The Right Question to Ask About Analytics

The Right Question to Ask About Analytics: "So asking the right question is the key to success in analytics. But this path is as undefined and murky as the road to the river Styx."

That's comforting!

Gartner Disses Oracle Security

Gartner Disses Oracle Security: "Close on the heels of Oracle's latest critical patch update, Gartner has published an advisory warning that, given the seriousness and the ease of exploit of the flaws involved, administrators have got to get over their laissez-faire attitude toward patching.
'Oracle has not yet experienced a mass security exploit, but this does not mean that one will never occur,' Gartner's Rich Mogull wrote. "

Choosing Colors for Data Visualization

Choosing Colors for Data Visualization: "Contrast and analogy are the principles that define color design. Contrasting colors are different, analogous colors are similar. Contrast draws attention, analogy groups. In Figure 2, the contrasting red squares stand out from the field of analogous blue-green ones, and capture your attention first."

Phil Windley's Technometria | SOA Governance Feature

Phil Windley's Technometria | SOA Governance Feature: "The SOA Governance feature I did for InfoWorld is up today. There are four parts:
Governing SOA - Rules, standards, and policies are the difference between playing with SOAP and real SOA.
A degree of tolerance for SOA � There�s a danger in going too far.
Exclusive: Infravio brings structure to unwieldy SOA � A review of X-Registry 5, one of a handful of tools that form and infrastructure for governance.
Understanding UDDI � A quick reference to UDDI-compatible registries. "

Microsoft SQL Server: Project REAL�Business Intelligence in Practice

Microsoft SQL Server: Project REAL�Business Intelligence in Practice: "What Is Project REAL?
Project REAL is a cooperative effort between Microsoft and a number of technology partners in the business intelligence (BI) industry to build on actual customer scenarios to discover best practices for creating BI applications based on SQL Server 2005. The term REAL in Project REAL is an acronym for Reference implementation, End-to-end, At scale, and Lots of users. Find out which partners are participating in Project REAL."

Mindjack - Feature - Inside The Internet Archive

Mindjack - Feature - Inside The Internet Archive: "Tucked away in one of the seediest neighborhoods of San Francisco is a roomful of over two hundred computers with a terabyte of data stored on every three. Stairs from the street lead up an intimidating hallway that opens into a room with 15-foot ceilings and just-this-side of hip ductwork in the ceiling. To the right is a storage area with a single desk, to the left are Baker's racks tightly packed with off-the-shelf HP desktop machines, each turned on it's side to maximize the space. Somewhere in all that ductwork, a fan is squeaking painfully. Walking into this echoey, over-warm warehouse space, it's easy to be underwhelmed until you realize what you are looking at: spinning away on these computers is nothing less than a copy of the Internet from 1996 until today."

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Analysis: Five Reasons to Invest in Process Management

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Analysis: Five Reasons to Invest in Process Management: "The number of people I meet who have heard of business process management but are unsure what it is and unaware of how it can benefit their organizations continually surprises me. If this description fits you, here is BPM in a nutshell."

ACM Queue - Lessons from the Floor - The manufacturing industry can teach us a lot about measuring performance in large-scale Internet services.

ACM Queue - Lessons from the Floor - The manufacturing industry can teach us a lot about measuring performance in large-scale Internet services.: "The manufacturing industry faces quality-sampling challenges for complex products that are similar to ours. In Web services, we have the advantage of being able to simulate a customer interaction simply and cheaply (on a small scale, at least). When it comes to measuring the quality of a product that has many facets, however, trying to define one aggregate measure to represent quality fails as an approach. In Hotmail, we looked at large-scale manufacturing operations for inspiration�and came away with several useful techniques that better matched our business goals."

Long break from Blogging...

For those that still visit, yes, I took a break, with the holidays and my business taking up all my time for the last coupld of weeks. Time to get back on the wagon!

Lot of interesting developments lately, and I intend to cover them in some detail coming up.

TOP 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT SQL SERVER

TOP 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT SQL SERVER: "6. Foreign Keys Constraints !

For some reason, in SQL you can only update or add rows to 1 table at a time! I can do my usual FULL OUTER JOINs with 800 tables together and go nuts with SELECTs all day long, but how about providing that feature for UPDATES and INSERTS!? Otherwise, how can I have referential integrity? If table A needs a matching row in table B, then how the heck do I get them in there at the exact same time? This seems pretty silly to me. "

MySQL Gets Government Thumbs Up

MySQL Gets Government Thumbs Up: "Open source scored its latest government takeover, with MySQL AB nabbing a five-year contract with the General Services Administration that will put its open-source database at the fingertips of government customers."

Business Intelligence in the Public Sector

Business Intelligence in the Public Sector: "When participants at the April 2004 E-Gov Knowledge Management Conference reflect on the event, they must think we were truly prescient. It was late 2003 when we were planning the conference. I had committed to teaching a tutorial on building knowledge management environments. While looking for a case study for discussion, I read some of the headlines coming out of Asia regarding the avian flu. After noticing these stories, I decided to pick a potential avian flu crisis as the case study for our tutorial. In February the Washington Post carried many similar stories like �Bird Flu Strain Is Discovered in Chicken Flock in Delaware� and �Maryland Bans Live Poultry Sales as a Precaution.�"