A while back at a SQL Saturday in Indianapolis, I was enjoying the WIT panel discussion listening to the panelists discuss their  upbringing and how they became a success in the field of technology.  Their stories were, in some ways, similar.  They were smart.  They weren’t scared of math.  They had an important mentor who supported them and encouraged them that they could accomplish any goal.  They endured struggles such as financial hardship that, while difficult to overcome, also refined their desire to become successful in their careers.  Some of the women who had to deal with men of the previous generation even had to overcome blatant chauvinism.

But then another similarity among the panelists, just a hunch really, struck me.  I had to ask, to confirm my idea. “How many of you were a bit of loner or at least weren’t heavily influenced by your friends’ opinions before your professional career?  Because with my own daughters, it’s their friends who they want to please.  And they’d punt right away if their friends teased them about being good at math, or choosing a technical career, or anything else I can think of for that matter.”

It was pretty much unanimous.  All of the panelists were loners or had a very small social circle during their formative years.  Now perhaps I’m speaking from an inaccurate assumption, but most of my daughters are tight with their friends.  And friends mean a lot to them, perhaps more than any other aspect of their social lives (like their family).  So if their friends tell them that being interested in technology will “geekify” them, then they’d drop it like a hot potato.

So I wanted to put this question out to my female friends in the IT world.  Were you in a big circle of friends during your developing years?  What importance did you place on their opinions?  Did they give you any flack for going in to IT or doing well in technology related classes?

It seems like the days of overt chauvinism are behind us here in the US.  But I wonder if we need to start earlier with our daughters among their own peer groups to support them for a future in technology.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

-Kev

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This white paper addresses methods for successfully managing today’s complex heterogeneous database infrastructures. Topics discussed include: balancing key business metrics, understanding challenges to the DBA, and managing multiple database platforms (i.e. Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Sybase) simultaneously.

Enjoy,

-Kev

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

In this podcast on the uber-popular podcast “RunAs Radio”, host Richard Campbell asks me about what topics are of particular interest at Tech-Ed 2011, focusing the discussion on cloud and SQL Server “Denali”

You can download the MP3 version of the podcast or the transcript here.

So I’m going to start sharing what I’m reading at least once per week, partly so that I don’t firehose too many reading links directly into your brain (where I to do it say once per month) and partly to solidify in my own mind the information that I’m reviewing. So here are a few good links for the seven days leading up to July 22, 2001:

• Microsoft and Whitehouse partnership on BigData: BigData isn’t a particularly new concept.  But I was intrigued to learn that the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, and 13 other teams were partnering on developing better BigData analytics for lots of government data from activities such as healthcare, economic development, education, transportation, and the power grid.  Cools stuff!  Plus, Microsoft has developed a new tool called Project Daytona to better harness the power of the cloud, in general, and Windows Azure, specifically.
• While we’re on the topic of Federal IT in the Cloud be sure to read this linked article from ComputerWorld.  Say what you will about our government, but putting government IT in the cloud and increasing both its transparency and availability will make a huge difference in how the Federal government will be able to service the public.  We’re talking as big a difference as corporations experienced between the “catalog on the web” experience of the 1990′s to the Web2.0 experience of today.
• If you’re the social media type, give this article a read discussing the Power of Hashtags in Social Media.
• The Register, of the UK, whose tagline is “Biting the hand that feeds IT” has a great article on a spat over database technologies between the IT sage Michael Stonebreaker and Google.  It’s a great read if for no other reason than to prove that databases are worth fighting over.
• And if you think Microsoft is still towing the relational database barge without thinking about other technologies, you need to read up on Projects Dryad and Daytona.
• Finally, I’m still getting lots of questions about when and where to limit SQL Server’s Max Degrees of Parallelism.  Be sure to read Microsoft’s Recommendations and Guidelines for ‘max degree of parallelism’ configuration option here.

And just because so many of us in IT are closet or former musicians, there’s Live Guitar Lessons with Steven Krenz, sponsored by my hometown boyz at Gibson Guitar.

Got a favorite article or tool tip? Let me know!  Enjoy,

-Kev

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It’s always interesting to see the guestimations of the big brains about figures and facts that are hard to verify.  Here’s an example – how much data is computerized today?  I’m not talking about ancient stuff, like the Codex Synaticus (which, incidentally IS on-line at www.codexsinaiticus.org).  I’m talking about the new and really important stuff, like the fourteen pictures that my step-daughter posted on her FaceBook account from our recent trip to Rock City.
Well, IDC figured that overall digital data was up to 1.2Zb (Zetabytes!)  at the end of 2010.  My mind is boggling.  Ok, so that’s only 1.2 trillion gigabytes!  Doctor Evil, please put your pinky to your mouth and say this huge number . . .

1,319,413,953,436 Gb

Another way to say it is that it’s about 1,228 Exabytes.

You can get other numbers by extrapolating from storage purchases from the major storage vendors.  Of course, not all of their storage sold is actually filled up right away.  But it’s still an interesting number to hear.  So just on scuttlebutt from a friend of a friend of a friend I heard numbers like this:

Online data back in 2002? around 5 Exabytes
Online data expected in 2011: around 700 Exabytes

And, again we’re surmising these values based on published storage sales from various vendors, this data growth is hurtling along at ridiculous speed, with data doubling every fifteen months or so.    Who knows where this will take us, but if we assume a constant rate of data growth (which is a bad bet, IMO), we’ll have 996,000 Exabytes of data online by 2020.  Hey, but that’s 8 years after the Mayan calendar, and the world along with it, is supposed to end, right?

Cloud, Bunny, or CloudBunny?

Last year, some of my friends from Quest Software attended Hadoop World in New York. In 2009, I never would’ve guessed that Quest would be there with products, community initiatives, as a major sponsor and with presenters?

There were just under 1,000 attendees who weren’t the typical devheads and geekasaurs you’d normally see at very techie events like Code Camps, SQL Saturdays, Cloud Camps and or even other NoSQL events such as the Cassandra Summit. We’re talkin’ enterprise customers with active Hadoop projects underway.

Some observations from the show that may be of interest to you:

-          Hadoop World was a trending topic on Twitter during its duration.
-          Hadoop has “arrived” with an average cluster of 66 nodes weighing in at 114TB. (For the philosophers among us, how much does a terabyte weigh?) The most famous Hadoop cluster is FaceBook with a trifling 30PB in storage – that’s petabytes. That’s more written information than has ever been written by man, cumulatively, including the Advice on Men column from Cosmo Magazine.  Unfortunately, that’s only a few hundred thousand pictures of teenagers pursing their lips at themselves and holding a digital camera while standing in front of the bathroom mirror.  They’re expecting about 60PB by the end of 2011.
-         HP was there, creating a lot of buzz, from a hardware perspective. Quest was there as the leading independent tool maker for cloud apps.
-         Oracle OraOop got attendees pulse’s racing, since many want a high speed, scalable connector between Oracle and Hadoop to fill a necessary gap.  I’m not sure if there’s something in place for SQL Server and I’m not currently aware of any high-speed connectors built in to SQL Server Integration Services.

Some other good coverage to check out about the show as well:

• http://www.ctoedge.com/content/helping-oracle-get-along-hadoop
• http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/10/12/oraoop-sounds-like-a-basketball-trick-but-its-really-an-oracle-apache-enhancer/
• http://www.marketwatch.com/story/quest-software-and-cloudera-unveil-first-release-of-oraoop-at-hadoop-world-2010-2010-10-12?reflink=MW_news_stmp

Why Should You Care?

All of this is very important because NoSQL in general and Hadoop in particular are picking up speed and momentum.  Even if your organization isn’t using NoSQL technology today, chances are very good that your CIO will be asking you for details on how and when it should be deployed.  And if you don’t think it should be deployed, the natural response of the CIO is “Why not?”.  So you’d better get your ducks in a row, Mr SQL Server DBA.

There are lots of great sites to get Hadoop information, but I invite you to take a gander at Jeremiah Peschka’s (blog | twitter) blog for much NoSQL goodness. Start with Jeremiah’s blog post here, and ignore all indications that you might be in a biker bar or a San Francisco tattoo parlor.  That’s just Jeremiah’s style.

His Hadoop writings are here, though lately he’s been writing a lot about RIAK - which sounds like a euphemism for vomiting, as in “Jeremiah spent a lot of time riaking after chugging that bottle of cough syrup.”

Originally published Jul 12, 2010

Originally posted on Jun 7, 2010

Posted May 10, 2010

Posted Apr 7, 2010