What I'm Reading, July 22 2011

KKline — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:43:00 GMT

I read too much, and that, my friends, is an entirely separate topic for a blog post. But I thought I'd share with you a little more about what I'm reading because sometimes, if I'm lucky, it might be something you'd enjoy too. So I'm going to start sharing what I'm reading at least once per week, partly so that I don't firehose too many reading links directly into your brain (where I to do it say once per month) and partly to solidify in my own mind the information that I'm reviewing. So here are a few good links for the seven days leading up to July 22, 2001:

Microsoft and Whitehouse partnership on BigData: BigData isn't a particularly new concept. But I was intrigued to learn that the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, and 13 other teams were partnering on developing better BigData analytics for lots of government data from activities such as healthcare, economic development, education, transportation, and the power grid. Cools stuff! Plus, Microsoft has developed a new tool called Project Daytona to better harness the power of the cloud, in general, and Windows Azure, specifically.
While we're on the topic of Federal IT in the Cloud be sure to read this linked article from ComputerWorld. Say what you will about our government, but putting government IT in the cloud and increasing both its transparency and availability will make a huge difference in how the Federal government will be able to service the public. We're talking as big a difference as corporations experienced between the "catalog on the web" experience of the 1990's to the Web2.0 experience of today.
If you're the social media type, give this article a read discussing the Power of Hashtags in Social Media.
The Register, of the UK, whose tagline is "Biting the hand that feeds IT" has a great article on a spat over database technologies between the IT sage Michael Stonebreaker and Google. It's a great read if for no other reason than to prove that databases are worth fighting over.
And if you think Microsoft is still towing the relational database barge without thinking about other technologies, you need to read up on Projects Dryad and Daytona.
Finally, I'm still getting lots of questions about when and where to limit SQL Server's Max Degrees of Parallelism. Be sure to read Microsoft's Recommendations and Guidelines for 'max degree of parallelism' configuration option here.

And just because so many of us in IT are closet or former musicians, there's Live Guitar Lessons with Steven Krenz, sponsored by my hometown boyz at Gibson Guitar. Got a favorite article or tool tip? Let me know! Enjoy,

-Kev

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Getting Ahead of the Curve – Big Data

KKline — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 14:41:00 GMT

I have to confess that I'm incredibly excited about BigData. I haven't been this excited about new innovations in IT since relational databases first appeared on the scene early in my career. But what is BigData? Back in those days, I can still feel the echos of adrenaline when I was hired to work on a NASA project that would involve over 100Mb of data. ONE HUNDRED MEGABYTES! Good grief, that was fantastically huge to us on the team. (That database was over 130Mb when I finally moved on to another project). And remember - PC software was installed using 640Kb floppy disks at the time. In fact, my Oracle v5 instance required shuffling through about a dozen floppy disks to get the thing installed on a 286 IBM PC. BigData today takes on an entirely meaning as database sizes scale into the petabytes. But the emphasis is still the same today as it was back in the 1980's - turning data into actionable information. However, with BigData, we can achieve amazing new insight from this data and mine for tidbits that would never have seen the light of day with smaller data sets. The two major themes to remember about big data are 1) the more data you have on a given domain, the more power you have, 2) the better the analysis you can perform on the data, the more power you have. In fact, theme 2 might be the most important thing to consider because lots of data is meaningless unless you can extract knowledge from it. And that's where better analytical techniques come into play. Here are some articles about Big Data that you might enjoy:

Let me know what you think. Best regards, -Kev

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What I'm Reading, July 22 2011

Getting Ahead of the Curve – Big Data