
Salesforce and the New Bucket of Bits. Phoenix, Ashes.
When Salesforce.com and Oracle announced a renewal of their vows last year I was kind of surprised. Why would Salesforce deepen its reliance on the Oracle database at a time when others across the industry were lessening their reliance on that venerable and not inexpensive platform. To be fair Oracle database has excellent high availability […]

The Old “Don’t Bring Up a Problem Unless You Have a Proposed Solution” Rule
There’s a rule out there, undoubtedly made long ago, and circulated widely as conventional wisdom that in the workplace you should never bring up a problem unless you have a proposed solution. For example, consider the following excerpt from this Inc Magazine article, Eight Things Great Bosses Demand from Employees: Rule 6: Provide Solutions, Not […]

A Question of Granularity
There is a long simmering issue coming back to the front burner these days. It’s the question of best of breed software vs. a single system. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought and realized something. The old discussion says that best of breed opens up application areas to greater competition from more vendors. […]

Enterprise headlines and excerpts, 2010-01-31
Enterprise news and headlines, second half of January 2011 Salesforce.com takes it to a new level with Super Bowl ads, SAP and Microsoft reposition themselves for the cloud – while juggling execs and responsibilities, Microsoft sues former employees and their new employers, Oracle raises the ire of the open source community, Microsoft and SAP deliver […]

Aster Data Adds Columnar Storage, Puts Stake in Ground for Hybrid Multistores
Aster Data has announced its new version, nCluster 4.6, which now includes a column data store, staking a claim as the first ADBMS to combine SQL and MapReduce on a hybrid row and column MPP system. While its R&D has hitherto been focused on enabling advanced in-database analytic processing in its flagship “Data-Analytics Server, ” […]

What can we learn from software development job posts? (Java, SAP, Oracle, SQL, and C#/C++ will get you a job!)
Several months ago, I posted some analysis of IT-related jobs listed on Dice and Monster. At the time, the hot job skills were SQL, Java, and XML. Things haven’t changed much since April – although some specific skills have moved down or up on the list. In summary, here are some conclusions we can draw […]