NoSQL is a Premature Optimization
There’s been a lot of back and forth lately from the NoSQL crowd around Michael Stonebreaker’s contention that reliance on relational technology and MySQL has trapped Facebook in a ‘fate worse than death.’ This was reported in a GigaOm post by Derrick Harris. Harris reports in a later post that most of the reaction […]

Enterprise Headlines and Excerpts, 1-15 April 2011
Tax day. Meh. Some highlights of the first half of April: Marin County tries using racketeering charges against Deloitte and SAP. Do Marin County residents realize their paid employees are wasting their money this way? And after wasting so much money with an ill-advised ERP project?!? Larry Page takes over CEO role at Google, shakes […]

Cloudera Convenes Colleagues to Crunch Content (Make Mine Membase)
Over the past two years, Cloudera has demonstrated the power of surrounding emerging open source software with support services, expertise and its own IP. The firm has racked up over 30 customers since its founding in late 2008, and emerged as the leading source of Apache Hadoop. Cloudera’s recent C round of financing brought its […]

At Oracle, Closed May be the New Open. Whither MySQL?
I hope I can be forgiven the cute headline. It speaks to a series of events that were heard in Oracle Open World messaging, where the word “open” appeared much less frequently than in years past. Oracle is fortifying its borders, opening new fronts in its market battles, and slowly closing itself off from some […]

Internal Email on Why a Software Company Migrates Away from MySQL
Twitter is abuzz this morning with MySQL news: What these messages refer to is that Oracle dropped InnoDB from the free Classic Edition, it is now only available starting with the $2,000 Standard Edition. A few days ago we heard support prices were increased – none of this should come as a surprise, the writing […]

The Guardian: NoSQL EU. Don’t Melt The Database
What follows is something like a live blog, based on comments from Matthew Wall and Simon Willison from The Guardian the NoSQL EU conference in London today. Wall kicked off the talk with a question about NoSQL: is it a good name for the phenomenon? He says not really, pointing out absurdity of calling SQLite […]

What can we learn from software development job posts? (SQL, Java, and XML will get you a job!)
About a year ago, I posted some analysis of what we can learn from job posts. Since then, the job outlook for at least the American economy has substantially declined, but there are still opportunities available if you have – or can develop – the skill…

Minimizing the Cost of SaaS Operations
SaaS software is much more dependent on being run by the numbers than conventional on-premises software because the expenses are front loaded and the costs are back loaded. SAP learned this the hard way with its Business By Design product, for example. If you run the numbers, there is a high degree of correlation between […]

Oracle and Sun – Quick Analysis
Notes and commentary from today’s 5 hour “what we’re going to do with Sun” Oracle event.