Boston Big Data Summit keynote outline
Last month, Bob Zurek asked me to give a talk on “Big Data”, where “big” is anything from a few terabytes on up, then moderate a panel on cloud computing. We agreed that I could talk just from notes,...
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Pranks, apocryphal and otherwise
I’ve been posting a bit about pranks of various kinds, mainly geeky ones. But so far I’ve only covered real pranks, rather than the much funnier imaginary ones. The classic of that genre, of course, is...
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Netezza nails April Fool’s Day
Netezza has nailed April Fool’s Day this year. (Their site will revert to normal after April 1, so I may later edit this post accordingly.) Related links April Fool’s Day 2010 highlights April...
View ArticleThe Wonderful One-Hoss Shay
I often write of Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole, an engineering approach that ensues when parts of a system are out of balance. Well, the flip side of that is the One-Hoss Shay, as in Oliver Wendell Holmes’...
View ArticleSome interesting links
In no particular order: Neil Raden points out that business intelligence dashboards can be dangerously misleading. His reasoning (sound) is that whatever you measure is apt to be distorted by the fact...
View ArticleNotes and links October 3 2010
Some notes, follow-up, and links before I head out to California: HP hired a software guy, Leo Apotheker, as CEO, and a software guy with a liking for high-end services, Ray Lane, as chairman. Now a...
View ArticleThe client that was confused about security
The competition for April Fool’s Day humor is brisk, as I documented in 2010 with two lists of excellent pranks. So I went against the grain that year, offering a collection of strange-but-true stories...
View ArticleMetaphors amok
It all started when I disputed James Kobielus’ blogged claim that Hadoop is the nucleus of the next-generation cloud EDW. Jim posted again to reiterate the claim, only this time he wrote that all EDW...
View ArticleComments on Oracle’s third quarter 2012 earnings call
Various reporters have asked me about Oracle’s third quarter 2012 earnings conference call. Specific Q&A includes: What did Oracle do to have its earnings beat Wall Street’s estimates? Have a bad...
View ArticleThree old jokes
Modern analytics described in three old jokes. The drunk under the lamppost A man is on his hands and knees, looking for something under a lamppost and obviously not finding it. The neighborhood...
View ArticleCautionary tales
Before the advent of cheap computing power, statistics was a rather dismal subject. David Lax scared me off from studying much of it by saying that 90% of statistics was done on sets of measure 0. The...
View ArticleThe worst database developers in the world?
If the makers of MMO RPGs (Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games) aren’t quite the worst database application developers in the world, they’re at least on the short list for consideration. The...
View ArticleMongoDB 3.0
Old joke: Question: Why do policemen work in pairs? Answer: One to read and one to write. A lot has happened in MongoDB technology over the past year. For starters: The big news in MongoDB 3.0* is the...
View ArticleMy favorite educational video
My favorite educational video growing up, by far, was a 1960 film embedded below. I love it because it pranks its viewers, starting right in the opening scene. (Start at the 0:50 mark to see what I...
View ArticleKafka and Confluent
For starters: Kafka has gotten considerable attention and adoption in streaming. Kafka is open source, out of LinkedIn. Folks who built it there, led by Jay Kreps, now have a company called Confluent....
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