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In Why SQL Is Not Suited for the Cloud and What Is NuoDB, one Aswin writes:

In the data world, SQL is a relation-based, data model, and the most common means used to retrieve and manipulate data. Predicates, clauses, expressions and queries that are all used in SQL data management system have made it abundantly popular and user friendly. But this traditional data management system suffers serious of limitations...

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My latest column Why Managers Need Business Models (my original title was Modeling and Usefulness).

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I am working on a European tour in the March-April time frame. UK will probably be included. Those interested in organizing seminars and/or presentations, or know somebody who might be, please contact me.

Have a nice weekend.

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WS: I have a question. I have been asked about the possibility of teaching a SQL course. My audience will be people from a scientific rather than an IT background (which I think will make my job easier). If the training does take place then obviously in my own material I will cover the basics of the relational model before moving on to SQL. One of them has asked me if there is a book I can recommend on the subject to get them started. Now although I own a lot of books about the relational model and about SQL they contain mainly quite advanced material, I don't know of an introductory book about SQL that is theoretically sound. I wonder if you can recommend one? ... I haven't seen anything that I am particularly enthusiastic about. I would say it is a gap in the market, though unfortunately the market probably demands books about Oracle, Sql Server or MySQL. That is, of course, true of trade media and book publishers too.

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tblIsThere, The Daily WTF

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Until the rise of nosql solutions, you would force-fit all data and relations into traditional RDBMS model and then do a fire dance in the application layer to manage them. In other words, you would force a cube into a cylinder with enough force that it fits. With nosql solutions, that is not necessary, so you can pick the right solution based on the problem domain. If your data is largely schemaless, there is no point in forcing it into a relational table with most of the columns being null, so a document oriented DB such as MongoDB or CouchDB would be ideal. If you dealing with lists, sets, queues etc., which need to be persisted, then Redis maybe an ideal candidate. If you are managing key/values then Cassandra maybe your choice. Of course, you don't want to have a dozen of these in your system, but a careful use of RDBMS and nosql solutions would greatly simplify application design.
--Have any NoSQL databases become viable replacements for SQL databases yet?, quora.com

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See the rewrite

What Is a True Relational System (and What It Is Not)

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Reminder

My presentation: Foundation Knowledge for Database Professionals
Mountain View, October 16, 6:30pm (open to the public and free)

More details here.

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Three LinkedIn Data Modeling group threads in which I participated.

One or two files
Is there a 3NF to denormalized tool
Kinds of Data Models -- And How to Name Them

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To new visitors: If you are wondering why the SEMINARS, PAPERS, QUOTES and LAUGH/CRY pages have not been updated, there is a bug in Blogger--the URL changes every time a page is updated--which wreaks havoc with traffic/SEO. Google has not been able to fix this for months and until they do many bloggers do not update the pages. Until a fix is provided, for previous quotes and To Laugh or Cry? posts please use the Blogger search facility at the top of every page or just scroll back to older posts.

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Cloud computing: here we go again

Came across this article that is consistent with my arguments about how industry operates.

Summary: The same pattern has emerged again and again in the history of IT. New ideas emerge. Vendors develop their own approaches. Camps form to support those approaches. Eventually standards emerge. The battle over cloud computing standards and approaches is only the latest repetition of the pattern.

The Achiles heel in all this is that many if not most new ideas are not new at all. The only way to ensure that the wheel--and a square wheel at that-- is not constantly reinvented is to rely on sound foundations and knowledge of the history of the field. Otherwise, we're spinning wheels in place at best, or go into reverse.

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A comparison

Last week during Oracle Open World I had the pleasure of meeting briefly Jonathan Lewis (with Jonathan Gennick's help) and we had a chat about the state of the industry. In that context, please watch the two videos below and see if you discern a difference.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g65fII0nX8g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=FvRDK2B0T_I