Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Another Big Data Database vendor

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 company head quartered in Toronto. It also uses column store technology and offers real time analytics, web log analysis and more. 
  • ParAccel - Another analytic database vendor claims to have blazing speed and throughput using column store. Some of its management team comes from analytic technology vendors like Netezza (now part of IBM) and MicroStrategy. 
  • GreenPlum - An EMC company again uses column store technology for big data Analytic. offers solutions in the form of software and appliance. The company is hiring like crazy. 
  • SAND - list goes on and on...  column store database vendor focusing on verticals. 
Well, as a database technology professionals I understand the need of enterprise for managing big data and definitely have an eye on the industry and the curve. I am going to have a extensive discussion on the column store technology and architecture in my course this Fall. Great time ahead for database developers !!

Sunday, June 12, 2011

My Classroom, my goals - Reflections of the first semester

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 taxonomy for cognitive learning. Later in 1990's a former student of Bloom, Lorin Anderson lead another group of researchers and updated the taxonomy to reflect it's relevance to 21st century work. Figure 2 represents the new taxonomy.

















Explaining the pyramid and all it's colors will take me away from the thoughts I planned to express in this blog, but at the minimum, I can tell that I tried my best to follow the new method of cognitive learning and completed the course with huge success. To set the context for my blog audience, my course was Enterprise Software Overview and my 90% of students were successful in:

  • Using their previous knowledge to define the subject
  • classifying, describing and discussing the subject to develop understanding of the topics
  • demonstrating, illustrating and interpreting to use the presented information in a NEW way
  • examining and distinguishing the information to break into different parts for critical analysis
  • choosing and defending their decisions for technology solutions they wanted to put together
  • and finally designing and creating a new product or point of view
The power of Group Learning:
Apart from the Bloom's and Lorin's learning method, one thing that is undisputed and  proven very effective is the power of group learning. Self organizing team can learn on their own and I leave you with this very inspirational video by Sugata Mitra:




New MS project ideas

  The car tells you what it needs http://news.mit.edu/2017/software-let-your-car-tell-you-what-it-needs-1026 Similarly in an Industrial sett...