Do What Matters

There is no scarcity of database vendors who claim to handle Big Data today with "blazing throughput", "linear scalability" and "flawless fault tolerance". Every week, I add a name to my research list. This tells us how important the Big Data is for enterprises today and how quickly market is able to respond with some really good innovative solutions. Time to market is the key, however we must recognize that there are some major innovation happened last few years in the field of distributed file system and parallel programming that are making us possible to put together various pieces of the puzzles and come up on solution that works. Here are some of the companies to watch for: VoltDB - co-founded by Michael Stonebaker, Berkeley professor and pioneer of Column store database technology. Its a main memory database with stored procedure based operations. It claims speed and scale based on complete I/O elimination.  Infobright - Analytic database com...

When I started teaching at University early this year, I had no idea how I am going to engage my students with the course materials and how to make sure they apply what they learn in the classroom. For me it was a multifold process of developing learner's outcomes and overall performance objectives for the class and using cognitive approaches to design and develop instruction materials. Since teaching grad students was  something brand new experience for me, I had to understand and learn more about the cognitive approaches that experts have been using. I started with researching Bloom's taxonomy for cognitive learning. We all know that there is more than a single type of learning. Benjamin Bloom in 1956 lead a group of educational psychologists who developed a classification of levels of intellectual behavior important for learning. This classification was represented as pyramid and became famous as Bloom's taxonomy. Figure 1 below represents the original Bloom's tax...