Seeking Alpha is, mostly, a stock touts paradise. Every so often one comes across an article which is trend seeking, rather than stock pumping (or, as the term is used, bashing). Today is such a day. This article explores the trend in internet connections from the point of view of ads. I don't much care about internet ads; I avoid them with AdBlock Plus. You should, too.
But the article, reading between the lines, makes my case again for high NF datastores. Just as there is less real estate for ads, there is less real estate for user data. In order to maximize the utility of phones, the data has be amenable to fine dicing while remaining coherent and meaningful. Having been embroiled in a few attempts to take VSAM data, conveniently stuffed into DB2 tables, and disassemble it into bite size pieces, I've decided I won't do that any more. Get it right the first time, as Mike Holmes counsels.
Dr. Codd's goal in devising the RM was to define the minimum cover of a datastore (here is presentation which explains the RM that way; see slide 10 and following). In 1969, when he first presented his findings internally at IBM, IMS was the new kid on the block and on its way to being a cash cow. It was not, however, a very coherent datastore. Just as the lawyers at IBM had devised GML (which later morphed into SGML and still later into html and xml) about the same time, IMS was an ad hoc answer to the general problem of BOM processing. Codd saw the flaws and changed the game with the RM. The Suits in Armonk were not pleased, and Larry Ellison grab the ball and ran with it.
In the 1960's DASD was still something of a new idea, and rather expensive compared to 9-track tape. COBOL was coming into wider use, after assembler, and was built on a file/record sequential processing paradigm. Stuffing all the "related" data into as few files as possible simplified, in a perverse way, applications. Applications of that era, to use today's terms, were siloed.
Fast forward with Mr. Peabody to today, and the demand for smaller, coherent data interaction will only increase. If that sounds a bit oxymoronic, well I won't argue. Think of feeding a baby versus Jabba the Hut.
IFF AI, as currently implemented, can intuit Special Relativity from just a clock tower and a moving tram will I take AI seriously.
Infinite granularity yields infinite complexity.
The Kleptocracy of Muskistan Devours You
The world is not linear.
-- Dr. McElhone/1974
[T]he massive push to relocate federal jobs outside the Beltway comes with the risk of kneecapping agencies through the loss of experienced workers and bogging them down in logistical minutia.
-- Curt Devine/2024 [that's the point: make the Damn Gummint incompetent, then destroy it because it's incompetent]
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. -- Dr. McElhone/1974
[T]he massive push to relocate federal jobs outside the Beltway comes with the risk of kneecapping agencies through the loss of experienced workers and bogging them down in logistical minutia.
-- Curt Devine/2024 [that's the point: make the Damn Gummint incompetent, then destroy it because it's incompetent]
-- 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
[Scotland's HPV] vaccination program began in 2008, and so far the women who were vaccinated as 12- or 13-year-olds have shown not one single case of cervical cancer. And the rate in women who were vaccinated at later ages was 80% lower than the unvaccinated. Cervical cancer is almost completely preventable through such vaccination programs, and the anti-vaccine activists who have come out against them (such as the dangerous fool nominated to be secretary of HHS) can go to hell. -- Derek Lowe/2024 [the morons will be running the asylum, if we let them]
See you next week in a brand new show©Heckle and Jeckle
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment