March 27, 2010
Quick news, links, comments, etc.
Some notes based on what I’ve been reading recently:
- Tom Foremski outlined the dire (at least in theory) privacy risks of geolocation services, going into a lot more detail on that point than I ever have. However, he topped that off with the odd claim that people pay toll (rather than using an electronic service) to cross the Bay Bridge because they fear being tracked, rather than for reasons of time or money.
- Oracle had an earnings conference call. Larry Dignan did a good job of covering the highlights; the gory details are on the Seeking Alpha transcript, especially pp. 3-5. Oracle now claims to be getting lots of multi-system deals for Exadata. (But I still haven’t seen much in the way of production customers named.) ULAs, which I presume are Unlimited License Agreements, are important on the software side. Besides picking on IBM and SAP, Oracle even touted a competitive win vs. EMC, which not coincidentally seems to be working on partnering with almost every Oracle competitor it can find.
- Brian Prentice of Gartner basically accused open source of being Dotcom 2.0, in terms of dubious business models and the hype associated with same. I agree with many of his particulars, and indeed often steer vendor clients away from open source strategies. For marketing purposes, I do feel that sometimes free can be a real cool price; but open source is not the only way to be free.
- Akiban, which I wrote about a couple of days ago, seems to be building out its website. As of this writing the website is still pretty raw, with bewildering messaging, carelessly repeated paragraphs, and a notable lack of clues as to who’s in company leadership. Even so — unless I missed some of the current stuff before, the site has come a long way in a few days, so maybe there’s hope.
- Groovy Corporation, which introduced the Groovy SQL Switch just last summer, seems to be doing something different now. It’s merged into a company called uCirrus (where the u is really a mu), but uCirrus doesn’t have a meaningful website yet, whereas Groovy does. There’s stuff there about a “push data cloud,” stressing the importance of not being a DBMS, under the name Cortex, whatever that all means. Groovy seems to have an online gaming deal for Cortex with MySpace, or maybe Cortex is just the name of a specific Groovy/MySpace project.
- Mike Mooney offered a long rant on the problems with database (design) version control. He did concede that the most recent Microsoft Visual Studio might help, for those who are bought into (and can afford) the Microsoft stack. Frankly, I think that’s what views are for, updatable or otherwise. In many cases, they’ll let you build what you need, quickly and without breaking anything, and you can leave it to the DBAs to sort out database performance later.
- I just discovered Chad Stewart’s programming blog. While he’s evidently a game programmer, a lot of his comments have broader applicability.
- Chip Hazard offered a VC’s perspectives on the difficulties facing enterprise IT startups. (Hat tip to Miriam Tuerk for turning me on to him.) Although he didn’t phrase it this way, his bottom line (at least the part I agree with) is that the startup’s products have to be amazingly superior to the alternatives (big vendors or in-house).
Categories: Akiban, Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, EMC, Exadata, Fox and MySpace, Games and virtual worlds, Groovy Corporation, IBM and DB2, Open source, Oracle, SAP AG, Theory and architecture
Subscribe to our complete feed!
Comments
Leave a Reply