“Appleantization” as blueprint for Oracle’s DWA

When I was last year in Boston in Netezza seeing all high performant NPS systems and buying the same day iPhone and MacMini I told to myself: well this is the great day- I have seen the most sophisticated large appliance – (Netezza NPS) and I own also most advanced smallest appliance in the world – Apple iPhone –all this in one day. “We believe the best user experience is when all the pieces in the system are engineered to work together.” Larry Ellison said in recent interview. Apple and Netezza knew this from the beginning – they need to design and control hardware to be able to perform much more faster than traditional concept on general purpose HW. Oracle realized this as well and entered hardware last year with Oracle Exadata based on HP hardware, however reaching only 10 time faster boost in performance. But it looks like Oracle is very serious about the concept of integrated HW and SW Appliance – recent announcement of Oracle acquiring Sun might have probably tremendous impact on the whole DWA (Data Warehouse Appliance) market. Now with Oracle taking Sun with its hardware division, operating system, Oracle has got finally all pieces to build up from ground to up database machine.

Curiously enough Greenplun – yet another player in DWA market is using Sun Fire X4500 for its DWA. That will soon mean Greenplun is “powered by Oracle” J . Also Greenplun was classified by Gartner magic quadrant as “Visionary” for 2008 . With Oracle – Greenplun ‘partnership’ this might possibly bring Greenplun upper to “Leaders” quadrant. Sun itself with MySQL was positioned in niche players in DWA Magic Quadrant. All of that will push Oracle in the leaders quadrant more close to the top player “Terradata”.

what Mr. Ellison said in interview about plans with Sun here:

…"we are definitely not going to exit the hardware
business. While most hardware businesses are low-margin,
companies like Apple and Cisco enjoy very high-margins because
they do a good job of designing their hardware and software to
work together. If a company designs both hardware and software,
it can build much better systems than if they only design the
software. That's why Apple's iPhone is so much better than
Microsoft phones."

"..Some of our competitors, Teradata
and Netezza for example, were delivering pre-configured
hardware/software systems, while we were just delivering
software. The combination of hardware and software has
significant performance advantages for data warehousing
applications. We had to respond with our own hardware/software
combination, the Exadata database machine. Oracle's Exadata
database machine runs data warehousing applications much faster
-- at least ten-times faster than Oracle software running on
conventional hardware. All the hardware and software pieces,
database to disk, are included. You just plug it in and go -- no
systems integration required."

Netezza to compete with iPhone appliance

Netezza announced today availability of their revolutionary mobile device “iQuery”. “Netezza is redefining database”.

Quoted from press release: The Netezza iQuery is a fully integrated, portable, data collection device with five terabytes of queryable storage that allows users to collect and store data for ‘on the go’ analysis. Analytic functions are supplied to iQuery through downloadable applications — called “applytics” –which provide solutions to common dilemmas such as ‘should I wear a coat today’, ‘will the price of bread fall in my supermarket’ or ‘should I talk to that interesting looking person at the bar.’ When docked, iQuery connects to the Internet to search social media websites and other information providers to bring back options quickly and help decisions be reached with a minimum of debate and discussion

Definitely LOL for the 1st April , Netezza smart marketing always positively surprises me. http://www.netezza.com/data-warehouse-appliance-products/iquery.aspx

iPhone 3.0 beta -Apple still ahead of competition

Apple has announced availability of iPhone 3.0 SDK beta. With over 1000 new API and 100 improvements in iPhone it underlines Apple innovation. The innovation that doesn’t go with crowd but choose the  way appropriate for mobile devices. For example instead of background processes they are offering notification infrastructure (understand here as ‘data center’ notification infrastructure highly scalable for multimillion notification deliveries over any custom applications). In fact they are using same principles already known from mail notifications or updates at current version of iPhone. There are other new cool features – transparent (no pairing) interacting with nearby users (devices) through Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, network. In show a company funded by iFUND showed a 3D game where a player was not able to make walk through a scene – he called his friend who appeared right  in the 3D scene and helped him (played in a team with him). Apple is also opening their wired connectivity for supporting various devices  ranging from medical (imagine you view your EKG or EEG right in your phone;) to consumer media (tuning TV, audio through iPhone). Shocking was also presenting (and mostly even presence) from ORACLE – their Business Intelligence application. iPhone 3.0 SDK allows to embed Google maps into your applications with annotations, but they have not mentioned any possible add-on layers on top of the Google map. Apple strategy is clear – to have iPhone not just for consumers and fun (and phone calls) but for serious business applications too. Not just throw away superior device with superior SDK but backing this all with their data center infrastructure for AppStore, Notifications, etc. Everyone can plug into this SaaS continuum either with content, applications or interaction in social networks.

WMSBinder as Open Source

Check page (updated 07/2025) https://www.sumbera.com/lab/wms25/wms25.html

  What is hot in new verison is ability to display thumbnails of layers you have attached into the main map window and ability to rearange them and change transparency. Export to MapShake is now working automaticaly from Export tab (using OLON)  (you just need to have valid account on MapShake).  Enjoy ! P.S> I am interchanging WMSBinder with the term MapBinder…not sure which one is better.

Contract Projection in WCF 4.0

WCF 4.0 introduce a concept “Contract Projection” – exactly ‘the right term’ I have tried to find while expressing the logical diagram of service concept, but called it “payload serialization/deserialization”. This concept of Contract Projection is about dcoupling integration logic from service, about posibility to have stable interface (type based .NET ) decorated with contract attribute (I call it mapping interface to contract) and multiple expression of how the contract will be used for integration with consumers. That is- what message format, encoding, protocol it will use. Contract Projection together with flexibility of binding through endpoints represent great way how to shield service code from interoperability standards details. So whether you want to access service through endpoint A, or endpoint B using JSON, SOAP,GeoRSS,GeoJSON, OGC/WPS,etc.. doesn’t matter. This is “flexibility of integration”.

“The .NET Framework 4.0 introduces the concept of a contract projection to separate the logical contract definition from the representation of the messages that are sent and received. This allows you to define a single-service contract that can be projected differently to support different messaging styles. For example, you can have one contract projection for SOAP-based messaging and another projection for REST/POX messaging, but both are based on the same logical service contract”

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.01.net40.aspx

 

Virtual Data Center according VMWare

This picture shows a vision of VMWare – “Computing Clouds on and off premise” exactly the flexibility to host applications anywhere. Whether some sensitive data should remain on premise or can be eventually loaded off premise should be up to decision of the enterprise not technology restrictions (or lock-down by cloud infrastructure).  Enterprise can always decide whether their ‘treasure’ will be stored. I have added my small notes into grey boxes in the graph refering to available type of products.Core part of this vision is enabling technology- VMWare VMotion that enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability, and complete transaction integrity.Other technology involev are : VMWare Fault Tolerance: no downtime in case of hardware failure (VM continuously sync, with another VM on another HW)
and AppSpeed (for self-managing Datacenter) – automatically assigning new resources when performance goes bellow SLA. vCenter provision more instances.

semi-virtualized machine running from USB

In summer last year I was experimenting with what I call “Geospatial Operating Environment” – a client based virtual appliance for geospatialy related operations that would give to user immediate (instant) tools and applications. Well, there is already approach to have USB drive and put there portable applications that can be run directly from USB drive without any need of installation. This approach is fine but definitely not error-prone since ‘the virtualization’ level is just on top of operating system and more dependent on a  host OS state and health. Running any executable from USB can potentially crash whole OS. Another approach is to virtualize applications using ThinApps or App-V but again the level of separation of OS from applications is not always guaranteed (I mean look on a way how you define virtualized applications – you need to sequence them (or ‘capture them’) where differences between initial state of OS and state of the OS after installation of apps represent the ‘properly installed and configured application’ that can be virtualized). Is this a right way ? why the industry is not looking more for jeOS and virtual appliances ? May be virtualized applications will give us more robust application sandbox that will less crash OS and less side-interact with other applications. Well may be the whole point is to always assemble OS+Apps where producer has always under control fresh new OS plus set of apps on top of that (Actually both CITRIX and VMWare are promoting this dynamic approach). Simply said, I do not trust so far to virtualized applications. OS is still pretty complex piece that you can make better, reliable but not as stable as hardware operations  today.Virtual Appliances rely on thin layer of hypervisor and hw while virtualized applications have much more large stack of software underneath.

Back to my topic… so I have done experimental client-side virtual appliance with lot of installed open source and free applications. One of them GoogleEarth was performing very slowly in virtualized environment due to the fact that virtualized environmend can’t so far utilize special hardware (a typical problem of virtual machines or common denominator).  But why not to run same appliance either virtualized or on physical hardware ? with VMWare it is possible with physical disk – once appliance is installed, you can either boot it directly from hard drive (or USB) or if you want to run it virtualized in some host environment, then this is possible too:

vmdk file then look very simple and access in fact regural disk image of the ‘virtual appliance’ – this is not any more virtual appliance but somehow ‘semi-virtualized’ appliance :

# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=2ccad3f7
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="fullDevice"
# Extent description
RW 625137345 FLAT "\\.\PhysicalDrive1" 0
# The Disk Data Base
#DDB
ddb.toolsVersion = "0"
ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "38913"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.geometry.biosCylinders = "38913"
ddb.geometry.biosHeads = "255"
ddb.geometry.biosSectors = "63"