CodeFutures News & Industry Commentary Blog

Gartner has nominated its top ten technologies for 2009:

Virtualization

Business Intelligence


Cloud Computing


Green IT


Unified Communications


Social Software and Social Networking


Web Oriented Architecture


Enterprise Mashups


Specialized Systems


Servers – Beyond Blades


As usual, the list contains broad concepts that are no surprise like "Green IT", some hot technologies like "Enterprise Mashups", and some cryptic references that required further reading of Gartner's material to understand. Sadly, no mention of Database Sharding, although the general area is covered well by Web Oriented Architecture - the driving force behind Database Sharding.

Labels: Application Development, Database Products, Database Scalability, Enteprise Mashups, Enterprise Development, Java Programming, Software Pipelines

Any customers that have requested new features or bug fixes will know that CodeFutures uses agile development. The primary benefits of agile for customers are fast turnarounds on requests. CodeFutures' positive experiences are not uncommon - there's a massive amount of material written about the benefits of agile development.

That makes Brian Marick somewhat revisionist keynote address at the Agile Development Practices conference interesting for anyone deeply committed to agile practices.

Labels: Agile Development, Customer Support, Database Products, Product Development

Microsoft has acquired DatAllegro. As well has creating problems for any DatAllegro customers that have avoided the Microsoft stack, the acquisition raises some interesting questions:

Why has it taken so long for Microsoft to realize that SQL Server does not scale well?

What will Microsoft say to DatAllegro's current customers that bought an open system based on the open source Ingres database and running on open source Linux?

Will the DatAllegro engineering team have to port its product over to .NET and how long will it take?

In addition to using Ingres and Linux, the DatAllegro engineering team presumably leveraged many open source products. Will these all have to be replaced due to Microsoft's stance against open source.

How will the DatAllegro's customers feel about the engineering team concentrating on a platform port that they probably do not want instead of delivering new features?

One fact is certain: the winners in this deal are DatAllegro's shareholders and the losers are DatAllegro's customers.

Labels: Data Warehouse Appliance, Data Warehouses, Database Products, Database Scalabilty, Database Sharding