george.james's blog

There's a new arrival in the blogosphere called The Database Column.

There's an impressive array of contributors lined-up, but so far it seems like an advertising vehicle for Michael Stonebraker's Vertica database. Time will tell whether there is any substance to this blog.

Anyway, the first article there One size fits all discusses the use of column oriented storage as being particularly effective for data warehouse purposes. Stonebraker makes some impressive performance claims for his own product in this respect.

It would be interesting to see how Vertica matches up to Caché and whether column-centric data stores would be a good design pattern for some of our databases. Performance for fetching a single column might be good, but wouldn't it suck if you needed several columns?

The lightning talks session is where we invite you to give a five minute talk on any subject of your choice.

This is your chance to tell everyone about your current project or some cool technology you've been using. Or maybe tell us about some problems you've encountered or show off a clever solution.

Lightning talks are your forum for sharing your thoughts and achievements with your peers.

If you are interested in giving a talk, just check the box on the registration form or send an email to Michelle: michelles@georgejames.com.

If our one-day conference is not enough for you why not make a weekend of it?

The day after InterSystems are running a free seminar in Eton about Java Persistence. They appear to be taking the heretic's view: "We challenge the view that java persistence should always be mapped to a relational model. This presentation accompanied with live demos will provide an overview of a new persistence option for Java developers, InterSystems Jalapeño™".

Or, if Java is not your thing, then perhaps the conference by the BCS Primary Health Care Specialist Group titled Global Health Records - Putting the Patient at the Heart of Care in Oxford, is more your cup of tea. This runs for two days, Friday 28th and Saturday 29th September. What better way to fill your weekend? You know the weather's going to be terrible so gardening is out of the question anyway.

In my presentation, Querying the Web, I'll be talking about a fundamental shift in the way that we should be thinking about data and databases.

Data is no longer locked up in corporate silos, it's all out there on the Internet just wanting to be used. I'll be talking about both the provision and the consumption of datasets that are exposed to the Internet.

To whet your appetite, I really recommend that you read this article by Google's Adam Bosworth[1] which says The Web has much to teach us about managing and modeling distributed data. It's time we began listening.... In particular, if you don't read the whole article, do read the six points on the last page about the implications for databases, IMHO he's right on the money.

[1] Incidentally, Adam Bosworth is currently VP of Google Health, which is going to be very big indeed and is worth keeping an eye on.