One thing that I really like about O'Reilly books is the Rep-Kover binding; the original better than the current, however. I find that most computer texts are near interchangeable with respect to content. It's nearly always marginal, so what matters is ease of use. For that, Rep-Kover is better than current "hardcover" bindings. What I tend to dislike about O'Reilly is their (his?) incessant need to create "new" memes in the computing world. Web 2.0 is, I think, the first; certainly the most infamous so far.
The last few months have seen the aborning of another: Data Science. This one is even worse, in that it seeks to dumb down a perfectly legitimate pair of professions; statistician and operations researcher. Long ago, I got involved in ISO-9000 certification, which was another early attempt to dumb down those professions (these days it's Six Sigma, which I had the pleasure to mentor at CSC). It irritated me then, too. It's of a piece with DIY neurosurgery, although not as directly deadly.
Yesterday's Forbes on-line version published a story about this newfangled profession, in the context of EMC. Regular readers may remember that STEC, gorilla of the Enterprise SSD jungle, first touted, then crashed, on its relationship to EMC. The article whispers that STEC, or whoever is currently supplying, is and will do well.
What's most bothersome about this meme is, as many others have remarked, both math stats and ORs do inferential stats, and inferential stats is based on the math of sampling and inference. The fact is, one needn't have much training to calculate the parameters of populations. Fact is, math stats and ORs don't even refer to these numbers as statistics, because they aren't. It is exactly the same as baseball stats; they aren't stats, just numbers. But, of course, the meme-sters once again wish to wrap themselves in the blanky of higher math.
On the other hand, stats as a profession and work product is more interesting than computers. Even databases, by golly. May be I'll try to parlay both; the article says that such folks (humble self qualifies) are in demand.
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.
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