsoft to acquire DATAllegro! Yes and I just got this message in my box this morning. So the Data Warehousing market is having another round of re-ordering. It seems that Microsoft SQL Server team has been trying hard to find good solution to hold more than 20 TB of data in their system and the conclusion is that: “Well, since we cannot do that, let’s buy an existing opponent to deal with that.” I would guess that the SQL Server solution for data warehousing will become more popular in the market and we will see how the next version of SQL Server 2008 can include the technologies in DATAllegro platform.
Where is the source of all kinds of database research? Well, one can try to look into all the different universities (esp. the old ones) in the world and find if their department pages include some great names in the faculty list. One interesting blog-note that I just found recently is in the Stanford DB-blog (http://infoblog.stanford.edu/2008/07/database-research-principles-revealed.html) which is a very good understanding of different principles of doing database research. I guess this can be a classic note for most DB research newbees to learn.
VMWare just changed their CEO from Diane Greene to Paul Maritz. From a small start-up to a company with $1bn revenues, Greene has contributed a lot to the VMWare’s big growth. But, just like any other successful start-ups, it comes the time that the whole strategy of the company needs to be changed. Now, facing more challenges from Citrix and Microsoft, let’s just hope the new CEO can keep the company in good health.
Google to challenge Wikipedia? Why not! Google has formally released the “Knol” which is an alternative encyclopedia thing to Wikipedia. Actually this new tool includes some news thoughts from Google on how social collaboration should work and benefit people. Knol writers can make money by using AdSense program. What is more interesting is that Google also has an agreement with the New Yorker magazine and allows any author to add one cartoon per knoll from the New Yorker’s cartoon bank.
After the failure of acquiring Yahoo!, Microsoft is looking for another alternative to build up good web search engines for the future business. It has recently agreed to acquire a start-up company, “Powerset” to strength its free Live Search service. Seems that Microsoft is looking for another life-reboot like what Google did sometime ago.
Microsoft to acquire DATAllegro! Yes and I just got this message in my box this morning. So the Data Warehousing market is having another round of re-ordering. It seems that Microsoft SQL Server team has been trying hard to find good solution to hold more than 20 TB of data in their system and the conclusion is that: “Well, since we cannot do that, let’s buy an existing opponent to deal with that.” I would guess that the SQL Server solution for data warehousing will become more popular in the market and we will see how the next version of SQL Server 2008 can include the technologies in DATAllegro platform.
Where is the source of all kinds of database research? Well, one can try to look into all the different universities (esp. the old ones) in the world and find if their department pages include some great names in the faculty list. One interesting blog-note that I just found recently is in the Stanford DB-blog (http://infoblog.stanford.edu/2008/07/database-research-principles-revealed.html) which is a very good understanding of different principles of doing database research. I guess this can be a classic note for most DB research newbees to learn.
VMWare just changed their CEO from Diane Greene to Paul Maritz. From a small start-up to a company with $1bn revenues, Greene has contributed a lot to the VMWare’s big growth. But, just like any other successful start-ups, it comes the time that the whole strategy of the company needs to be changed. Now, facing more challenges from Citrix and Microsoft, let’s just hope the new CEO can keep the company in good health.
Google to challenge Wikipedia? Why not! Google has formally released the “Knol” which is an alternative encyclopedia thing to Wikipedia. Actually this new tool includes some news thoughts from Google on how social collaboration should work and benefit people. Knol writers can make money by using AdSense program. What is more interesting is that Google also has an agreement with the New Yorker magazine and allows any author to add one cartoon per knoll from the New Yorker’s cartoon bank.
After the failure of acquiring Yahoo!, Microsoft is looking for another alternative to build up good web search engines for the future business. It has recently agreed to acquire a start-up company, “Powerset” to strength its free Live Search service. Seems that Microsoft is looking for another life-reboot like what Google did sometime ago.
Friday, July 25, 2008
What's new in week 30, 2008
Monday, 2008-07-21, Copenhagen
If we think of what has been for PC developers in the past 20 years, Microsoft is at least one of the major eyehole-attraction vendors (I could think of linux as another potential). Now Google is joining the game. People have been talking about Google deploying dynamic language runtime just like what MS has been doing. Well, it looks really difficult for a start-up developer to choose which way to go.
Friday, 2008-07-25, Copenhagen
Oracle to look at ECM? Not a surprise. The enterprise software market has been experiencing a lot of acquisitions in the past 3 years. ECM is always a big cake for giants to share. Oracle has just announced that it will acquire Skywire Software’s business on application software. The acquisition will improve Oracle’s content management business. Another benefit is that the insurance software of Skywire is also added to Oracle’s insurance business software suite. It seems that SAS will start feeling panic of losing its business in the insurance market.
Microsoft has recently announced its acquisition of a Portugal-based private company MobiComp to enhance its strength in mobile data protection and sharing services technology and business. After Gate’s leave, Microsoft is continuing its movement towards the mobile market.
Oracle is getting more money at the recession world? Well, according to a recent report, Oracle sales and profits actually grew over 20 percent for the 2008 fiscal year, which is the highest growth rate in 10 years. Well, are we in an IT recession time?
Revenge from RealNetworks! Online music store Rhapsody, owned by RealNetworks is launching DRM free downloads. So Apple’s iTune is not the only one controlling the market any more. We will see how RealNetworks approaches consumers’ mobile phones and MP3 players in the near future.
Indian IT services giant Infosys has just expanded its education center in Mysore with upto $380m facility. It seems that outsourcing market is fast growing especially in the recent years and the Indian company is aware of its great potential in this scenario.
AMD has a new CEO! What a great piece of news to Intel’s biggest rival. Well, it is hardly great. We definitely need AMD to keep Intel running on the technology world. Let us just hope the new chief, Meyer, is able to bring the company back to profit after 8 successive quarters of losses.
If we think of what has been for PC developers in the past 20 years, Microsoft is at least one of the major eyehole-attraction vendors (I could think of linux as another potential). Now Google is joining the game. People have been talking about Google deploying dynamic language runtime just like what MS has been doing. Well, it looks really difficult for a start-up developer to choose which way to go.
Friday, 2008-07-25, Copenhagen
Oracle to look at ECM? Not a surprise. The enterprise software market has been experiencing a lot of acquisitions in the past 3 years. ECM is always a big cake for giants to share. Oracle has just announced that it will acquire Skywire Software’s business on application software. The acquisition will improve Oracle’s content management business. Another benefit is that the insurance software of Skywire is also added to Oracle’s insurance business software suite. It seems that SAS will start feeling panic of losing its business in the insurance market.
Microsoft has recently announced its acquisition of a Portugal-based private company MobiComp to enhance its strength in mobile data protection and sharing services technology and business. After Gate’s leave, Microsoft is continuing its movement towards the mobile market.
Oracle is getting more money at the recession world? Well, according to a recent report, Oracle sales and profits actually grew over 20 percent for the 2008 fiscal year, which is the highest growth rate in 10 years. Well, are we in an IT recession time?
Revenge from RealNetworks! Online music store Rhapsody, owned by RealNetworks is launching DRM free downloads. So Apple’s iTune is not the only one controlling the market any more. We will see how RealNetworks approaches consumers’ mobile phones and MP3 players in the near future.
Indian IT services giant Infosys has just expanded its education center in Mysore with upto $380m facility. It seems that outsourcing market is fast growing especially in the recent years and the Indian company is aware of its great potential in this scenario.
AMD has a new CEO! What a great piece of news to Intel’s biggest rival. Well, it is hardly great. We definitely need AMD to keep Intel running on the technology world. Let us just hope the new chief, Meyer, is able to bring the company back to profit after 8 successive quarters of losses.
Friday, July 11, 2008
What's new in week 28, 2008
Thursday, 2008-07-10, Copenhagen
Can iPhone be so popular in the mobile handset market? Well, guess Samsung Instinct is one of those that are trying out challenging this topic. By lowering down the price on 100 USD, it’s really hard to tell if iPhone can lead the market for a long time. Wait a minute, what does Nokia say here?
Microsoft has recently acquired a firm called Navic Networks, which is well into the interactive TV and advertising. Guess Microsoft has moved its strategy to the online/interactive marketing technology a bit. If we remember that online TV is not far away from us, this step may lead us to think that Microsoft is trying to take back the scenario of online advertisement that has been mostly occupies by Google.
Friday, 2008-07-11, Copenhagen
Nokia has the plan to acquire full parts of Symbian and make the platform free. Well, Symbian has been a major mobile platform and is now facing challenges from Microsoft as well as emerging platforms such as Google's Android. It seems that the giant mobile vendor is taking its steps to claim its impact of the market.
We have been hearing about the coming of new iPhone for 1 month. What about other vendors? Samsung and LG are already having their answers in the market. Samsung provides the "Instinct" brand while LG has the Dare, and these two companies are in corporation with other ISPs in the US area to compete iPhone+AT&T package.
Can iPhone be so popular in the mobile handset market? Well, guess Samsung Instinct is one of those that are trying out challenging this topic. By lowering down the price on 100 USD, it’s really hard to tell if iPhone can lead the market for a long time. Wait a minute, what does Nokia say here?
Microsoft has recently acquired a firm called Navic Networks, which is well into the interactive TV and advertising. Guess Microsoft has moved its strategy to the online/interactive marketing technology a bit. If we remember that online TV is not far away from us, this step may lead us to think that Microsoft is trying to take back the scenario of online advertisement that has been mostly occupies by Google.
Friday, 2008-07-11, Copenhagen
Nokia has the plan to acquire full parts of Symbian and make the platform free. Well, Symbian has been a major mobile platform and is now facing challenges from Microsoft as well as emerging platforms such as Google's Android. It seems that the giant mobile vendor is taking its steps to claim its impact of the market.
We have been hearing about the coming of new iPhone for 1 month. What about other vendors? Samsung and LG are already having their answers in the market. Samsung provides the "Instinct" brand while LG has the Dare, and these two companies are in corporation with other ISPs in the US area to compete iPhone+AT&T package.
Monday, June 30, 2008
What's new in week 27, 2008
Monday, 2008-06-30, Copenhagen
Launching location-based services have been a big stream for many tekis and academias. We have not seen a good success of LBS since the idea was born. Now, Nokia just said that it has agreed to buy social networking company Plazes which provides location-aware services that people can use to plan, record, and share social activities. If Nokia is starting to push this idea, what would the ISPs do? Allowing the protocols or not?
Facebook is coming to China. The big social network site has just launched a mainland Chinese version zh-cn.facebook.com. Well, knowing that there have been quite a lot of facebooking sites within China for the past years (and some of them are very successful), let us cross our fingers and see when Facebook will have the same destiny as Ebay.
Wednesday, 2008-07-02, Copenhagen
We have been dreaming of having mobile phone as the only means of media to use on ANYTHING, such as paying a ticket, buying food, reserve an airline ticket, etc. Now with the ISPs and vendors’ help, this is becoming true. T-systems and Nokia started offering mobile ticketing in Germany. This is especially useful for countries like Germany where people tend to stay outside of what’s happening in the world and only trust what TV says.
Skype has been out of our sight for a while. What’s happening after the company has been acquired by EBay? Well, the CEO recently said that Skype has been receiving full help and support from the parent EBay and both are working on integrating Skype with Paypal. We can see that this is a good idea in terms that people can actually negotiate when they are selling or buying things (like what we did 50 years ago in Bazaars). But, isn’t true that after bundling Skype with Paypal, Skype itself is becoming more-or-less a sub-product in the EBay’s brand and that will change people’s image on Skype that it has been a tool independent of any platforms?
Launching location-based services have been a big stream for many tekis and academias. We have not seen a good success of LBS since the idea was born. Now, Nokia just said that it has agreed to buy social networking company Plazes which provides location-aware services that people can use to plan, record, and share social activities. If Nokia is starting to push this idea, what would the ISPs do? Allowing the protocols or not?
Facebook is coming to China. The big social network site has just launched a mainland Chinese version zh-cn.facebook.com. Well, knowing that there have been quite a lot of facebooking sites within China for the past years (and some of them are very successful), let us cross our fingers and see when Facebook will have the same destiny as Ebay.
Wednesday, 2008-07-02, Copenhagen
We have been dreaming of having mobile phone as the only means of media to use on ANYTHING, such as paying a ticket, buying food, reserve an airline ticket, etc. Now with the ISPs and vendors’ help, this is becoming true. T-systems and Nokia started offering mobile ticketing in Germany. This is especially useful for countries like Germany where people tend to stay outside of what’s happening in the world and only trust what TV says.
Skype has been out of our sight for a while. What’s happening after the company has been acquired by EBay? Well, the CEO recently said that Skype has been receiving full help and support from the parent EBay and both are working on integrating Skype with Paypal. We can see that this is a good idea in terms that people can actually negotiate when they are selling or buying things (like what we did 50 years ago in Bazaars). But, isn’t true that after bundling Skype with Paypal, Skype itself is becoming more-or-less a sub-product in the EBay’s brand and that will change people’s image on Skype that it has been a tool independent of any platforms?
Friday, June 27, 2008
What's new in week 26, 2008
Monday, 2008-06-23, Copenhagen
A very funny news, two Belgian developers designed a video game concept called place-to-pee that relies on players hitting sensors in urinals to control the game play. Apparently the great ideas came from the country with best beers because people there have to spend a lot of time in the bath room. The games are for both man and woman. Now bath rooms will be more filled up….
We have seen that Google is challenging MS on collaboration to suites. Now another player joined the game, Adobe. Adobe has recently formally launched its free online collaboration tool suite which includes work processing, file sharing and web conferencing tools. Let’s wait and see how Adobe and get the market already occupied by Google and MS.
Where to receive if you have a BI report to wait while traveling with your mobile? In most cases, if you have BO, MicroStrategy, or Cognos tools in the company, these tools are integrated with Blackberry very well. There are also other possibilities, such as the Windows smart phones, given that your company also uses Microsoft BI tool suites. Another BI vendor Information Builder actually can work with any mobile devices with browser support. It seems that Blackberry is indeed a tool well-integrated with the business world. It will take a very long time for MS to enter the same market with their smart phones.
Tuesday, 2008-06-24, Copenhagen
Is SOA the ultimate way to go for all enterprises? Well, it depends pretty much how you work with services. Sometimes services can be very difficult to design and package. If you package basic functionalities into services, they do not have any business meanings such that it makes the re-usability no sense. If you try to package things into more business oriented services, then it is very possible that many services have overlaps with each other, meaning that they utilizes similar basic functionalities which may bring ripple effects when the performance is tuned according to one specific needs or changes are made to the basic functionalities. Especially in legacy systems, packing legacy applications into services are making the picture more complicated. One can hardly find easy ways to separate hard-coded functionalities according to different business needs.
So, is SOA the right way to go?
Which is the best way to grow for social networking sites like Facebook? Well, open source can be the answer. Facebook has been opening its application development extensions to all developers around the world and people are adding new applications to Facebook more than 100 pieces per day. It is just like there are always a lot of parties or other fun stuff coming up every day. How can facebook lose its audience? Never! Well, Google is also looking at the same initiative and starts to open-sourcing its social network protocols for developers. We’ll wait and see what’s going on the next.
Friday, 2008-06-27, Copenhagen
Here is a news about cloud computing. Data center operator Terremark just launched its “Enterprise Cloud” platform which is a complete managed platform for full-time operation of online business infrastructure. As we can see from this news, hardware and system providers are now thinking of platforms that can support global cloud computing. We can see that there are not only one computing center as the main server, but quite a few centers located globally such that 24/7 cloud computing is definitely not a hardware problem.
A very funny news, two Belgian developers designed a video game concept called place-to-pee that relies on players hitting sensors in urinals to control the game play. Apparently the great ideas came from the country with best beers because people there have to spend a lot of time in the bath room. The games are for both man and woman. Now bath rooms will be more filled up….
We have seen that Google is challenging MS on collaboration to suites. Now another player joined the game, Adobe. Adobe has recently formally launched its free online collaboration tool suite which includes work processing, file sharing and web conferencing tools. Let’s wait and see how Adobe and get the market already occupied by Google and MS.
Where to receive if you have a BI report to wait while traveling with your mobile? In most cases, if you have BO, MicroStrategy, or Cognos tools in the company, these tools are integrated with Blackberry very well. There are also other possibilities, such as the Windows smart phones, given that your company also uses Microsoft BI tool suites. Another BI vendor Information Builder actually can work with any mobile devices with browser support. It seems that Blackberry is indeed a tool well-integrated with the business world. It will take a very long time for MS to enter the same market with their smart phones.
Tuesday, 2008-06-24, Copenhagen
Is SOA the ultimate way to go for all enterprises? Well, it depends pretty much how you work with services. Sometimes services can be very difficult to design and package. If you package basic functionalities into services, they do not have any business meanings such that it makes the re-usability no sense. If you try to package things into more business oriented services, then it is very possible that many services have overlaps with each other, meaning that they utilizes similar basic functionalities which may bring ripple effects when the performance is tuned according to one specific needs or changes are made to the basic functionalities. Especially in legacy systems, packing legacy applications into services are making the picture more complicated. One can hardly find easy ways to separate hard-coded functionalities according to different business needs.
So, is SOA the right way to go?
Which is the best way to grow for social networking sites like Facebook? Well, open source can be the answer. Facebook has been opening its application development extensions to all developers around the world and people are adding new applications to Facebook more than 100 pieces per day. It is just like there are always a lot of parties or other fun stuff coming up every day. How can facebook lose its audience? Never! Well, Google is also looking at the same initiative and starts to open-sourcing its social network protocols for developers. We’ll wait and see what’s going on the next.
Friday, 2008-06-27, Copenhagen
Here is a news about cloud computing. Data center operator Terremark just launched its “Enterprise Cloud” platform which is a complete managed platform for full-time operation of online business infrastructure. As we can see from this news, hardware and system providers are now thinking of platforms that can support global cloud computing. We can see that there are not only one computing center as the main server, but quite a few centers located globally such that 24/7 cloud computing is definitely not a hardware problem.
Friday, June 20, 2008
What's new in week 25, 2008
Friday, 2008-06-20, Copenhagen
Allen System Group, ASG, is in negotiations to have another major acquisition. ASG is one of the largest privately owned software companies in this world. It is no doubt that this acquisition will lead to an improvement in its business process management technology flagship in the market.
High performance computing is definitely a continuously-growing market in the enterprise world. Just like an IDC expert said recently, the HPC market has over 10 billion usd market nowadays and it is still growing over 10 percent per year. One interesting observation is that Microsoft is also having over 1000 developers working at its HPC lab. So even the current market leaders are HP and IBM, or perhaps Sun. Other vendors are eagerly joining the competition.
More enterprise vendors are looking into how their products can have a Google version. For example, BI vendor Panorama has been launching its BI tools on top of Google spreadsheet applications. It seems that Google is also becoming a name of a certain kind of OS.
Allen System Group, ASG, is in negotiations to have another major acquisition. ASG is one of the largest privately owned software companies in this world. It is no doubt that this acquisition will lead to an improvement in its business process management technology flagship in the market.
High performance computing is definitely a continuously-growing market in the enterprise world. Just like an IDC expert said recently, the HPC market has over 10 billion usd market nowadays and it is still growing over 10 percent per year. One interesting observation is that Microsoft is also having over 1000 developers working at its HPC lab. So even the current market leaders are HP and IBM, or perhaps Sun. Other vendors are eagerly joining the competition.
More enterprise vendors are looking into how their products can have a Google version. For example, BI vendor Panorama has been launching its BI tools on top of Google spreadsheet applications. It seems that Google is also becoming a name of a certain kind of OS.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Notes for Chp. 4 of "Beyond Software Architecture"
Chapter 4. Business and License Model Symbiosis
Software vendors normally have one or more license models on each of their products.Why do we need a license? Because software is different from solid objects. You cannot stop people from copying it, redistribute it, and even reverse-engineering it. License is a legal way of protecting people from abusing the product while still enjoying not only the product but also the services around the product.
There are several common software business models. For example, users can by access or use of application for a period of time, or they can be charged at a percentage of their cost saved from using the software (enterprises tend to be resistant to this model), or they can be charged per transaction, or the vendors can be more precise by metering the users accesses on different resources(for example, the amount of concurrent users). Users can also be charged on the hardware that runs on the software instead of the software itself. Another way is used by the open source tool vendors.An open source tool is free. But if you want specialized services on top of the tool, it comes with price.
I have two reflections on the pricing models.
First, modern software tends to provide more features with online access. One example being the anti-virus software which normally needs to updates its virus library regularly. By using the Internet,one can find certain ways of protecting the software from abuse. In fact, in the architecture design process, one must try to include this business model in the technical design.
Second, software vendors must think of their architecture to have specialized support of more precise pricing models, such as the metering. Not all software can be priced by the metering way. But it is preferred by some customers.
There can be different rights and restrictions (most of them are very technical) associated with each type of business models. Again, the tarchitecture is very important in embedding such rights and restrictions in the technical design.
So, how can tarchitecture help the business model? I am sure that may technical architects have quite a lot of ideas in their mind. There are following things that one should always be careful with.
1. The most important thing is to capture the necessary data for the business pricing. This has to happen within the architecture.
2. Give the necessary report so that both the vendors and customers can be aware of the details of the cost.
3. Put something there to enforce the business model in case the license is violated.
4. Sometimes, the price can also be linked with those "-ility" such as scalability and reliability. The architecture should be able to support it.
5. Successful tarchitecture must also try to help customers to save their budget on other things such as the hardware investment.
6. Vendors should regularly adjust the parameters used in the pricing models. Everything changes over the time,especially in the IT world.
There are many ways of enforcing the licensing models. One can always try to link the architecture with online access to ensure that people are serious when using and paying the software. However,up to now, I have not heard any 100 percent secure licensing model if there is no law to protect the copyright of software.
Finishing on the tarchitecture, let us get back to the marchitecture. In fact, in the beginning of specific software market, vendors can make the business models very simple so that customers can easily understand and decide to buy. The idea is of course to occupy the market first.
The maturity of the market decides on the business model, indeed.
Software vendors normally have one or more license models on each of their products.Why do we need a license? Because software is different from solid objects. You cannot stop people from copying it, redistribute it, and even reverse-engineering it. License is a legal way of protecting people from abusing the product while still enjoying not only the product but also the services around the product.
There are several common software business models. For example, users can by access or use of application for a period of time, or they can be charged at a percentage of their cost saved from using the software (enterprises tend to be resistant to this model), or they can be charged per transaction, or the vendors can be more precise by metering the users accesses on different resources(for example, the amount of concurrent users). Users can also be charged on the hardware that runs on the software instead of the software itself. Another way is used by the open source tool vendors.An open source tool is free. But if you want specialized services on top of the tool, it comes with price.
I have two reflections on the pricing models.
First, modern software tends to provide more features with online access. One example being the anti-virus software which normally needs to updates its virus library regularly. By using the Internet,one can find certain ways of protecting the software from abuse. In fact, in the architecture design process, one must try to include this business model in the technical design.
Second, software vendors must think of their architecture to have specialized support of more precise pricing models, such as the metering. Not all software can be priced by the metering way. But it is preferred by some customers.
There can be different rights and restrictions (most of them are very technical) associated with each type of business models. Again, the tarchitecture is very important in embedding such rights and restrictions in the technical design.
So, how can tarchitecture help the business model? I am sure that may technical architects have quite a lot of ideas in their mind. There are following things that one should always be careful with.
1. The most important thing is to capture the necessary data for the business pricing. This has to happen within the architecture.
2. Give the necessary report so that both the vendors and customers can be aware of the details of the cost.
3. Put something there to enforce the business model in case the license is violated.
4. Sometimes, the price can also be linked with those "-ility" such as scalability and reliability. The architecture should be able to support it.
5. Successful tarchitecture must also try to help customers to save their budget on other things such as the hardware investment.
6. Vendors should regularly adjust the parameters used in the pricing models. Everything changes over the time,especially in the IT world.
There are many ways of enforcing the licensing models. One can always try to link the architecture with online access to ensure that people are serious when using and paying the software. However,up to now, I have not heard any 100 percent secure licensing model if there is no law to protect the copyright of software.
Finishing on the tarchitecture, let us get back to the marchitecture. In fact, in the beginning of specific software market, vendors can make the business models very simple so that customers can easily understand and decide to buy. The idea is of course to occupy the market first.
The maturity of the market decides on the business model, indeed.
Monday, June 16, 2008
What's new in week 24, 2008
Thursday, 2008-06-12, Copenhagen
Another high-performance, parallel processing database? Aster Data Systems, started up three years ago with three Stanford students, is now coming into a period of growing up their business with the brilliant product. One of their well-known customers is MySpace. The parallel processing database has incorporated quite a few new innovations like data partitioning algorithm POD. We will see how this database engines goes if one of giant database players has the intention to acquire it. So Teradata may not always be the leading players in parallel databases.
Google has recently announced the availability of a new Google application, called Google Sites, which let users create own web pages with a WYSIWYG style. This is another cloud computing application from Google. Seems that Google will attract quite a lot of SoHos’ attention.
Another high-performance, parallel processing database? Aster Data Systems, started up three years ago with three Stanford students, is now coming into a period of growing up their business with the brilliant product. One of their well-known customers is MySpace. The parallel processing database has incorporated quite a few new innovations like data partitioning algorithm POD. We will see how this database engines goes if one of giant database players has the intention to acquire it. So Teradata may not always be the leading players in parallel databases.
Google has recently announced the availability of a new Google application, called Google Sites, which let users create own web pages with a WYSIWYG style. This is another cloud computing application from Google. Seems that Google will attract quite a lot of SoHos’ attention.
Friday, May 23, 2008
What's new in week 21, 2008
Tuesday, 2008-05-20, Copenhagen
A new competitor to Google on the search engine market? Yes and this may happen everyday. Recently, Powerset has launched a semantic search engine so that users can input natural language to query on stuff. Although not the whole internet content has been indexed by this new engine (only Wikipedia is in the index), using natural language is definitely a good idea to attract users attention.
HP does have a big dream of becoming the next IBM. In a very recently news, we have heard that HP has successfully acquired EDS, a big IT server providers. Services, out-sourcing, and new hardware (as well as software) technology alliance, HP is becoming the great challenger to IBM.
The big idea of cloud computing has been attracting more business people’s mind. The column-based database vendor, Vertica, has joined the cloud with a number of database vendors like EnterpriseDB, MS, Amazon (SimpleDB), and Google (Bigtable).
Friday, 2008-05-23, Copenhagen
Microsoft and Yahoo are in ANOTHER talk after Yahoo’s rejection of MS’s request of deal. Now MS is looking for a chance not totally acquire the searching brand and find out a better way of making things work. Yahoo’s board have received complains after the rejection that they were not considering the deal in a rational way. Let’s just wait and see what Google says about this.
Google is reaching another scenario in the search-engine market. Quite recently the search giant unveiled its health-related website, Google Health. This can be very good news for most people who does not know pretty much on how to find the good medical information on Google. What can make it difficult for Google is that people make just want to find a good medical answer by the search engine instead of going to their doctors. Oh, one more thing, there is a privacy issue if people start to put their health information on their Google Health profiles.
A new competitor to Google on the search engine market? Yes and this may happen everyday. Recently, Powerset has launched a semantic search engine so that users can input natural language to query on stuff. Although not the whole internet content has been indexed by this new engine (only Wikipedia is in the index), using natural language is definitely a good idea to attract users attention.
HP does have a big dream of becoming the next IBM. In a very recently news, we have heard that HP has successfully acquired EDS, a big IT server providers. Services, out-sourcing, and new hardware (as well as software) technology alliance, HP is becoming the great challenger to IBM.
The big idea of cloud computing has been attracting more business people’s mind. The column-based database vendor, Vertica, has joined the cloud with a number of database vendors like EnterpriseDB, MS, Amazon (SimpleDB), and Google (Bigtable).
Friday, 2008-05-23, Copenhagen
Microsoft and Yahoo are in ANOTHER talk after Yahoo’s rejection of MS’s request of deal. Now MS is looking for a chance not totally acquire the searching brand and find out a better way of making things work. Yahoo’s board have received complains after the rejection that they were not considering the deal in a rational way. Let’s just wait and see what Google says about this.
Google is reaching another scenario in the search-engine market. Quite recently the search giant unveiled its health-related website, Google Health. This can be very good news for most people who does not know pretty much on how to find the good medical information on Google. What can make it difficult for Google is that people make just want to find a good medical answer by the search engine instead of going to their doctors. Oh, one more thing, there is a privacy issue if people start to put their health information on their Google Health profiles.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Notes for reading "The Data Warehouse Toolkit," Chapter 2
There are following topics described in this chapter.
1. The “four step dimensional design process”
According to this book, there are four basic steps to do dimensional modeling. First, to select the business process, second , to define the granularity of the data, third, to find out the dimensions, fourth, to find out the facts. We discuss each in the following.
1.1, to select the business process
The basic step of data modeling is to think about the scope and influence of the new model. One principle is to avoid publishing the same data multiple times. This book discusses about having the model per business process rather than per department. The idea behind is that, if having the models per department, the same data may have to be published more than once as different business processes may require similar data on the same department. However, it is not enough to just have one data model per business process, one still has to reach the step of consolidating these business process into a unified model at certain time point in the future. But I agree that, given most situations that data marts are required in a short time frame, focusing on a specific business process is the most optimal way to take. However, one must take a serious step later to consolidate the “quickly-designed” data mart into a large data warehouse. That step, as I can see from my experience, is missing in most of the industry implementations.
1.2, to define the grain of the business process
The question is “how to define a single row in the fact table?” It is a question on how detail we should devolve into in the data model. And here is the place that we consider the balance between the scalability of data and the performance requirement. In many cases, if one uses the most detailed data in the data model, it means that, if there are new requirements to the model, it is very easy to adapt those requirements as we already have all the data (otherwise, a major re-work has to be called). On the other hand, when having the most detailed data, that brings extra maintenance cost (you have to pay people to “watch” and “fix” you disks to yield the best performance in order to satisfy the users).
This step also helps people to understand the content of the dimensions.
1.3, to define the dimensions
It is about to find out and group the categories. The tricky part is how can we make the grouping in a generic way so that it is very easy to scale the model to include more different sets of data in the future?
1.4, to identify the facts
What are we measuring? There are some columns that are generated based on calculations over other columns. Do we need these extra columns that seem to be waster of disk space? It depends on the requirement on the performance as well as how often the data is used.
2 A case study on the retail business
I have the following reflection from the case study.
First, it is always necessary to start by understanding, from the business points of view, what is required exactly. There are many business processes in a case, but to choose the right one is the most important thing.
Second, when you have defined the grain of data, the dimensions seem to be self-clarified. Just read and analyze the definition of the grain and use the terms in the that definition, for example, “prodoctu,” “store,”, “promotion.” And remember that date is always a dimension in all data warehouses (otherwise you would not call it a data warehouse).
Third, in the design of fact tables, for those additive measures, it is a kind of belief to add an additive measure to a fact table. Knowing that this will bring storage cost but still deciding to do it, you have to have a belief. In fact, it is up to how the value of the measure is used and how that piece of architecture is designed to let people use the data.
Fourth, as long as you can do the join operation, it is a good idea to have the date dimension. You cannot rely on special functions to tell you when a special public holiday is in a certain country. They have to be documented in the date table.
Fifth, I think what has been misleading in the book is that you should not always add as many attributes to the dimensional tables as possible. In the physical world, there is a limitation of row size, and by adding more columns to each row, the performance for doing queries is getting worse. One has to take a very serious step to consider whether to add a new column or to find out ways so that you can do the calculation without adding anything at all.
Sixth, apparently only the “happened” facts are recorded in the fact table. What about those that are not “happened?” For example, what are the products that are in promotion but are not sold by any amount? There can be multiple ways to cope with this request. Either you run a query to find out those that are sold and then filter out the unsold, or you add a column to the Sales fact table with a lot of “0” values in it. Because the unknown things also have hierarchies, what the book suggests is to add another fact table to carry such information. The difference of this fact table is that you do not have to be one the same grain as the Sales table. By doing this, you can record the information in an easy (for query) way and save the disk cost by rolling-up the grain. Note that this fact table may just look like a many-to-many table without facts (a factless fact table).
Seventh, regarding degenerating dimensions, it is OK and normally allowed to have them. In the example given by the book, the “transaction number” is just added to the fact table (and actually there can be a transaction dimension to record more things if needed).
Eighth, what brings the most difficulty to the dimensional design is not the initial requirement, but the new requirements after the initial design has been established. It takes a modeling team much more time to just consider how to add the new requirements to the existing star-schema model. If new fields are added, what happens to the corresponding values of those records that are already there? Should each of the records always have “not available” value on the new fields? This is a place where best practices should be collected. And I do not believe that there is always a single method that can solve all the problems. The best practices have to be selected and used case-by-case.
Ninth, what should be bared in mind for dimensional modelers, is that the nature of dimensional model is for business users to be able to query on but not for systems to efficiently update. So this model is and should not be quite normalized. So snow-flaking is in fact a risk for dimensional models. In addition to bring extra cost on joining the different tables, you cannot even create bitmap indexing on necessary fields. Business users will also find it difficult to see through the snow flake tables because there is too much snow flake. J
Tenth, I do not quite like the claim that “most business processes can be represented with less than 15 dimensions in the fact table.” Perhaps Kimall is right but an exact value brings nothing but difficulty in a modeler’s struggle with managers who do not know much about modeling but just want things done in the way the book says.
3. Surrogate Keys
Surrogate keys make so much benefit in dimensional models and please bear in mind that it is the best if one can just use small integer numbers for the surrogate keys (instead of writing a hashing function). Using surrogate keys also means that data warehouse people do not have to rely on the operational system people on the natural keys. This situation gets even worse when the people in operational systems decide to re-cycle the account number or product numbers that are inactive for a certain period of time (but the data warehouse’ life is much longer than this period).
Sometimes you just cannot rely one the natural keys to keep the data clean. For example, a product number plus a date can be a combined natural key. But the value for the “date” field may be unknown for a period, what do we do with the record during this period? How to identify them?
One deep performance problem with having a star-schema model, is the cost of making join operations. So one wise idea is to use single keys, like surrogate keys, instead of having compound or concatenated keys because you then have to join on multiple columns and that is much more complicated.
4. Market Basket Analysis
What is interesting in this part, is the book shows how to use the star-schema model for analysis purposes. The idea is to generate regular reports based on a join operation between the fact table and several dimensional tables. Actually I would think an OLAP tool will make this work much easier.
1. The “four step dimensional design process”
According to this book, there are four basic steps to do dimensional modeling. First, to select the business process, second , to define the granularity of the data, third, to find out the dimensions, fourth, to find out the facts. We discuss each in the following.
1.1, to select the business process
The basic step of data modeling is to think about the scope and influence of the new model. One principle is to avoid publishing the same data multiple times. This book discusses about having the model per business process rather than per department. The idea behind is that, if having the models per department, the same data may have to be published more than once as different business processes may require similar data on the same department. However, it is not enough to just have one data model per business process, one still has to reach the step of consolidating these business process into a unified model at certain time point in the future. But I agree that, given most situations that data marts are required in a short time frame, focusing on a specific business process is the most optimal way to take. However, one must take a serious step later to consolidate the “quickly-designed” data mart into a large data warehouse. That step, as I can see from my experience, is missing in most of the industry implementations.
1.2, to define the grain of the business process
The question is “how to define a single row in the fact table?” It is a question on how detail we should devolve into in the data model. And here is the place that we consider the balance between the scalability of data and the performance requirement. In many cases, if one uses the most detailed data in the data model, it means that, if there are new requirements to the model, it is very easy to adapt those requirements as we already have all the data (otherwise, a major re-work has to be called). On the other hand, when having the most detailed data, that brings extra maintenance cost (you have to pay people to “watch” and “fix” you disks to yield the best performance in order to satisfy the users).
This step also helps people to understand the content of the dimensions.
1.3, to define the dimensions
It is about to find out and group the categories. The tricky part is how can we make the grouping in a generic way so that it is very easy to scale the model to include more different sets of data in the future?
1.4, to identify the facts
What are we measuring? There are some columns that are generated based on calculations over other columns. Do we need these extra columns that seem to be waster of disk space? It depends on the requirement on the performance as well as how often the data is used.
2 A case study on the retail business
I have the following reflection from the case study.
First, it is always necessary to start by understanding, from the business points of view, what is required exactly. There are many business processes in a case, but to choose the right one is the most important thing.
Second, when you have defined the grain of data, the dimensions seem to be self-clarified. Just read and analyze the definition of the grain and use the terms in the that definition, for example, “prodoctu,” “store,”, “promotion.” And remember that date is always a dimension in all data warehouses (otherwise you would not call it a data warehouse).
Third, in the design of fact tables, for those additive measures, it is a kind of belief to add an additive measure to a fact table. Knowing that this will bring storage cost but still deciding to do it, you have to have a belief. In fact, it is up to how the value of the measure is used and how that piece of architecture is designed to let people use the data.
Fourth, as long as you can do the join operation, it is a good idea to have the date dimension. You cannot rely on special functions to tell you when a special public holiday is in a certain country. They have to be documented in the date table.
Fifth, I think what has been misleading in the book is that you should not always add as many attributes to the dimensional tables as possible. In the physical world, there is a limitation of row size, and by adding more columns to each row, the performance for doing queries is getting worse. One has to take a very serious step to consider whether to add a new column or to find out ways so that you can do the calculation without adding anything at all.
Sixth, apparently only the “happened” facts are recorded in the fact table. What about those that are not “happened?” For example, what are the products that are in promotion but are not sold by any amount? There can be multiple ways to cope with this request. Either you run a query to find out those that are sold and then filter out the unsold, or you add a column to the Sales fact table with a lot of “0” values in it. Because the unknown things also have hierarchies, what the book suggests is to add another fact table to carry such information. The difference of this fact table is that you do not have to be one the same grain as the Sales table. By doing this, you can record the information in an easy (for query) way and save the disk cost by rolling-up the grain. Note that this fact table may just look like a many-to-many table without facts (a factless fact table).
Seventh, regarding degenerating dimensions, it is OK and normally allowed to have them. In the example given by the book, the “transaction number” is just added to the fact table (and actually there can be a transaction dimension to record more things if needed).
Eighth, what brings the most difficulty to the dimensional design is not the initial requirement, but the new requirements after the initial design has been established. It takes a modeling team much more time to just consider how to add the new requirements to the existing star-schema model. If new fields are added, what happens to the corresponding values of those records that are already there? Should each of the records always have “not available” value on the new fields? This is a place where best practices should be collected. And I do not believe that there is always a single method that can solve all the problems. The best practices have to be selected and used case-by-case.
Ninth, what should be bared in mind for dimensional modelers, is that the nature of dimensional model is for business users to be able to query on but not for systems to efficiently update. So this model is and should not be quite normalized. So snow-flaking is in fact a risk for dimensional models. In addition to bring extra cost on joining the different tables, you cannot even create bitmap indexing on necessary fields. Business users will also find it difficult to see through the snow flake tables because there is too much snow flake. J
Tenth, I do not quite like the claim that “most business processes can be represented with less than 15 dimensions in the fact table.” Perhaps Kimall is right but an exact value brings nothing but difficulty in a modeler’s struggle with managers who do not know much about modeling but just want things done in the way the book says.
3. Surrogate Keys
Surrogate keys make so much benefit in dimensional models and please bear in mind that it is the best if one can just use small integer numbers for the surrogate keys (instead of writing a hashing function). Using surrogate keys also means that data warehouse people do not have to rely on the operational system people on the natural keys. This situation gets even worse when the people in operational systems decide to re-cycle the account number or product numbers that are inactive for a certain period of time (but the data warehouse’ life is much longer than this period).
Sometimes you just cannot rely one the natural keys to keep the data clean. For example, a product number plus a date can be a combined natural key. But the value for the “date” field may be unknown for a period, what do we do with the record during this period? How to identify them?
One deep performance problem with having a star-schema model, is the cost of making join operations. So one wise idea is to use single keys, like surrogate keys, instead of having compound or concatenated keys because you then have to join on multiple columns and that is much more complicated.
4. Market Basket Analysis
What is interesting in this part, is the book shows how to use the star-schema model for analysis purposes. The idea is to generate regular reports based on a join operation between the fact table and several dimensional tables. Actually I would think an OLAP tool will make this work much easier.
What's new in week 20, 2008
Wednesday, 2008-05-14, Copenhagen
What can we guess from Microsoft’s failure in acquiring Yahoo? One possible answer is that Microsoft has to try harder on cloud computing to save its success in the enterprise market. Let us just be frankly, MS is not a good player in the online service market while Google was started on this market (and is in the leaders’ dimension now). Given the assumption that online services (ideas like SAAS, Cloud Computing) will be the next market trend for enterprise IT, MS has to make a solid move in order to take the lead in that direction (which is always viewed as a great piece cake). Without Yahoo’s reputation, MS has to find another way to attract more online users’ eyeballs.
The online virus-protection technology is one of the biggest trends in the security market. Given the fact that most of the virus-affections (and/or security breakage) happened through internet protocols, this market is indeed a great place to put innovations. McAfee and Yahoo just announced a beta launch of a new technology, termed SearchScan, to make Yahoo searching much safer by warning of dangerous sites before the user even clicks on them. Wait a minute, isn’t it true that, when you search on a site from Google, there is always a suggestion if the site is believed to contain malicious code? So, there is not just one player in this scenario.
Friday, 2008-05-16, Copenhagen
Quite a few major Internet players, like Microsoft and Yahoo, are trying to put profile-sharing into their service portfolio. The idea is that once a user has an ID and profile information created in one of their websites, the information can just be shared with other sites with one-mouse-click. The convenience is straightforward but many people have the concern that this will have certain amount of privacy leak (just like what happened to FaceBook.com).
Good news for VW fans! Volkswagen and Sanyo are working on a joint venture to deliver battery to be used in hybrid and electric cars. According to their plan, VW aims to start producing cars with the battery by 2012 (which is not far away from us). It’s a bit difficult to imagine how the battery can be, given the fact that VW cars are normally heavier than other competitors.
What can we guess from Microsoft’s failure in acquiring Yahoo? One possible answer is that Microsoft has to try harder on cloud computing to save its success in the enterprise market. Let us just be frankly, MS is not a good player in the online service market while Google was started on this market (and is in the leaders’ dimension now). Given the assumption that online services (ideas like SAAS, Cloud Computing) will be the next market trend for enterprise IT, MS has to make a solid move in order to take the lead in that direction (which is always viewed as a great piece cake). Without Yahoo’s reputation, MS has to find another way to attract more online users’ eyeballs.
The online virus-protection technology is one of the biggest trends in the security market. Given the fact that most of the virus-affections (and/or security breakage) happened through internet protocols, this market is indeed a great place to put innovations. McAfee and Yahoo just announced a beta launch of a new technology, termed SearchScan, to make Yahoo searching much safer by warning of dangerous sites before the user even clicks on them. Wait a minute, isn’t it true that, when you search on a site from Google, there is always a suggestion if the site is believed to contain malicious code? So, there is not just one player in this scenario.
Friday, 2008-05-16, Copenhagen
Quite a few major Internet players, like Microsoft and Yahoo, are trying to put profile-sharing into their service portfolio. The idea is that once a user has an ID and profile information created in one of their websites, the information can just be shared with other sites with one-mouse-click. The convenience is straightforward but many people have the concern that this will have certain amount of privacy leak (just like what happened to FaceBook.com).
Good news for VW fans! Volkswagen and Sanyo are working on a joint venture to deliver battery to be used in hybrid and electric cars. According to their plan, VW aims to start producing cars with the battery by 2012 (which is not far away from us). It’s a bit difficult to imagine how the battery can be, given the fact that VW cars are normally heavier than other competitors.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Reading notes for "Universal Metadata Models" Part II
Part II Universal Meta Models for the Meta Data Repository Environment
The rest part of this book is dedicated to explain, in detail, a very detailed meta model for a large enterprise. The meta model covers not only the enterprise system data, but also the IT portfolio management, the XML, and the business metadata.
For example, meta model for enterprise system data includes six subject areas, such as data package, data relationships to structures, data movement and transformation, expression transformation, transformation operational history, and data profiling.
The rest part of this book is dedicated to explain, in detail, a very detailed meta model for a large enterprise. The meta model covers not only the enterprise system data, but also the IT portfolio management, the XML, and the business metadata.
For example, meta model for enterprise system data includes six subject areas, such as data package, data relationships to structures, data movement and transformation, expression transformation, transformation operational history, and data profiling.
What's new in week 19, 2008
Monday, 2008-05-05, Copenhagen
A little bit funny but interesting news, is that Intel, Texas Instruments, Panasonic and Infineon have formed an alliance to promote home networks for movies, music and pictures using domestic wiring. One question just out of my mouth, is that, why not “WiFi?” It is true that telephone lines are almost everywhere in a house. But you still need to consider a little extra construction work (like digging the holes, adding a few extra nails). Why not just think about wireless technology?
Friday, 2008-05-09, Copenhagen
WiMax will come to us (I mean US) very soon and hopefully bring new development chances to the awkward economy situation of the country. Intel and Google are two big proponents of WiMax technology. The traditional ISP and telephone companies will start to worry about their existence in the next few years.
A little bit funny but interesting news, is that Intel, Texas Instruments, Panasonic and Infineon have formed an alliance to promote home networks for movies, music and pictures using domestic wiring. One question just out of my mouth, is that, why not “WiFi?” It is true that telephone lines are almost everywhere in a house. But you still need to consider a little extra construction work (like digging the holes, adding a few extra nails). Why not just think about wireless technology?
Friday, 2008-05-09, Copenhagen
WiMax will come to us (I mean US) very soon and hopefully bring new development chances to the awkward economy situation of the country. Intel and Google are two big proponents of WiMax technology. The traditional ISP and telephone companies will start to worry about their existence in the next few years.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
What's new in week 18, 2008
Tuesday, 2008-04-29, Copenhagen
Teradata has recently put new members of its data warehouse platform family into the market. The new members, including Teradata 550 SMP, 2500SMP, and 5550 SMP, are all focused on SMP architecture. Apparently, Teradata’s parallel processing power has been enhanced by the new members.
I always like to spread information about free software, especially free security tools. Here is a link (http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Ten-Free-MustHave-Security-Tools/) of the ten must-have tools, Secunia Personal Software Inspector, OpenDNS, Haute Secure, Trend Micro RUBotted, AVG Anti-Rootkit, ZoneAlarm Firewall, BitDefender 10 Free AntiVirus, CC Cleaner, WinPatrol, NoScript.
Teradata has recently put new members of its data warehouse platform family into the market. The new members, including Teradata 550 SMP, 2500SMP, and 5550 SMP, are all focused on SMP architecture. Apparently, Teradata’s parallel processing power has been enhanced by the new members.
I always like to spread information about free software, especially free security tools. Here is a link (http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Ten-Free-MustHave-Security-Tools/) of the ten must-have tools, Secunia Personal Software Inspector, OpenDNS, Haute Secure, Trend Micro RUBotted, AVG Anti-Rootkit, ZoneAlarm Firewall, BitDefender 10 Free AntiVirus, CC Cleaner, WinPatrol, NoScript.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Reading notes for "Universal Metadata Models" Part I
This is the second book by David Marco on metadata management in large enterprises. Michael Jennings is the second author of this book.
Part I, Presenting the Managed Metadata Environment
First, a managed metadata environment (MME) is far from being just a repository of metadata or a data warehouse. Building a data warehouse for metadata is much more difficult than a data warehouse for normal data because of the various data sources and the difficulty of maintaining the link among the data.
There are companies trying to do point-to-point integration with EAI tools or just using XML. What can be problematic with such approaches is that, when the company grows too large, the effort to maintaining the integration will very easily over the whole IT budget. So, it’s better to start thinking of building an MME as early as you can.
It’s quite inevitable that, when thinking of building MME from an architectural point of view, there are architecture elements that are much similar to what data warehouse architecture includes. Specifically, they are, sourcing layer, integration layer, repository, data management layer, data marts, and data delivery layer.
Similar to the development of a data warehouse, the governance and stewardship models of metadata are also important.
What can we achieve when we have a good MME? If we look at the SE-CMM for data warehousing (CMM is always something big enterprise is focused on and it indeed can help these enterprises to improve the business by reducing cost and promoting new business opportunities), most global 2000 companies are at levels 1 or 2. By having a good MME, it is possible to move up to level 3 and level 4 (it’s called “world class”). And of course, level 5 (continuously improving) has never been achieved by anyone yet.
Part I, Presenting the Managed Metadata Environment
First, a managed metadata environment (MME) is far from being just a repository of metadata or a data warehouse. Building a data warehouse for metadata is much more difficult than a data warehouse for normal data because of the various data sources and the difficulty of maintaining the link among the data.
There are companies trying to do point-to-point integration with EAI tools or just using XML. What can be problematic with such approaches is that, when the company grows too large, the effort to maintaining the integration will very easily over the whole IT budget. So, it’s better to start thinking of building an MME as early as you can.
It’s quite inevitable that, when thinking of building MME from an architectural point of view, there are architecture elements that are much similar to what data warehouse architecture includes. Specifically, they are, sourcing layer, integration layer, repository, data management layer, data marts, and data delivery layer.
Similar to the development of a data warehouse, the governance and stewardship models of metadata are also important.
What can we achieve when we have a good MME? If we look at the SE-CMM for data warehousing (CMM is always something big enterprise is focused on and it indeed can help these enterprises to improve the business by reducing cost and promoting new business opportunities), most global 2000 companies are at levels 1 or 2. By having a good MME, it is possible to move up to level 3 and level 4 (it’s called “world class”). And of course, level 5 (continuously improving) has never been achieved by anyone yet.
Monday, April 21, 2008
What's new in week 17, 2008
Monday, 2008-04-21, Copenhagen
Are solution providers being phased out due to the economy? According to a recent news, that IBM solution providers in UK has diminished from 10-12 big ones into 2 to 3 left in the market, it looks like that the market is decreasing for the VARs. Well, you can also vision that as consolidation in the techonomy (technology-economy) market. In a down period of economy, consolidation is a good idea for small IT fishes to survive under the wings of bigger ones. As we will surely witness, those small fishes will come out again in a even higher amount when the economy growth is coming back.
Wednesday, 2008-04-23, Copenhagen
It seems that Microsoft is serious about the next generation of web (web 2.0). And one of the most brilliant ideas that MS thinks for web 2.0 is mesh-up. In the Web 2.0 conference, MS is launching its Live Mesh Synchronization solution to the developers that are targeting next generation of IT applications.
Free music! Yes, for Nokia customers. Nokia had a deal with Sony BMG so that all buyers of Nokia’s certain music phones will be able to download the music for free for the next 12-month. And these users are welcome to keep the music. It seems that media products, such as songs, music, video shows, have the trend to be free for public and of course, there are commercial meanings behind the trends. Can we see a better future for P2P media-sharing tools? I would agree.
Are solution providers being phased out due to the economy? According to a recent news, that IBM solution providers in UK has diminished from 10-12 big ones into 2 to 3 left in the market, it looks like that the market is decreasing for the VARs. Well, you can also vision that as consolidation in the techonomy (technology-economy) market. In a down period of economy, consolidation is a good idea for small IT fishes to survive under the wings of bigger ones. As we will surely witness, those small fishes will come out again in a even higher amount when the economy growth is coming back.
Wednesday, 2008-04-23, Copenhagen
It seems that Microsoft is serious about the next generation of web (web 2.0). And one of the most brilliant ideas that MS thinks for web 2.0 is mesh-up. In the Web 2.0 conference, MS is launching its Live Mesh Synchronization solution to the developers that are targeting next generation of IT applications.
Free music! Yes, for Nokia customers. Nokia had a deal with Sony BMG so that all buyers of Nokia’s certain music phones will be able to download the music for free for the next 12-month. And these users are welcome to keep the music. It seems that media products, such as songs, music, video shows, have the trend to be free for public and of course, there are commercial meanings behind the trends. Can we see a better future for P2P media-sharing tools? I would agree.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
What's new in week 16, 2008
Tuesday, 2008-04-15, Copenhagen
I just read an article by Richard Winter, regarding the large growth of data volume in enterprise data warehouses. Here are my learning points on the article. Why is it that many enterprise vision bigger growth of data volume in the near future? Mostly this is due to the business needs and the better ways (that technology has brought out) to measure, collect, and calculate the data from its most detailed level. For example, most enterprises use to retain 3 years of historical data in the hard disk for doing analysis. Now there are more ones trying to keep 7 years of historical data to be more accurate in the business competition. So the needs for better hardware will never stop because human beings are becoming more ambitions.
Google recently announced the “Google Solutions Marketplace” which is a network that allows customers and partners to find each other and do business. Most products in this market are based on Google’s communication, search, and collaboration products.
Friday, 2008-04-18, Copenhagen
We are getting used to what Google can provide us. But is there another search engine that can be as competitive as Google? Yahoo? Live? or what? If we look at the recent news, that AOL has just acquired Sphere Source, a developer of contextual-search tools to make connections between content from blogs, video, media, photos, and advertisements, it seems that other people are thinking on the same online search market. I can tell that, nor far from the future, AOL will have its new brand of search engine pushed to market with a lot of competitive features.
Is webBI a form of SAAS for BI applications? Well, it depends. WebBI is indeed a way of enabling SAAS and it provides good opportunities for off-shore BI applications and services. But webBI is far from getting adoptted by medium and large enterprises. What stays in-between is the matter of security and regulations.
I just read an article by Richard Winter, regarding the large growth of data volume in enterprise data warehouses. Here are my learning points on the article. Why is it that many enterprise vision bigger growth of data volume in the near future? Mostly this is due to the business needs and the better ways (that technology has brought out) to measure, collect, and calculate the data from its most detailed level. For example, most enterprises use to retain 3 years of historical data in the hard disk for doing analysis. Now there are more ones trying to keep 7 years of historical data to be more accurate in the business competition. So the needs for better hardware will never stop because human beings are becoming more ambitions.
Google recently announced the “Google Solutions Marketplace” which is a network that allows customers and partners to find each other and do business. Most products in this market are based on Google’s communication, search, and collaboration products.
Friday, 2008-04-18, Copenhagen
We are getting used to what Google can provide us. But is there another search engine that can be as competitive as Google? Yahoo? Live? or what? If we look at the recent news, that AOL has just acquired Sphere Source, a developer of contextual-search tools to make connections between content from blogs, video, media, photos, and advertisements, it seems that other people are thinking on the same online search market. I can tell that, nor far from the future, AOL will have its new brand of search engine pushed to market with a lot of competitive features.
Is webBI a form of SAAS for BI applications? Well, it depends. WebBI is indeed a way of enabling SAAS and it provides good opportunities for off-shore BI applications and services. But webBI is far from getting adoptted by medium and large enterprises. What stays in-between is the matter of security and regulations.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Reading notes for "Building and Managing Meta Data Repository," Part II
Here comes the reading notes for the rest part of "Building and Managing Metadata Respository."
To find out metadata in an organization, there are two ways, top-down and bottom-up. The top-down approach is more like to be used if a project team has the opportunity to organize and summary all kinds of metadata of an organization, regardless of any existing tools and systems. The bottom-up approach is used if a project team is mainly going to fulfilling the needs of metadata by certain existing software and repositories.
Normally a metadata tool should have certain administrative facilities just like what a database system should have. For example, security, concurrent accesses, change management, validate integrity and consistency, and error recovery.
One should also think of how the metadata tool can accommodate existing standards.
There are two categories of metadata tools, the data integration and repository tool and the data access tool. It’s just like the back-end and front-end of any systems.
The “-ilities” for an architecture of metadata system is quite similar to what it is for a data warehouse. The additional “-ilities” are “customizable” and “open.”
Customizable means the metadata tool must be customized to meet specific business needs. This is quite important for those who use prepackaged metadata solutions. The tool must be able to provide abilities for customization.
Open means the metadata tool must allow sharing of metadata.
It is very difficult to define database naming standards and use it throughout the whole enterprise, even for the Global 2000 ones.
There are many sources of metadata, for example, ETL tool/process, data modeling tools, documents, employees, reporting and OLAP tools, vendor applications, and data quality tools.
One should bare in mind that, metadata repository is just like a data warehouse. So there can be multiple versions of metadata, or slowing changing dimensions.
If a metadata repository is complete, there should be logic, rules, tests and even requirements included and these metadata can be of great help to data quality applications. They can be organized into a “data quality dictionary.”
Sometimes it also makes sense to put the most naive technical metadata, for example, what is the name of the production servers, how many CPUs it has, etc.
What is a meta model? It is the physical data model for the meta data. There can be two types of meta model. The first one is a model that is based on a generic object model. It is like what you can see in the system tables in SQL Server. Having a very generic model means that you do not need to have a very big effort to extend it when new elements should be added (why? Because it is generic!). The second one is just like the normal entity-relationship model. The metadata team can just find out a list of all kinds of metadata and then treat them as different entities or relationships. What happens normally is that most teams start with the ER way of modeling and find out later that the object model makes more sense in the end.
One should also think of what kinds of metadata delivery should be included when developing a metadata system. It is not just the metadata when you get batch data from the source system. There are many sources. The architecture of the metadata delivery is also important.
One interesting and also very useful direction is to think about if we can make metadata repository bi-directional. That means we can have any available entries to input updates to the metadata and the updates will be reflected to other relevant parties in very short time. In addition, if every business user or IT user in the company starts the work by thinking and using metadata, the company’s data management situation will be very excellent.
To give a final hit, metadata is now considered a highly valuable asset for an enterprise. But not everybody knows how to make it real. In fact, just think of it as yet-another data warehouse of your enterprise. The suggestion that I will give, if I have only one sentence left, is to let the people who always possess with a bigger overview and solid education background of data management theory to design it.
To find out metadata in an organization, there are two ways, top-down and bottom-up. The top-down approach is more like to be used if a project team has the opportunity to organize and summary all kinds of metadata of an organization, regardless of any existing tools and systems. The bottom-up approach is used if a project team is mainly going to fulfilling the needs of metadata by certain existing software and repositories.
Normally a metadata tool should have certain administrative facilities just like what a database system should have. For example, security, concurrent accesses, change management, validate integrity and consistency, and error recovery.
One should also think of how the metadata tool can accommodate existing standards.
There are two categories of metadata tools, the data integration and repository tool and the data access tool. It’s just like the back-end and front-end of any systems.
The “-ilities” for an architecture of metadata system is quite similar to what it is for a data warehouse. The additional “-ilities” are “customizable” and “open.”
Customizable means the metadata tool must be customized to meet specific business needs. This is quite important for those who use prepackaged metadata solutions. The tool must be able to provide abilities for customization.
Open means the metadata tool must allow sharing of metadata.
It is very difficult to define database naming standards and use it throughout the whole enterprise, even for the Global 2000 ones.
There are many sources of metadata, for example, ETL tool/process, data modeling tools, documents, employees, reporting and OLAP tools, vendor applications, and data quality tools.
One should bare in mind that, metadata repository is just like a data warehouse. So there can be multiple versions of metadata, or slowing changing dimensions.
If a metadata repository is complete, there should be logic, rules, tests and even requirements included and these metadata can be of great help to data quality applications. They can be organized into a “data quality dictionary.”
Sometimes it also makes sense to put the most naive technical metadata, for example, what is the name of the production servers, how many CPUs it has, etc.
What is a meta model? It is the physical data model for the meta data. There can be two types of meta model. The first one is a model that is based on a generic object model. It is like what you can see in the system tables in SQL Server. Having a very generic model means that you do not need to have a very big effort to extend it when new elements should be added (why? Because it is generic!). The second one is just like the normal entity-relationship model. The metadata team can just find out a list of all kinds of metadata and then treat them as different entities or relationships. What happens normally is that most teams start with the ER way of modeling and find out later that the object model makes more sense in the end.
One should also think of what kinds of metadata delivery should be included when developing a metadata system. It is not just the metadata when you get batch data from the source system. There are many sources. The architecture of the metadata delivery is also important.
One interesting and also very useful direction is to think about if we can make metadata repository bi-directional. That means we can have any available entries to input updates to the metadata and the updates will be reflected to other relevant parties in very short time. In addition, if every business user or IT user in the company starts the work by thinking and using metadata, the company’s data management situation will be very excellent.
To give a final hit, metadata is now considered a highly valuable asset for an enterprise. But not everybody knows how to make it real. In fact, just think of it as yet-another data warehouse of your enterprise. The suggestion that I will give, if I have only one sentence left, is to let the people who always possess with a bigger overview and solid education background of data management theory to design it.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Notes for Ch. 3 of "Beyond Software Architecture"
Both marketecture and tarchitecture represent part of the whole picture of a system and they must work together to achieve business objectives. Sometimes what is built from a technical point of view may look quite naïve but it can be a very successful architecture from a business point of view. Just like the example "Boolean flags" in the book, it is a potentially problematic way but it is good for business people to understand.
Normally in the start of a development cycle, everything begins with the problem domain, the technology, and the –bilities that wanted from the business side. The problem domain is where you find the actually requirements, the technology is where you look for proper technical foundations to implement the solution, and the –bilities is where people discuss non-functional requirements and give priorities. Here the priority is very important. People must set it up and agree upon it in the beginning. It is OK to change it later (but not so frequently) but every change will force the team to look back at what they have done and do certain adjustment.
In the software vendors' world, a successful marketecture normally means that you have to look into what the customers will need in the next 18 or 24 months rather than the current. And you always have to maintain this marketecture up-to-a-future-date continuously. Another important thing to do is to make sure that the tarchitecture agrees with the marketecture. Otherwise, there will be a major dis-continuity in the product life-cycles.
In a product development lifecycle, you always have to talk to people and get feedbacks. Sometimes the marketecture is used to talk to business people and the tarchitecture is used for talking with technology-related people or information source. One important thing is that, if there are changes or disagreements on the pictures, there must be a way to maintain the two pictures and let people agree on it.
One important usage of having the marketecture and tarchitecture is that they are the best models to talk to the project team and all the stakeholders. The project team should always unify these two "architectures" if there is any change to any of them. It is important to put the latest of these two models publicly available to the relevant parties of the project.
Normally it makes a good sense to start making the marketecture and tarchitecture using context diagrams. What is a context diagram? As I get from Wiki, "System Context Diagram (SCD) is the highest level view of a system, similar to Block Diagram, showing a (normally software-based) system as a whole and its inputs and outputs from/to external factors. SCDs are a type of Data Flow Diagram, and they should always be produced as DFDs. Context Diagrams show the interactions between a system and other actors with which the system is designed to face." SCD is very helpful in understanding the context of a system.
Normally in the start of a development cycle, everything begins with the problem domain, the technology, and the –bilities that wanted from the business side. The problem domain is where you find the actually requirements, the technology is where you look for proper technical foundations to implement the solution, and the –bilities is where people discuss non-functional requirements and give priorities. Here the priority is very important. People must set it up and agree upon it in the beginning. It is OK to change it later (but not so frequently) but every change will force the team to look back at what they have done and do certain adjustment.
In the software vendors' world, a successful marketecture normally means that you have to look into what the customers will need in the next 18 or 24 months rather than the current. And you always have to maintain this marketecture up-to-a-future-date continuously. Another important thing to do is to make sure that the tarchitecture agrees with the marketecture. Otherwise, there will be a major dis-continuity in the product life-cycles.
In a product development lifecycle, you always have to talk to people and get feedbacks. Sometimes the marketecture is used to talk to business people and the tarchitecture is used for talking with technology-related people or information source. One important thing is that, if there are changes or disagreements on the pictures, there must be a way to maintain the two pictures and let people agree on it.
One important usage of having the marketecture and tarchitecture is that they are the best models to talk to the project team and all the stakeholders. The project team should always unify these two "architectures" if there is any change to any of them. It is important to put the latest of these two models publicly available to the relevant parties of the project.
Normally it makes a good sense to start making the marketecture and tarchitecture using context diagrams. What is a context diagram? As I get from Wiki, "System Context Diagram (SCD) is the highest level view of a system, similar to Block Diagram, showing a (normally software-based) system as a whole and its inputs and outputs from/to external factors. SCDs are a type of Data Flow Diagram, and they should always be produced as DFDs. Context Diagrams show the interactions between a system and other actors with which the system is designed to face." SCD is very helpful in understanding the context of a system.
What's new in week 15, 2008
Monday, 2008-04-07, Copenhagen
HP does have a big ambition in the Enterprise Information Management market. It has just announced a new acquisition on the Australia-based company Tower who has been an Enterprise Content Management vendor. HP has already built a “league” of software vendors circling around enterprise information management. It has been competing with IBM on this market for a while. As I believe, it will not be so long that we can see HP acquire Informatica and other BI software vendors
The Dojo foundation has just released its ver 1.1 of the Dojo toolkit. Dojo is an open source DHTML toolkit designed to enable developers to build dynamic capabilities into web pages and other environments.
Wanna browse YouTube videos directly from your inbox? There are people working on social inbox utilities, such as Xobni, Xoopit, and Yahoo. It seems that Google and Microsoft are joining this line very soon.
As I remember, I wrote sometime ago that there have been so many social networking sites and one way to stay with all your friends from different networks is to have another website that does some kind of “integration” work. Check out “plaxo.com.” This is the site I meant.
Tuesday, 2008-04-08, Copenhagen
Here is a very interesting website listing I would like to share, the 25 great geek sites.
Bluesnews.com, theinquirer.net, betanews.com, artstechnica.com, osnews.com, Beyond3D.com, hardocp.com, techreport.com, anandtech.com, mvktech.net, Silentpcreview.com, guru3d.com, hacknmod.com, tech-forums.net/pc, driverheaven.net/forum.php, hardforum.com, avsforum.com, rockpapershotgun.com, joelonsoftware.com, gamepolitics.com, engadget.com, codinghorror.com, thinkgeek.com, xkcd.com, mikeshardware.co.uk.
Yahoo is preparing on an Ad management platform for customers to buy and sell ads online. Online Ads have been a big trend for bringing new business models to the market. After Google’s success (well, I mean the success of getting so much focus and investment), most websites are seeking new models in the online market. Despite its recent acquisition actions with Microsoft, Yahoo is looking forward to this new piece of cake.
Thursday, 2008-04-10, Copenhagen
Microsoft is also quite open to the open source world. Quite recently, Microsoft has started to make available the technical docs for the protocols built into Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. The protocols will let developers understand and be able to write programs using the connection protocols among tools in the MS Office tool suite, e.g., SharePoint 2007, Outlook, etc.
Google is now starting to host web applications, like what Amazon has been doing. It seems that more and more vendors are focusing on cloud computing. When will Microsoft start to do the same thing? I do not believe it, unless MS can acquire Yahoo or MSN has a major strategy change.
Licensed online video? Yes, ModernFeed.com has started to aggregate many licensed content on the web. From a programmer’s point of view, ModernFeed is just collecting the “pointers” to all kinds of video sources, rather than hijacking it. It will be interesting to know how they can make an online video show as smooth as possible without thinking about P2P technologies.
It seems that OOXML, the MS standard, has been approved by ISO. What does it mean for most of the enterprise Office users? Primarily it is about transforming old files into the new format. I would agree that XML is the best tool for standardizing information, but does it take more space on my disk?
Saturday, 2008-04-12, Copenhagen
Many of us watch online videos and we are aware of the license problem. Is it possible to save licensed online videos and browse them later in an offline mode? It's a matter of protection technique. Adobe just annouced the version 1.0 of Adobe Media Player. How can another media player make sense to any users? The answer is that one of the major feature of this media player is that it can let users to download licensed online videos and watch them in offline mode and it is still legal to do so? I think one major effort put into this players, is the way to avoid users to abuse the downloaded video content. No wonder a lot of hackers will try to crack down the tool. So let us just cross our figures and wait-to-see.
Barcelona is available now. I mean, the AMD quad-core Opteron processor. Now it's Intel's turn to make the quad-core or multi-core chipsets.
Here's an interesting list of websites, the 10 sites for cheap flights (may be for US only) (http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/0,1206,l=226215&s=25306&a=226221,00.asp)
They are: Airfarewatchdog.com, BookingBuddy, Farecase, Hotwire, InsideTrip, Kayak, Mobissimo, SeatGuru, SideStep, Yapta, (and a bonus) Virgin Air Charter.
HP does have a big ambition in the Enterprise Information Management market. It has just announced a new acquisition on the Australia-based company Tower who has been an Enterprise Content Management vendor. HP has already built a “league” of software vendors circling around enterprise information management. It has been competing with IBM on this market for a while. As I believe, it will not be so long that we can see HP acquire Informatica and other BI software vendors
The Dojo foundation has just released its ver 1.1 of the Dojo toolkit. Dojo is an open source DHTML toolkit designed to enable developers to build dynamic capabilities into web pages and other environments.
Wanna browse YouTube videos directly from your inbox? There are people working on social inbox utilities, such as Xobni, Xoopit, and Yahoo. It seems that Google and Microsoft are joining this line very soon.
As I remember, I wrote sometime ago that there have been so many social networking sites and one way to stay with all your friends from different networks is to have another website that does some kind of “integration” work. Check out “plaxo.com.” This is the site I meant.
Tuesday, 2008-04-08, Copenhagen
Here is a very interesting website listing I would like to share, the 25 great geek sites.
Bluesnews.com, theinquirer.net, betanews.com, artstechnica.com, osnews.com, Beyond3D.com, hardocp.com, techreport.com, anandtech.com, mvktech.net, Silentpcreview.com, guru3d.com, hacknmod.com, tech-forums.net/pc, driverheaven.net/forum.php, hardforum.com, avsforum.com, rockpapershotgun.com, joelonsoftware.com, gamepolitics.com, engadget.com, codinghorror.com, thinkgeek.com, xkcd.com, mikeshardware.co.uk.
Yahoo is preparing on an Ad management platform for customers to buy and sell ads online. Online Ads have been a big trend for bringing new business models to the market. After Google’s success (well, I mean the success of getting so much focus and investment), most websites are seeking new models in the online market. Despite its recent acquisition actions with Microsoft, Yahoo is looking forward to this new piece of cake.
Thursday, 2008-04-10, Copenhagen
Microsoft is also quite open to the open source world. Quite recently, Microsoft has started to make available the technical docs for the protocols built into Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. The protocols will let developers understand and be able to write programs using the connection protocols among tools in the MS Office tool suite, e.g., SharePoint 2007, Outlook, etc.
Google is now starting to host web applications, like what Amazon has been doing. It seems that more and more vendors are focusing on cloud computing. When will Microsoft start to do the same thing? I do not believe it, unless MS can acquire Yahoo or MSN has a major strategy change.
Licensed online video? Yes, ModernFeed.com has started to aggregate many licensed content on the web. From a programmer’s point of view, ModernFeed is just collecting the “pointers” to all kinds of video sources, rather than hijacking it. It will be interesting to know how they can make an online video show as smooth as possible without thinking about P2P technologies.
It seems that OOXML, the MS standard, has been approved by ISO. What does it mean for most of the enterprise Office users? Primarily it is about transforming old files into the new format. I would agree that XML is the best tool for standardizing information, but does it take more space on my disk?
Saturday, 2008-04-12, Copenhagen
Many of us watch online videos and we are aware of the license problem. Is it possible to save licensed online videos and browse them later in an offline mode? It's a matter of protection technique. Adobe just annouced the version 1.0 of Adobe Media Player. How can another media player make sense to any users? The answer is that one of the major feature of this media player is that it can let users to download licensed online videos and watch them in offline mode and it is still legal to do so? I think one major effort put into this players, is the way to avoid users to abuse the downloaded video content. No wonder a lot of hackers will try to crack down the tool. So let us just cross our figures and wait-to-see.
Barcelona is available now. I mean, the AMD quad-core Opteron processor. Now it's Intel's turn to make the quad-core or multi-core chipsets.
Here's an interesting list of websites, the 10 sites for cheap flights (may be for US only) (http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/0,1206,l=226215&s=25306&a=226221,00.asp)
They are: Airfarewatchdog.com, BookingBuddy, Farecase, Hotwire, InsideTrip, Kayak, Mobissimo, SeatGuru, SideStep, Yapta, (and a bonus) Virgin Air Charter.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Reading notes for "Building and Managing Meta Data Repository," Part I
This is wonderful book by David Marco. As Mr. Inmon suggested, one has to come to Mr. Marco's writings if looking for "meta data" education.
Here comes my notes of the first part.
Part 1, Laying the Foundation
One reason to have a metadata system is to keep information flexibility and integrity in an enterprise’s IT system. Another reason is that, due to the fast growth of data volume, many enterprises have to split data from a single server to multiple systems and maybe, get a federation server to help people to use it. In such conditions, it becomes much more important to control the metadata.
Most of the metadata systems nowadays are kind of provider of information, not a monitor. But what makes a metadata system the most powerful is when you are able to, not only get the metadata information, but also modify and manage the modification of metadata.
What can be the ROI of metadata? There are quite a few benefits.
1. Data definition reporting
It is, indeed, a very basic metadata solution and it is somewhat a data dictionary. Normally very experienced people cannot sense the importance of this benefit. But for less-experienced IT people and business users, this is a must-have thing.
2. Data quality tracking
Controlling the data redundancy, accuracy, and completeness is always a good issue.
3. Business user access to metadata
If there is a semantic layer between the IT systems and the business users, it will become quite easy for the business users to understand the data. For example, a business user may get a report but want to know how the values in the columns are calculated. Here the business metadata comes into the play.
4. Impact analysis
If an enterprise has a whole-wide metadata system, it becomes very easy to do impact analysis on most subjects. And if the data is kept at a high quality, the result of the impact analysis will be a very excellent input to decision-making or enterprise analysis.
A good example to understand what metadata is, is the card catalog in the library. Normally, in a data warehouse environment, there are two types of metadata, technical and business. You can look at the target group for these two types. The technical metadata is the metadata that supports technical and IT users. The business metadata supports business users.
Even external data is quite ad hoc and unstable, it is quite important, when external data source is used, to have and maintain the metadata of external data source.
There are majorly three types of users for metadata, business users, technical users, and power users.
In a data life cycle of a data warehouse, there are many parts, or components that can lead to metadata. For example, the ETL tools, the data modeling tools, the reporting tools, and the data quality tools. There are vendors that provide independent systems on metadata management. But such systems look more like a metadata source rather than a solution. When there are third-party applications that are focused on one or a few business areas, such as CRM or ERP systems, the management of metadata may become a bit more complicated. The reason is that these vendors do not want users to manipulate its internal infrastructure (because this may lead users to create own systems other than use theirs).
Metadata of an enterprise comes from two types of sources, structured and unstructured. The structured sources are those that people have discussed, documented and agreed on. They are kept well in tools and documents. On the other hand, much of the most useful information is actually unstructured. They are on a Post-It note or just in some people’s mind (and be assumed as commonsense). Still, such information should be well captured and recorded and managed if possible.
What has not been quite established, even nowadays (8 years after this book is published), is the metadata security issue. In general, there are two ways of metadata security, proactive security that prevents unwanted access before it occurs, and reactive security that use audits to check what has happened.
Meta model is important when it comes to a standard for different tools to interchange information. There used to be MDC (based by Microsoft) and CWM meta models (based by OMG folks) but MDC merged into CWM around 2002. Any since XML has been so popular now, the meta model should also be represented by XML.
Here comes my notes of the first part.
Part 1, Laying the Foundation
One reason to have a metadata system is to keep information flexibility and integrity in an enterprise’s IT system. Another reason is that, due to the fast growth of data volume, many enterprises have to split data from a single server to multiple systems and maybe, get a federation server to help people to use it. In such conditions, it becomes much more important to control the metadata.
Most of the metadata systems nowadays are kind of provider of information, not a monitor. But what makes a metadata system the most powerful is when you are able to, not only get the metadata information, but also modify and manage the modification of metadata.
What can be the ROI of metadata? There are quite a few benefits.
1. Data definition reporting
It is, indeed, a very basic metadata solution and it is somewhat a data dictionary. Normally very experienced people cannot sense the importance of this benefit. But for less-experienced IT people and business users, this is a must-have thing.
2. Data quality tracking
Controlling the data redundancy, accuracy, and completeness is always a good issue.
3. Business user access to metadata
If there is a semantic layer between the IT systems and the business users, it will become quite easy for the business users to understand the data. For example, a business user may get a report but want to know how the values in the columns are calculated. Here the business metadata comes into the play.
4. Impact analysis
If an enterprise has a whole-wide metadata system, it becomes very easy to do impact analysis on most subjects. And if the data is kept at a high quality, the result of the impact analysis will be a very excellent input to decision-making or enterprise analysis.
A good example to understand what metadata is, is the card catalog in the library. Normally, in a data warehouse environment, there are two types of metadata, technical and business. You can look at the target group for these two types. The technical metadata is the metadata that supports technical and IT users. The business metadata supports business users.
Even external data is quite ad hoc and unstable, it is quite important, when external data source is used, to have and maintain the metadata of external data source.
There are majorly three types of users for metadata, business users, technical users, and power users.
In a data life cycle of a data warehouse, there are many parts, or components that can lead to metadata. For example, the ETL tools, the data modeling tools, the reporting tools, and the data quality tools. There are vendors that provide independent systems on metadata management. But such systems look more like a metadata source rather than a solution. When there are third-party applications that are focused on one or a few business areas, such as CRM or ERP systems, the management of metadata may become a bit more complicated. The reason is that these vendors do not want users to manipulate its internal infrastructure (because this may lead users to create own systems other than use theirs).
Metadata of an enterprise comes from two types of sources, structured and unstructured. The structured sources are those that people have discussed, documented and agreed on. They are kept well in tools and documents. On the other hand, much of the most useful information is actually unstructured. They are on a Post-It note or just in some people’s mind (and be assumed as commonsense). Still, such information should be well captured and recorded and managed if possible.
What has not been quite established, even nowadays (8 years after this book is published), is the metadata security issue. In general, there are two ways of metadata security, proactive security that prevents unwanted access before it occurs, and reactive security that use audits to check what has happened.
Meta model is important when it comes to a standard for different tools to interchange information. There used to be MDC (based by Microsoft) and CWM meta models (based by OMG folks) but MDC merged into CWM around 2002. Any since XML has been so popular now, the meta model should also be represented by XML.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
What's new in week 14, 2008
Wednesday, 2008-04-02, Copenhagen
There has been a rumor that Microsoft is testing an online version of Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE). It seems that (if this is TRUE), MS is seriously looking at the threats that Google has put to its desktop tool suite like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. And MS is also launching projects (such as Albany) to compete on this line. Is MS becoming Google or the other way around? No doubts that both sides are working on the web 2.0 direction.
Facebook is revolutionizing from time to time. It recently introduced a ‘People you may know’ feature so that it becomes easier to fill out your buddies list and what’s more to find opportunities to re-connect.
Online document collaboration tools, where it started? Perhaps one could say it can be originated from the time when Google acquired Writely, which was a web-hosted word processing tool. Microsoft now has provided a new service called Officer Live Workspace in order to let people collaborate on documents. And there are other players on this front line. Adobe has Buzzword (a flash-based tool), AOL has just acquired Goowy and of course its online workspace tech. ThinkFree online offers an online office tool and there is Zoho.
Thursday, 2008-04-03, Copenhagen
Apple has just been elected as the most influential brand in the world! The poll is brought out by online magazine brandchannel.com. Microsoft and United States nation brand are numbered 2nd and 3rd. It seems that, by iPod and Mac computers, Apple has really been buries in the mind of a majority of people as the coolest and most impressive stuff.
Ops, there is local news. The Danish telecoms operator TDC just announced that it will offer free music downloads to its mobile phones and broadband Internet customers in cooperation with EMI, Warner Music and Song BMG. Anything in TDC's plan but hidden under our tables? Let us just cross our figures and see.
OOXML vs. ODF? ISO is working on it now. Microsoft has pushed quite hard for the certification of Open Office XML (OOXML) so that it can become an international standard supported by ISO, while Sun has already introduced the Open Document Format (ODF) which is ISO-approved. Google actually used the ODF standard in the Google Documents applications. So this becomes yet-another-war between MS and the ‘open world’ led by Sun.
Comcast has made an agreement with BitTorrent that it will re-configure its network management practices so that users of P2P services will not have discriminated services. Comcast admitted that the P2P traffic used to be ‘delayed’ in peak times. P2P services have been believed to be one of the sources for illegal usage of copyright content. But the net neutrality is the major issue and Comcast seems to be doing the right thing now.
Facebook has made a deal with CareerBuilder to start up a campaign of job recruiting. It seems that the US style of job recruiting is going on the Internet as well. Such an idea was actually adopted by LinkedIn for a quite while.
Friday, 2008-04-04, Copenhagen
Microsoft has been talking about LINQ (Language Integrated Query) for a while and it has made quite a big progress towards this target. LINQ actually merges the gap between programming languages and database. With LINQ, all kinds of data happened in a program flow can be queried like what a standard SQL do to a standard DB dataset. But, my question is, are you trying to clear things out or are you trying to confuse people more? My belief is that LINQ will be a generation but just a generation, meaning that it definitely be replaced and people may come back to the time that language should be separated from database (remember what FoxPro and FoxBase did?).
NAC, network access control, is a good idea for people to be able to have full and flexible control of their networks. Right now there are only two vendors in the market, Cisco and Microsoft. Most other competitors are either disappeared or moved to other business scenarios.
There has been a rumor that Microsoft is testing an online version of Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE). It seems that (if this is TRUE), MS is seriously looking at the threats that Google has put to its desktop tool suite like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. And MS is also launching projects (such as Albany) to compete on this line. Is MS becoming Google or the other way around? No doubts that both sides are working on the web 2.0 direction.
Facebook is revolutionizing from time to time. It recently introduced a ‘People you may know’ feature so that it becomes easier to fill out your buddies list and what’s more to find opportunities to re-connect.
Online document collaboration tools, where it started? Perhaps one could say it can be originated from the time when Google acquired Writely, which was a web-hosted word processing tool. Microsoft now has provided a new service called Officer Live Workspace in order to let people collaborate on documents. And there are other players on this front line. Adobe has Buzzword (a flash-based tool), AOL has just acquired Goowy and of course its online workspace tech. ThinkFree online offers an online office tool and there is Zoho.
Thursday, 2008-04-03, Copenhagen
Apple has just been elected as the most influential brand in the world! The poll is brought out by online magazine brandchannel.com. Microsoft and United States nation brand are numbered 2nd and 3rd. It seems that, by iPod and Mac computers, Apple has really been buries in the mind of a majority of people as the coolest and most impressive stuff.
Ops, there is local news. The Danish telecoms operator TDC just announced that it will offer free music downloads to its mobile phones and broadband Internet customers in cooperation with EMI, Warner Music and Song BMG. Anything in TDC's plan but hidden under our tables? Let us just cross our figures and see.
OOXML vs. ODF? ISO is working on it now. Microsoft has pushed quite hard for the certification of Open Office XML (OOXML) so that it can become an international standard supported by ISO, while Sun has already introduced the Open Document Format (ODF) which is ISO-approved. Google actually used the ODF standard in the Google Documents applications. So this becomes yet-another-war between MS and the ‘open world’ led by Sun.
Comcast has made an agreement with BitTorrent that it will re-configure its network management practices so that users of P2P services will not have discriminated services. Comcast admitted that the P2P traffic used to be ‘delayed’ in peak times. P2P services have been believed to be one of the sources for illegal usage of copyright content. But the net neutrality is the major issue and Comcast seems to be doing the right thing now.
Facebook has made a deal with CareerBuilder to start up a campaign of job recruiting. It seems that the US style of job recruiting is going on the Internet as well. Such an idea was actually adopted by LinkedIn for a quite while.
Friday, 2008-04-04, Copenhagen
Microsoft has been talking about LINQ (Language Integrated Query) for a while and it has made quite a big progress towards this target. LINQ actually merges the gap between programming languages and database. With LINQ, all kinds of data happened in a program flow can be queried like what a standard SQL do to a standard DB dataset. But, my question is, are you trying to clear things out or are you trying to confuse people more? My belief is that LINQ will be a generation but just a generation, meaning that it definitely be replaced and people may come back to the time that language should be separated from database (remember what FoxPro and FoxBase did?).
NAC, network access control, is a good idea for people to be able to have full and flexible control of their networks. Right now there are only two vendors in the market, Cisco and Microsoft. Most other competitors are either disappeared or moved to other business scenarios.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Notes of Ch. 2 for "Beyond Software Architecture"
Sometimes software developers may not be the best candidate for creating a winning solution if they do not have a clear view of what is product management.
So, what is product management? It has many definitions. There are two sides in product management. From a product manager’s point of view, these two are the internal and external sides. The external side is about to go to the customers (or, users) and turn their requirements into strategies and objectives of the product. The internal side is about to let the organization to support and implement the strategies and objectives.
Why should we think about product management before talking anything about architecture? Generally speaking, what you delivered, as a software product, must be maintained, upgraded, re-developed by a set of people in your developing organization. Then it matters quite a lot that, at the beginning of developing this product, you start by considering how the software is managed by the product management team. Without a successful product management, no architecture can be said as successful.
There are many product development models, such as the waterfall, spiral, and XP. What makes these models successful in individual teams, is that one must bare in mind that the delivery is not just a software-thing, it is a suite of things, including a software, a set of product management protocols, and so on. The principles behind the agile development method should be very well understood by modern software teams. One important thing is to put test always in the first place. Before you design anything, design the test first.
Normally a product development process starts from a business plan and then a project proposal and so on. When we come to new releases, it is very important that all differences in the different releases are captured in at least one document. The book mentioned a “marketing requirements document (MRD)” to keep track of these differences.
There are quite a few things important to the product development cycle.
1. Freezing. When we work on stuff in a serious manner, it is always important to have test, freeze, and production environments. Freezing environment is where we put a batch of updates together and commit, test them before these updates are finally moved to production.
2. Change management should always be thought of as something should be documented, implemented, tested, analyzed, and linked to the source of change.
3. Documentation is always a challenge. It is always hard to know how much documentation is enough or what kinds of documentation is enough for the users and the product management team.
4. Recycle Bin. It is always a good idea to say “no” if you know that you do not have enough capacity to develop a new feature required by the customer. Just put it to a recycle bin and get back in the next life cycle of the product.
Actually modern software architecture design must also be tightly connected to the product marketing process. There are 4 “Ps” of marking, i.e., product, price (and the business model), place (distribution channel), and promotion (advertising and marketing communication). In fact some of these can be considered in the architecture design and be implemented accordingly. One should also look at a market segmentation when thinking about the architecture design of the product.
So, what is product management? It has many definitions. There are two sides in product management. From a product manager’s point of view, these two are the internal and external sides. The external side is about to go to the customers (or, users) and turn their requirements into strategies and objectives of the product. The internal side is about to let the organization to support and implement the strategies and objectives.
Why should we think about product management before talking anything about architecture? Generally speaking, what you delivered, as a software product, must be maintained, upgraded, re-developed by a set of people in your developing organization. Then it matters quite a lot that, at the beginning of developing this product, you start by considering how the software is managed by the product management team. Without a successful product management, no architecture can be said as successful.
There are many product development models, such as the waterfall, spiral, and XP. What makes these models successful in individual teams, is that one must bare in mind that the delivery is not just a software-thing, it is a suite of things, including a software, a set of product management protocols, and so on. The principles behind the agile development method should be very well understood by modern software teams. One important thing is to put test always in the first place. Before you design anything, design the test first.
Normally a product development process starts from a business plan and then a project proposal and so on. When we come to new releases, it is very important that all differences in the different releases are captured in at least one document. The book mentioned a “marketing requirements document (MRD)” to keep track of these differences.
There are quite a few things important to the product development cycle.
1. Freezing. When we work on stuff in a serious manner, it is always important to have test, freeze, and production environments. Freezing environment is where we put a batch of updates together and commit, test them before these updates are finally moved to production.
2. Change management should always be thought of as something should be documented, implemented, tested, analyzed, and linked to the source of change.
3. Documentation is always a challenge. It is always hard to know how much documentation is enough or what kinds of documentation is enough for the users and the product management team.
4. Recycle Bin. It is always a good idea to say “no” if you know that you do not have enough capacity to develop a new feature required by the customer. Just put it to a recycle bin and get back in the next life cycle of the product.
Actually modern software architecture design must also be tightly connected to the product marketing process. There are 4 “Ps” of marking, i.e., product, price (and the business model), place (distribution channel), and promotion (advertising and marketing communication). In fact some of these can be considered in the architecture design and be implemented accordingly. One should also look at a market segmentation when thinking about the architecture design of the product.
Monday, March 24, 2008
What's new in week 13, 2008
Monday, 2008-03-24, Copenhagen
Safari is known mostly to Mac users. But it seems that this browser is trying to join the competition between MS IE and Mozilla’s Firefox. The recent release of Safari 3.1 is claimed to be an excellent tool for both MS and Mac users. Most of the foundational work of Safari comes from the WebKit open source project. The key feature of Safari is speed and simplicity. Safari has the best score on the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test. However, the feature also brings disadvantages to the tool. As compared to Firefox, the extended features of Safari seem poor.
Sun has recently released NetBeans 6.1 IDE with extended features to support Java, C/C++, JavaScript and Ruby. MySQL is more tightly-binded with NetBeans in this new release. It seems that Sun is building a similar IDE platform to the Visual Studio from MS. Hopefully the developers all over the world can benefit from this competition.
IBM has recently introduced a new BI tool, called ProAct. It is a tool to help companies automate customer interaction tasks and boost sales. The software is developed by the IBM India research lab. It does not seem that this tool will be very well integrated with Information Server platform, but rather stay as a standalone system.
Unified threat management (UTM) solutions are quite popular among SMBs. It takes quite a cost to have people that are able to maintain the multiple devices that take care of different aspects of threats, such as firewall, anti-spam, malware detection, web content filter, physical hookups, licenses, services and support. Most SMBs are looking for a unified solution that minimizes the maintenance cost of the different tools.
An IDE for SQL developers? Yes! Embarcadero just shipped PowerSQL, an Eclipse-based SQL development tool. The tool supports Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, and DB2. It seems that everybody is trying to extend Eclipse to everything (except MS, of course) and people are now seriously looking at the importance of database developers.
Tuesday, 2008-03-25, Copenhagen
Sun has just upgraded its virtualization software, VDI, to support the management of virtual desktop sessions on operation systems like Solaris OS, Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. It seems that, in addition to VMWare and MS, other OS vendors are also looking into the “virtualization” cake.
IBM just launched its first cloud computing center in Europe. The Cloud Computing Center is located in Dublin, Ireland and offers the same types of services and technology as in the Blue Cloud program. In addition, IBM has developed yet-another social networking application for business for cloud computing, called “Idea Factory.” The collaboration platform is targeted for business users inside an enterprise.
BI in Google spreadsheet? Yes! Google just said that it is using the BI software from Panorama, a Toronto-based software company to let users have analytical and reporting tools. Given that Panorama formerly sold its OLAP platform to Microsoft in 1996 (which is then rebranded as SSAS and has been very successful since then), Google’s action with Panorama seems to be a step forward to challenge the market of MS Office and BI platforms.
Wednesday, 2008-03-26, Copenhagen
Blist just went public two days ago and opened its social database application to the internet folks. Any user of Blist can create a database that uses a spread-sheet style front-end. Users create databases, called Blists, to store information for private use and for groups to collaborate. The great idea behind Blist, is that, even you have a social network with a lot of participants, you may not be able to connect to the right person at the right time. The reason is that you do not have enough information on the other folks in the same community. On the other hand, nobody would like to open his/her own information totally public. How do you spread your part of the knowledge/skill/stories/what-ever in the network? The technology can help you. If you keep your data in the database and let a kind of “data-miner” to work on it, when other people are searching for something related to the same stuff, the “data-miner” will be able to “RELATE” you and your stuff to those people. By doing that, we can easily find and use everybody’s expertise in an optimal way. Of course, users of Blist may experience privacy and security problems in the future. But the great idea of collaboration improvement behind this tool is more important and exciting.
Thursday, 2008-03-27, Copenhagen
British Telecom (BT) moving to Asia area? Yes. It is not new information any more. BT has just completed its acquisition of a Singapore-based firm, Frontline Technology. The Singapore-based company is listed on Singapore Exchange and has operations in most countries of south-eastern Asia. BT seems to be quite a bit interested in the growing market in this area.
What to note for Vertica? It is a company that produces RDBMS. Their product is majorly focused on the data warehouse and business intelligence market. The special thing about Vertica RDBMS is that it is a column-based RDBMS (while the traditional ones are row-based). It seems that the company chooses to go for a complete different direction from all the other RDBMS vendors. It may be interesting to know how long this RDBMS will exist (or maybe all the others will disappear).
While we have had so many social networking sites (Facebook, Bebo, LinedIn, hi5, Zorpia, …) in the internet planet, should there be anyone who finally unite or unify these networks? Yes, it is Microsoft. It seems that MS is seriously looking into the big pie of internet and starting to open its bloody mouth. When you can unite these networks, of course you can bring more users (either from these networks or new ones) to the world that you have designed to be. When all the users are so much dependent on your, you can just leave those networks so that they die out soon.
What is Imeem? As described on its website, “imeem is an online community where millions of fans and artists discover new music, videos, and photos, and share their tastes with friends.” What is interesting about this community is that it publishes a lot of OpenAPI so that other developers can use these APIs to create tools for the application. This is a brilliant idea for attracting man power from the open source community. But, wait a minute, how can we make sure that these outside applications do not bring security leaks? Apparently you cannot force out-house developers to following your development model, but then, what is the maintenance cost when you decide to adopt one provided from the outsiders?
Friday, 2008-03-28, Copenhagen
Is PostgreSQL just an open source toy? Definitely not! A lot of people have already been working on different extensions of PostgreSQL and there are software vendors that seriously take the energy from the open source community and utilize the tool in a commercial way. For example, EnterpriseDB, with a successful new round of Series C venture capital financing, has just released Postgres Plus 8.3 and Postgres Plus Advanced Server 8.3. Maybe PostgreSQL will be the only tool left for medium-size vendors to work on after MySQL is acquired by Sun.
Yahoo and Google just started an initiative that developers from both sides will create an open framework for social networks. This is a threat to the big network-owners like MySpace or Facebook. But on the other hand, this is always an ultimate destiny of all different networks. If you stay isolated, you will die our very soon. Everyone needs to connect to the rest of the world.
Microsoft is reaching the VOIP market and focusing on SMBs. Normally it takes a big cost when you move your office from one geographical location to another. I am not saying the cost of hiring someone to move the tables, but the cost of hiring someone who is able to re-configure everything in the new location so that the IT systems work the way it is expected to be. One important part is the VOIP system which used to be very complicated to play with. For SMBs, this is a serious problem. MS just had a new release of its VOIP Response Point phone system which is aimed to strip away the need for expertise with VOIP. The ultimate target is to let even the business users able to install and configure the system without any technical support. I am wondering what will happened when MS links its VOIP part with the rest of the unified communication plan (then there comes another big piece of cake).
Motorola is splitting into two parts, with the handset division being standalone in the future and the rest business stay in the other part. As Motorola is already losing its handset market in the US (from number 2 down to number 3, overtaken by Samsung), to split up may be a very good idea to re-boom the business.
SAS is seriously taking steps to occupy future BI markets. Last week, SAS announced its acquision of Teragram, a provider of multilingual natural language processing technologies and text analytics. At some point in history, people in the BI market were talking about text-based business intelligence and this only seems to be a bit far away from reality. Now SAS are taking its first step towards this trend. I bet other big vendors will follow very soon.
Safari is known mostly to Mac users. But it seems that this browser is trying to join the competition between MS IE and Mozilla’s Firefox. The recent release of Safari 3.1 is claimed to be an excellent tool for both MS and Mac users. Most of the foundational work of Safari comes from the WebKit open source project. The key feature of Safari is speed and simplicity. Safari has the best score on the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test. However, the feature also brings disadvantages to the tool. As compared to Firefox, the extended features of Safari seem poor.
Sun has recently released NetBeans 6.1 IDE with extended features to support Java, C/C++, JavaScript and Ruby. MySQL is more tightly-binded with NetBeans in this new release. It seems that Sun is building a similar IDE platform to the Visual Studio from MS. Hopefully the developers all over the world can benefit from this competition.
IBM has recently introduced a new BI tool, called ProAct. It is a tool to help companies automate customer interaction tasks and boost sales. The software is developed by the IBM India research lab. It does not seem that this tool will be very well integrated with Information Server platform, but rather stay as a standalone system.
Unified threat management (UTM) solutions are quite popular among SMBs. It takes quite a cost to have people that are able to maintain the multiple devices that take care of different aspects of threats, such as firewall, anti-spam, malware detection, web content filter, physical hookups, licenses, services and support. Most SMBs are looking for a unified solution that minimizes the maintenance cost of the different tools.
An IDE for SQL developers? Yes! Embarcadero just shipped PowerSQL, an Eclipse-based SQL development tool. The tool supports Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, and DB2. It seems that everybody is trying to extend Eclipse to everything (except MS, of course) and people are now seriously looking at the importance of database developers.
Tuesday, 2008-03-25, Copenhagen
Sun has just upgraded its virtualization software, VDI, to support the management of virtual desktop sessions on operation systems like Solaris OS, Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. It seems that, in addition to VMWare and MS, other OS vendors are also looking into the “virtualization” cake.
IBM just launched its first cloud computing center in Europe. The Cloud Computing Center is located in Dublin, Ireland and offers the same types of services and technology as in the Blue Cloud program. In addition, IBM has developed yet-another social networking application for business for cloud computing, called “Idea Factory.” The collaboration platform is targeted for business users inside an enterprise.
BI in Google spreadsheet? Yes! Google just said that it is using the BI software from Panorama, a Toronto-based software company to let users have analytical and reporting tools. Given that Panorama formerly sold its OLAP platform to Microsoft in 1996 (which is then rebranded as SSAS and has been very successful since then), Google’s action with Panorama seems to be a step forward to challenge the market of MS Office and BI platforms.
Wednesday, 2008-03-26, Copenhagen
Blist just went public two days ago and opened its social database application to the internet folks. Any user of Blist can create a database that uses a spread-sheet style front-end. Users create databases, called Blists, to store information for private use and for groups to collaborate. The great idea behind Blist, is that, even you have a social network with a lot of participants, you may not be able to connect to the right person at the right time. The reason is that you do not have enough information on the other folks in the same community. On the other hand, nobody would like to open his/her own information totally public. How do you spread your part of the knowledge/skill/stories/what-ever in the network? The technology can help you. If you keep your data in the database and let a kind of “data-miner” to work on it, when other people are searching for something related to the same stuff, the “data-miner” will be able to “RELATE” you and your stuff to those people. By doing that, we can easily find and use everybody’s expertise in an optimal way. Of course, users of Blist may experience privacy and security problems in the future. But the great idea of collaboration improvement behind this tool is more important and exciting.
Thursday, 2008-03-27, Copenhagen
British Telecom (BT) moving to Asia area? Yes. It is not new information any more. BT has just completed its acquisition of a Singapore-based firm, Frontline Technology. The Singapore-based company is listed on Singapore Exchange and has operations in most countries of south-eastern Asia. BT seems to be quite a bit interested in the growing market in this area.
What to note for Vertica? It is a company that produces RDBMS. Their product is majorly focused on the data warehouse and business intelligence market. The special thing about Vertica RDBMS is that it is a column-based RDBMS (while the traditional ones are row-based). It seems that the company chooses to go for a complete different direction from all the other RDBMS vendors. It may be interesting to know how long this RDBMS will exist (or maybe all the others will disappear).
While we have had so many social networking sites (Facebook, Bebo, LinedIn, hi5, Zorpia, …) in the internet planet, should there be anyone who finally unite or unify these networks? Yes, it is Microsoft. It seems that MS is seriously looking into the big pie of internet and starting to open its bloody mouth. When you can unite these networks, of course you can bring more users (either from these networks or new ones) to the world that you have designed to be. When all the users are so much dependent on your, you can just leave those networks so that they die out soon.
What is Imeem? As described on its website, “imeem is an online community where millions of fans and artists discover new music, videos, and photos, and share their tastes with friends.” What is interesting about this community is that it publishes a lot of OpenAPI so that other developers can use these APIs to create tools for the application. This is a brilliant idea for attracting man power from the open source community. But, wait a minute, how can we make sure that these outside applications do not bring security leaks? Apparently you cannot force out-house developers to following your development model, but then, what is the maintenance cost when you decide to adopt one provided from the outsiders?
Friday, 2008-03-28, Copenhagen
Is PostgreSQL just an open source toy? Definitely not! A lot of people have already been working on different extensions of PostgreSQL and there are software vendors that seriously take the energy from the open source community and utilize the tool in a commercial way. For example, EnterpriseDB, with a successful new round of Series C venture capital financing, has just released Postgres Plus 8.3 and Postgres Plus Advanced Server 8.3. Maybe PostgreSQL will be the only tool left for medium-size vendors to work on after MySQL is acquired by Sun.
Yahoo and Google just started an initiative that developers from both sides will create an open framework for social networks. This is a threat to the big network-owners like MySpace or Facebook. But on the other hand, this is always an ultimate destiny of all different networks. If you stay isolated, you will die our very soon. Everyone needs to connect to the rest of the world.
Microsoft is reaching the VOIP market and focusing on SMBs. Normally it takes a big cost when you move your office from one geographical location to another. I am not saying the cost of hiring someone to move the tables, but the cost of hiring someone who is able to re-configure everything in the new location so that the IT systems work the way it is expected to be. One important part is the VOIP system which used to be very complicated to play with. For SMBs, this is a serious problem. MS just had a new release of its VOIP Response Point phone system which is aimed to strip away the need for expertise with VOIP. The ultimate target is to let even the business users able to install and configure the system without any technical support. I am wondering what will happened when MS links its VOIP part with the rest of the unified communication plan (then there comes another big piece of cake).
Motorola is splitting into two parts, with the handset division being standalone in the future and the rest business stay in the other part. As Motorola is already losing its handset market in the US (from number 2 down to number 3, overtaken by Samsung), to split up may be a very good idea to re-boom the business.
SAS is seriously taking steps to occupy future BI markets. Last week, SAS announced its acquision of Teragram, a provider of multilingual natural language processing technologies and text analytics. At some point in history, people in the BI market were talking about text-based business intelligence and this only seems to be a bit far away from reality. Now SAS are taking its first step towards this trend. I bet other big vendors will follow very soon.
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