As the open source faithful have gathered in Portland for the annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) Canonical, the company behind an ever popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, announced that it has paired up the latest version of the free DB2 Express-C v9.7 with the latest version of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to deliver a free enterprise-grade cloud database appliance.
Not that kind of an appliance
Database appliances, especially for data warehousing, are all the rage. These database appliances deliver a package of hardware and database software that are put together and optimized by the DBMS vendor. Most of [...]
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Just like in real estate, location plays a huge role in making data relevant. When it comes to computing, we are no longer chained to our office desks and a large Windows machine. The computing device of choice today is an iPhone, or an a new Android based device, not an old and clunky desktop PC. The new generation and the new population uses phones to compute. In India alone, 15 million mobile telephone subscribers were added every months in 2008. That is like getting the entire population of Canada – every man, woman and child – as [...]
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Last week I asked a question if Apple went too far in its attack on Flash. This question generated a lively discussion on reddit. While my point was that Apple iPhone SDK restricts choice of development tools/languages to be only Objective-C, most comments centered on the merits of Flash. Steve Jobs felt compelled to add more fuel to this fire and published an open letter Thoughts on Flash. In this letter Steve Jobs explains why Apple has banned Flash. Basic just is that he believes it is proprietary, buggy, security challenged, battery draining technology and that Apple’s (his) [...]
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It is hard to believe but it has been a year since we first made DB2 available on the Amazon EC2 cloud. In Cloud Computing this is an eternity. It has been quite the ride. As I look back at the success that DB2 has enjoyed on the Amazon EC2 cloud I am amazed as just wrong the critics were when we first started. Of all of the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that IBM has made available DB2 is the the one that people purchase the most. As a matter of fact, more than all of the other [...]
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On Monday February 8th, without much pomp or ceremony IBM announced the new POWER7 microprocessor architecture and the 4 new SYSTEM p servers that utilize the new architecture. POWER7 is the next step in the IBM POWER roadmap and as far as next steps go it is a very significant one. I don’t intend to do a blow by blow account of everything that is new in POWER7 and what it really means. For those that are interested, I recommend attending one of the POWER 7 launch events/webcasts. If you are interested in databases (why else would you [...]
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