Here's an interesting post on design practices for building massively-scalable apps on database infrastructure such as Google BigTable.
The takeaway: this ain't your granpappy's old relational database system, so throw out everything he taught you. Denormalize. Prefer big fluffy things to small granular things. Don't bother with DB constraints - enforce the model in the application. Prefer small frequent updates to large page updates.
The good news (or bad, depending on how fed up you are with your local DBA) - don't bother with all this unless you intend to scale to millions of users.
Showing posts with label web. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
GeoSVG, anyone?
The GeoPDF format seems to be gaining traction these days. I have to admit, when I first heard of this technology I had the same reaction as James Fee - "What's it good for"? But I'm coming round... A live map with rich information content and a true geospatial coordinate system - what's not to like?
My excuse for such scepticism is my finely-honed technical bullsh*t reflex, which uses the logic of "If this is such a good, obvious, simple idea then why hasn't it been implemented ages ago?".
To be fair, there have been lots of SVG mapping demos, which fill the same use case and provide equivalent functionality. Sadly that concept hasn't really caught fire, though (perhaps due to the ongoing SVG "always a bridesmaid, never a bride" conundrum).
Of course, an idea this good is really too important to be bottled up in the murky world of proprietary technology. It seems like this area is ripe for an open standard. SVG is the obvious candidate for the spatial content (sorry, GeoJSON). What it needs is some standards around modelling geospatial coordinate systems and encoding layers of features. It seems like this should be quite doable. The goal would be to standardize the document format so that viewers could easily be developed (either stand-alone, as modules of existing viewers, or as browser-hosted apps). Also, the feature data should be easy to extract from the data file, for use in other applications.
Perhaps there's already an initiative like this out there - if so, I'd love to hear about it.
My excuse for such scepticism is my finely-honed technical bullsh*t reflex, which uses the logic of "If this is such a good, obvious, simple idea then why hasn't it been implemented ages ago?".
To be fair, there have been lots of SVG mapping demos, which fill the same use case and provide equivalent functionality. Sadly that concept hasn't really caught fire, though (perhaps due to the ongoing SVG "always a bridesmaid, never a bride" conundrum).
Of course, an idea this good is really too important to be bottled up in the murky world of proprietary technology. It seems like this area is ripe for an open standard. SVG is the obvious candidate for the spatial content (sorry, GeoJSON). What it needs is some standards around modelling geospatial coordinate systems and encoding layers of features. It seems like this should be quite doable. The goal would be to standardize the document format so that viewers could easily be developed (either stand-alone, as modules of existing viewers, or as browser-hosted apps). Also, the feature data should be easy to extract from the data file, for use in other applications.
Perhaps there's already an initiative like this out there - if so, I'd love to hear about it.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Is that cloud on the horizon going to start raining applications?
Timothy O'Brien speculates that the transition to cloud-based computing is happening sooner than expected. He's talking about the new integration between Salesforce.com (which is apparently the poster child for SaaS) and Google Apps (the poster child for desktop replacement by the Web). And he generalizes this to include EC2, SimpleDB, and the "twenty or thirty other companies that are going to join the industry".
He also warns here that this transition could transform the model for software development in ways uncomfortable for IT professionals.
He could be right. Cloud computing does seem to be poised to finally provide the right platform to suck the juice out of corporate data centres. The idea of virtual everything certainly has an appeal (especially to someone like me who is basically a software guy).
But questions occur... Salesforce and Google seem like a perfect match - but what about the other companies that want a piece of this action? Does it matter that you will have to commit everything to a given cloud platform? And what happens if that platform goes away? The more advantage you take of the cloud, the bigger the pain when it disappears. And what about apps which are a bit more specific than CRM (which in my naive view seems like just a fancy Contacts list - and hence an obvious and easy thing to integrate with an office suite).
Tim would probably call these kinds of questions "self-interested observations from one with the most to lose". He mentions a Salesforce meeting where business types applaud a sign showing "Software" with a big red slash through it... Well, maybe. Last I noticed no-one has quite managed to automate generating code from requirements documents (let alone automating the generation of implementable requirments documents out of people's heads 8^). So I would say it's more like "different software" than "no software".
One thing's for sure.. there's going to be some gigantic platform turf wars going on up there in the stratosphere.
(One big disappointment - it sounds like the Salesforce platform is based on their proprietary Apex language. Ugh. Just what the world needs - one more language to debate over. At least Google App Engine picked a real language for their launch!)
He also warns here that this transition could transform the model for software development in ways uncomfortable for IT professionals.
He could be right. Cloud computing does seem to be poised to finally provide the right platform to suck the juice out of corporate data centres. The idea of virtual everything certainly has an appeal (especially to someone like me who is basically a software guy).
But questions occur... Salesforce and Google seem like a perfect match - but what about the other companies that want a piece of this action? Does it matter that you will have to commit everything to a given cloud platform? And what happens if that platform goes away? The more advantage you take of the cloud, the bigger the pain when it disappears. And what about apps which are a bit more specific than CRM (which in my naive view seems like just a fancy Contacts list - and hence an obvious and easy thing to integrate with an office suite).
Tim would probably call these kinds of questions "self-interested observations from one with the most to lose". He mentions a Salesforce meeting where business types applaud a sign showing "Software" with a big red slash through it... Well, maybe. Last I noticed no-one has quite managed to automate generating code from requirements documents (let alone automating the generation of implementable requirments documents out of people's heads 8^). So I would say it's more like "different software" than "no software".
One thing's for sure.. there's going to be some gigantic platform turf wars going on up there in the stratosphere.
(One big disappointment - it sounds like the Salesforce platform is based on their proprietary Apex language. Ugh. Just what the world needs - one more language to debate over. At least Google App Engine picked a real language for their launch!)
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