Under whelming shock and awe

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A whale of a time - what’s so good about Docker? A good idea often has many parents. This is how it is for Docker. Docker looks like a trending, shiny new piece of technology, and a required part of a software developer’s vocabulary. To be used liberally. But the idea behind Docker - containerisation - is not new and the same concept is used even in proprietary software. Docker does appear to have the most accessible implementation to date, though. Their logo, a whale loaded up with containers is a perfect image for this company and its main product. Those of us that have used Solaris may recognise these ‘containers’ as ‘zones’, which have been in Solaris for some time. Mainframe people may even see a glimmer of IBM MVS. Let me describe the main idea behind Docker. For maybe 10 years, people have been using Virtual machines (VM). Each VM contains a complete copy of an Operating System (OS). This is flexible, in that each VM can have a different OS and be completely isolated from

My life with Oracle

As an undergraduate student studying computer science I became very interested in databases. At the time, Relational databases were a subject for books, especially C.J Date’s Introduction to relational databases. There was a chapter on relational algebra. I chose to implement a working version of relational algebra as my final year project. It sounds easy, but I decided that for convenience I would develop the project on a micro computer (PC), using Pascal. The main issue was having only 64kb of memory. Some time later, and after a few job changes, I landed a software development job with an American company, CINCOM. They developed and sold database software for IBM mainframes and DEC VAX computers. The UK office was responsible for development of the non-mainframe versions of the software; VAX, IBM PC, Solaris, etc. What made me decide to join was that they had just started a project in trying to enter the relational database market. My project was to write a SQL interface

My life with Oracle As an undergraduate student studying computer science I became very interested in databases. At the time, Relational databases were a subject for books, especially C.J Date’s Introduction to relational databases. There was a chapter on relational algebra. I chose to implement a working version of relational algebra as my final year project. It sounds easy, but I decided that for convenience I would develop the project on a micro computer (PC), using Pascal. The main issue was having only 64kb of memory. Some time later, and after a few job changes, I landed a software development job with an American company, CINCOM. They developed and sold database software for IBM mainframes and DEC VAX computers. The UK office was responsible for development of the non-mainframe versions of the software; VAX, IBM PC, Solaris, etc. What made me decide to join was that they had just started a project in trying to enter the relational database market. My project was to write

Ada Lovelace - an inspiration

Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, may not just have been the first computer programmer - she may also have been the first data scientist. At around the age of 17, she met Charles Babbage, a mathematician and inventor. The pair became friends, and the much older Babbage served as a mentor to Ada. Babbage is known as the father of computing. He invented the ‘Difference Engine’, which was meant to perform mathematical calculations. Ada got a chance to look at the machine before it was finished, and was captivated by it. Babbage also made plans for another device, known as the ‘Analytical Engine’, designed to handle more complex calculations. Lovelace translated an article about it, and added copious notes of her own. Her notes included what is considered to be the first algorithm for a machine, and so Lovelace is known as the first programmer. Babbage needed money for this machine. The Difference Engine was supported with finance from parliament, but building the

Oracle shards

Oracle Corp after venturing into NoSQL, have now fully stolen the clothes of the open source brigade by implementing a shared nothing sharding schema on top of their industrial strength database engine! Mongo DB aficionados will scream this was implemented in their favorite product years ago! But in reality, many of the largest dot.com's have had to 'cook' up sharding in their preferred databases to achieve web-scale transaction processing. Twitter used 100 instances of Mysql, they also use Apache Cassandra for some applications. facebook appears to have embraced open source HBase. Of course, the landscape is changing every day. The below white paper from Oracle shows that Oracle RAC (cluster) is a far superior way to address ALL data processing needs, from transaction processing to analytics. Sharding is strong when applied to transaction processing tasks. Of course, Oracle RAC is prohibitively expensive! I just wonder if Free Oracle12c express can be deployed in a