There is an olde Wendy's commercial with the tag line, "Parts is Parts". I don't even remember the commercial, just the tag. I had to Google to find that it came from Wendy's. Which brings us to today's NY Times, with a Bits article in the Business section of the Dead Tree version. The kernel of the article is that large companies are now buying direct from parts makers, Seagate notably in the article.
This trend, toward in-sourcing of computer functions, bodes well for the ideas behind this endeavor. As companies begin to understand that self-sufficiency in computer technology is not only cheaper, no middleman, but also encourages directed thinking on the problems unique to the business. If it's feasible to construct servers to XYZ Corp's specification by XYZ staff, then why not the software that runs on said servers? Back to the future; of course, this is how the world worked until the mid 1980's (or thereabouts). SAP, Oracle Forms, JD Edwards, et al, were able to convince even large companies (Fortune X00) that the companies were wasting money by building their own business running software.
The so-called Vertical Market software development houses had been around for sometime, catering to small to medium businesses, and were the drivers of the acceptance of Unix (as well as proprietary work alikes, thence Linux) as a viable platform. SAP is just the most effective marketer to the Fortune 500 crowd.
But, if these companies can once again realize that betting one's core business on off-the-shelf is not wise, then they are also capable of understanding that there are also better ways to do this software. Enter, stage right, the SSD based multi-machine running a smart database. I have a dream.
Despite what the reactionaries assert, the world is not flat nor is it hierarchical. The world is relational. Infinite granularity yields infinite complexity.
Vaccinated ≠ Not Infectious
$536,800,000 MARF™(party like it's 1829)
-- New York Slammers, so far/2024 [GA and The Feds still to come]
-- New York Slammers, so far/2024 [GA and The Feds still to come]
Covid-19 has killed at least 1,123,836 people (as of 20 March 2023, final update)
Scientists aren't vocal enough about science. There are large groups of people who think scientists are all frauds and who don't
believe in science, and they're being cultured by some of our far right-wing politicians, religious leaders and community leaders. -- Drew Weissman/2022
To date, Microsoft is stating that organizations testing In-Memory OLTP have
seen transaction speeds improve by up to 30 times compared to past
performance, with the best performance gains achieved when the business
logic resides in the database and not in the applications.
-- Jonathan Watts/2015 [my emphasis]
-- Jonathan Watts/2015 [my emphasis]
I have had to explain and re-explain and re-explain and re-explain, you know, how relational databases work, what is an eigenvector,
what is dimensionality reduction.
-- Christopher Wylie/2018
... but Flash-based storage has such a different performance profile from rotating media, that I suspect that it will end up having
a large impact on filesystem design. Right now, most filesystems tend to be designed with the latencies of rotating media in mind.
-- Linus Torvalds/2007
-- Chris Date/2009
This week's thought
[The intelligence community] argued that [the restrictive amendment] would cripple the program because they typically use it before there is enough evidence to meet a standard of probable cause for a warrant, like early in investigations when they are trying to learn more about a phone number or an email account found to be in contact with a suspected foreign spy or terrorist. -- Charlie Savage/2024 [IOW, let's catch the thief before the horse is out of the barn - the MARF™(party like it's 1829) traitor's worst nightmare]
In a time of SSD, multi-core/processor, two terabyte memory and Optane App Direct Mode machines, there is no reason not to
build from BCNF data. Time to do what Dr. Codd demonstrated. Technology has finally caught up with the maths.
About
- Robert Young
- Been doing databases, both relational and others, as well as operations research since Hector was a Pup.
Shameless Plug
I know a little something about SQL, DB2 (preferably LUW, z/OS if the money's right), Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, and database design in general. Mentoring/teaching/consulting on a short term basis, too. And a bit of stat analysis if it's R.
gnuoytr at rcn dot com.
gnuoytr at rcn dot com.
2 comments:
Back around 1995, my friend Nelson, who had been in the IT field for close to 35 years at that point, told me that the buy vs. build cycle went around about every 10 years or so. Would you concur with this observation? Do you see the build cycle coming again anytime soon? (I read your post as yes, but I've been known to read with colored lenses.)
Not surprisingly, I waffle. On the one hand, SSDs are really taking over, although not fast enough to suit me. On the other, there is still cloud to deal with, again, there is an although: the China kerfuffle, and the recognition that the 'net is inherently unsafe (it was designed explicitly to share documents openly) has led to some pressure to keep data in house.
If the Fortune X00 do the cloud, we may regress back to COBOL/VSAM paradigms since cloud vendors are all about providing a cheap homogeneous utility, which means commodity HDD and various CPUs. Not a pleasant thought. We'll see.
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