Such A Touching Tribute!

A bit more than two years ago, along with the first iPad, I considered the future of data stores and tablets. We now have Windows 8, in its three(?) suits of clothes. Back then I mused:

BCNF schemas, doled out in "just the right size" to Goldilocks, is the way forward. Very cool.

So, today we get this view of Win8, and it does sound rather familiar! This writer is new to SA, and on balance does pump pieces. On the other hand, the transition to pickable form factors is inevitable. As I pointed out back in 2010, the pick list implementation on tablets has been around for at least two decades. It may be new to most consumers, and Fortune X00 office drones, but it isn't new to a large swath of software developers.

The victors will be those that embrace the core meme of this endeavor: multi-processor/core/SSD machines on *nix running an industrial strength 5NF database. Only such systems have the capability to serve up small bites of coherent bytes of pickable data, without a tsunami of client (and only for one language) code to sort out the alternative from bloated flat-files, database resident or not.