Data Management Strategies

Testers give Microsoft’s Entity Framework a no-confidence vote | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

A timely reality check for Microsoft; see the full post for more details

A number of testers who’ve been dabbing with the first version of Microsoft’s ADO.Net Entity Framework are unhappy with the direction Microsoft has taken with the technology — so much so that they’ve created a “no confidence vote” petition to make their gripes public.

As of June 24, more than 150 testers had signed the petition, including several Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs).

Testers give Microsoft’s Entity Framework a no-confidence vote | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

News Release: Progress Software Corporation [acquires IONA]

More market consolidation and a logical extension of the Progress product family; see the full press release for more details

The combination of Progress Software and IONA creates the industry choice for truly independent, heterogeneous Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) infrastructure. IONA products complement the Progress SOA Portfolio with leading edge, best-in-class technology now with the widest variety of heterogeneous deployment options and interoperability. And IONA brings an experienced and talented team to Progress that has built a reputation with Global 2000 enterprises for addressing the most complex integration challenges through innovative and cost-effective solutions.

Through its Artix(TM) product line, IONA provides some of the industry's most advanced Web-standards based integration technologies in support of a SOA. In addition, IONA offers open source SOA integration components through its FUSE(TM) product line. And, for 15 years, IONA has been the industry leader in CORBA integration technology, a well-established integration standard currently relied upon in mission-critical IT systems of some of the world's largest companies.

News Release: Progress Software Corporation

Gates hints about Microsoft’s cloud futures on his way out | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

The WinFS vision continues; read the full article for more context-setting

Gates emphasized that he still believes the WinFS concept is important and would meet an unsolved need.

“(T)here is a famous quest of mine called integrated storage, where you have not just a file system but more of a very flexible object-type database: things like your contacts, calendars, favorites, your photos, your music—how you rate those things are stored in a much more structured environment. And so they can be navigated easily and move between applications very easily. And that hasn’t happened. It will happen as part of the move to cloud storage. We will get this extra storage structure. Say you want to move data between multiple phones, multiple PCs, TV, car. You don’t just want to move files, you want to move things that have more structure. So there’s integrated storage or unified storage that hasn’t happened yet, and that’s too bad. You see a little bit of it where Apple and Microsoft are doing string indexes in the background, but it’s only a partial step. It doesn’t give you the full structure. “

Bits and pieces of WinFS are finding their way into SQL Server and other Microsoft products, but it definitely sounds like Gates is hoping the company he founded will find a way to take the WinFS concept further as it is designing/developing future iterations of Windows.

Gates hints about Microsoft’s cloud futures on his way out | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

Prototype - How a G.P.S. Can Predict Group Behavior - NYTimes.com

An interesting snapshot of "reality mining"

Just this month, the journal Nature published a paper that looked at cellphone data from 100,000 people in an unnamed European country over six months and found that most follow very predictable routines. Knowing those routines means that you can set probabilities for them, and track how they change.

“What we do is really not random, even though it may appear random,” says Albert-László Barabási, a physicist at Northeastern University who is one of the paper’s authors.

It’s hard to make sense of such data, but Sense Networks, a software analytics company in New York, earlier this month released Macrosense, a tool that aims to do just that. Macrosense applies complex statistical algorithms to sift through the growing heaps of data about location and to make predictions or recommendations on various questions — where a company should put its next store, for example. Gregory Skibiski, 34, the chief executive and a co-founder of Sense, says the company has been testing its software with a major retailer, a major financial services firm and a large hedge fund.

p.s. Albert-László Barabási's Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means is a classic, imho

Blogger: Peter O'Kelly

Prototype - How a G.P.S. Can Predict Group Behavior - NYTimes.com

DMS 2008 theme #2, part 2: XQuery to the rescue

(Oops -- sorry about letting so much time sneak by since part 1 on this topic; I got detoured preparing for our Burton Group Catalyst conference next week and attending Microsoft TechEd last week, but the DMS team is committed to making this blog a sustained and regularly updated conversation on data-centric topics, so expect the post frequency to increase as we get into and beyond Catalyst.)

Part 1 on this topic concluded with a summary of ideal attributes for an XML query (general-purpose XML content manipulation, actually) language.  XQuery does a great job of addressing those goals, and its role in the common XML processing pipeline is depicted below:

Specifically:

• XQuery is an efficient and effective means of working with information resources including databases, documents, and programming language data structures.
• It doesn't require developer brain transplants, but it is generally more accessible to people familiar with SQL than to people who have been working with content/document-focused systems in the past.
• XQuery has strong potential to replace the use of multiple programming languages often used for XML query and structural transformation operations.  In this respect, it's a lot like the shift to SQL more than 20 years ago, in that a lot of difficult-to-maintain procedural code can be replaced with more a declarative, set-oriented (and easier to maintain) approach.
• XQuery is a W3C Recommendation, building on other W3C work including XPath (updated in conjunction with XQuery) and XML Schema (the XSD data type model, although XQuery is not exclusively tied to XSD), along with other related standards such as SQL.
• XQuery is not, despite its name, just for queries.  It is an XML data manipulation language, designed for declarative expressions that can be optimized by servers, but it also includes variables, conditional expressions, function and modular declarations, and extension points. The W3C XQuery working group is also expanding XQuery to include insert, update, and delete operations.
• XQuery is not a replacement for SQL; it's designed to be used in conjunction with SQL, as the languages are designed for different data models -- SQL is for the extended relational model, and XQuery is for (ideally well-structured/schema-described) XML content.

Overall, XQuery has significant potential to simplify XML query and structural transformation concerns, and, as support for XQuery increases in a variety of software product categories, XQuery is poised to become, for XML content, what SQL is for relational databases.

Blogger: Peter O'Kelly

Data, and more data, is the big theme at Microsoft's Tech-Ed show

See the full article for more data-related Microsoft news from TechEd.

Microsoft Corp. is kicking off the first of two back-to-back Tech-Ed conferences in Orlando this morning with a slew of product announcements, and one theme is standing out: data management.

For instance, Microsoft said it is partnering with IBM to let software developers use Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System Database Edition tools to program and test IBM's DB2 database, even while working offline. An initial Community Technology Preview (CTP) release of the DB2-enabled tool set is expected in the fall, said Jonathan Perera, general manager of Microsoft's application platform division.

Apologies for the delay in completing my XQuery post series, BTW; I've been busy preparing for Burton Group's Catalyst conference but will resume the series ASAP.

Data, and more data, is the big theme at Microsoft's Tech-Ed show