COBOL @ 50

Seems I missed a significant event earlier this month or year. The first major COBOL development environment turned 50 years old on Sept 18. And earlier in May was the 50th anniversary of the US DOD meeting that got COBOL started, so that could have been the birthday too.

From CIO Magazine:

“The statistics that surround COBOL attest to its huge influence upon the business world. There are over 220 billion lines of COBOL in existence, a figure which equates to around 80% of the world’s actively used code. There are estimated to be over a million COBOL programmers in the world today. Most impressive perhaps, is that 200 times as many COBOL transactions take place each day than Google searches – a figure which puts the influence of Web 2.0 into stark perspective.”

One metric says it costs about $25 to re-write a line of COBOL. With 220 billion lines, think of the staggering cost to replace it.

Yet I’ve only met one COBOL programmer in my whole career. I’ve never written a line of it, not even in school 25 years ago.

The language that is everywhere and nowhere at once, to borrow another line from CIO magazine.

Surprising isn’t it.

Now, I did write a LOT of Pascal in school, back then we thought Pascal and its ilk would be the next big thing. Instead it has largely disappeared.

Who is an Enterprise Architect?

There is much discussion in enterprise architecture circles about IT co-opting title Enterprise Architect meaning a person who does IT architecture
While it is unfortunate that the term EA has been co-opted by IT, it is easy to see why it happens.

It starts with many businesses having no enterprise architects or no idea of enterprise or business architecture really. Of course the business does have an ad-hoc or accidental architecture but no one thinks about it, they are content in not knowing what they don’t know.

If the business is simple enough, IT can take that ad-hoc architecture and codify it into something that works, or works mostly. But at some point there is too much complexity and someone has to codify the architecture before IT can make sense of it.. At this point the business usually starts complaining that IT doesn’t understand the business. In fact, without a defined architecture, the business doesn’t really understand the business either but they just don’t notice.

So someone in IT is going to get the job to define enough of the business architecture that IT can work with. If that person does it formally with something like TOGAF, s/he will end up being called the enterprise architect, as the first person to reveal at least some of the enterprise architecture. Of course it will be IT-centric too, since it is only being written for IT in the first place.

It is a misnomer of course. Revealing a part of the business architecture is not really an enterprise architect’s work but what should we call this person? The “Person who writes down enough architecture so IT can build something useful” isn’t a great job title either.

Enterprise Architecture

I stumbled into enterprise architecture this summer while attending CloudCamp which was hosted by the TOGAF Toronto 2009 conference. The Open Group was kind enough to let me attend a couple of the introductory sessions at TOGAF 2009.

I like TOGAF. The ADM and the cyclic process nature of it make sense to me. An architecture should be a dynamic thing, not something static. There are some holes still but look how far it has come from V7 and I think it is well on its way to becoming the standard for EA in the next release or two. The fact that it is an open standard helps too.

My current interest in EA is largely focused on data architecture, probably closer to what is called Master Data Management (MDM). A natural lead from being a DBA I expect. I see a lot of overlap between the data architecture part of EA and MDM, like different views onto the same thing.

Watch for more about about EA and MDM here going forward.

Oracle Exadata 2

Yikes it been a long time since my last post. Let’s get started catching up

Just watched Larry Himself unveil the new Exadata 2 database machine.

Clearly this will put an end to the idea that Oracle wants to sell off Sun’s hardware business. Creating a fully integrated stack from hardware to OS to database to middle tier to applciation is the Oracle mission now and IBM is the target. Now we see why IBM made that desperate and hopeless bid for Sun back in the winter.

Oracle stacks up pretty well against IBM all through the stack and owns the Java technology they both rely on, so IBM has some need to be worried.

And the Exadata 2 is definitely a beast, big enough that Larry can at least claim it as the world’s fastest database machine. Now has Larry ever exaggerated before?

Sun Sparc/Solaris customers probably aren’t feeling so rosy though as the giant database machine runs Intel/Linux. Hopefully Oracle will quickly offer them a nice upgrade path from Sparc/Solaris before they all bail out onto IBM and HP.

I don’t see where MySQL fits in all this. Already the MySQL community is splintering and reforming around some of the old core, I don’t see that Oracle is going to have any claim to having more than a leftover piece of the “real” MySQL. Time to score some open source points and donate what’s left to some foundation. Larry though is having none of that so far reportedly.

Oracle & MySQL

Yes it remains to be seen what Oracle will do with MySQL. Will Oracle see it as a threat to Oracle Database and try to smother it or will Oracle see MySQL as more of a threat to things like SQLServer and use MySQL as a way to keep Oracle shops on the Oracle brand.

While MySQL may cost Oracle some revenue on the low end of Oracle Database, I’ve seen many Oracle shops use SQLserver for smaller , so-called departmental loads to save on licenses and admin costs. (Or at least a perceived saving on costs, that a whole other discussion.) Using MySQL would “obviously” save even more and cut MS out of the picture. There is a lot of value in keeping the competition’s sales person out of the building.

Oracle Buys Sun

I am surprised that anyone is surprised by this. I was more surprised that IBM would try to buy Sun, I’ve been waiting for Oracle to buy Sun for a long time.

With all due respect to MySQL, it isn’t about MySQL at all. I wonder if Larry even knows he bought MySQL. It is all about Java. Oracle has a huge and lucrative enterprise application stack on Java, as does IBM. Owning Java gives Oracle total control if its own stack. and some control over IBM’s. That’s got to be worth the $7billion alone.

As for the future of MySQL. Yes technically MySQL 5.x could do what a low end Oracle installation can do. But it hardly matters, no Oracle customer is going to risk porting a big enterprise app to MySQL to save a few bucks on license fees. Oracle may be expensive but it works so the customers will stay locked in. And remember that Oracle already gives away low end versions of its database now. It may affect new customers at the bottom but then again, a customer that would have chosen MySQL anyway is now an Oracle customer.

A look at Innobase or BerkeleyDB likely points to MySQL’s immediate future, ie. much the same as it was but with a big RED label pasted on it. Long term there are some challenges for MySQL though. Oracle isn’t going to let MySQL encroach onto Oracle Database’s rich territory. They would probably be happier if the 16 way support in MySQL 5.4 didn’t see the light of day but that cat is out of the bag already. I can’t see much more of that coming from Oracle. Which leads to something more serious, the splintering of MySQL. This was already happening with Sun but it will get worse with Oracle, especially if Oracle puts some brakes on its MySQL. Already there is the Oracle/Sun version, Percona, Monty, etc. It may not be bad, Linux flourishes under many versions, but it will be different from the focus that MySQL AB had.

The future of Solaris and Sparc are more uncertain. I doubt Oracle really wants to be in the hardware business. We can look at the HP Exadata product for a precedent. Expect the hardware busness to be sold to HP and HP to kill the Sparc as it did its own PA-RISC. Solaris has been poorly supported on Intel for years, HP likely has the skills to fix that and carry Solaris customers forward until it can convert them to HP/Linux or HP-UX. ( I can’t imagine a Solaris SA being happy with the prospect of being stuck with HP-UX though ).Whether Oracle sells or keeps the hardware, look for pre-configured Oracle/Solaris/hardware packages, especially for the SMB market

There is likely strong nostalgia within Oracle to keep Solaris, it was the development platform for a long long time and it is still the Cadillac environment for Oracle. Nothing really beats Oracle RAC on a big multi-cpu Solaris box. Sadly, the market just doesn’t support such luxury anymore so it probably has to go. We and Oracle will have to settle for RAC on Linux, especially if Oracle buys RedHat next.

Data Warehouses Redux

About a year ago I blogged about my dissatisfaction with Kimball style star schema based DWs. Well, lately I’ve been re-reading Kimball’s books and website and I’m now eating my words.

I guess I can I say this time I get it. This time I see how well conformed dimensions can create a usable DW. I still don’t think it is as elegant as the Inmon style but it can work.

More importantly, I see that the Kimball style DW is the only thing that will get built today. No one is going to get the sponsorship to build a centralized Inmom DW and then the data marts to hang off it. You have to start with the data marts and build the DW up gradually. A Kimball style DW with well conformed dimensions is your only hope. Franky. there are more and more people who try or must build DWs out of “federated” OLTP systems. A Kimball DW is a step up from that.

There is also a performance or latency issue. More and more we want “real-time” DWs or at least reduced latency between the DW and its source. The Inmom style inherantly has more latency becauses it a two step architecture of DW -> DM. If your star schema DMs are also the DW, its one step and less latency.

Is Email obsolete?

Back in the old unconnected days, Email made sense. It is a way to deliver information to unconnected computers. You create a message locally, send it through some method that can involves some intermittent connections and I receive and read it locally.

Now however if you and I are both on Gmail, nothing ever really gets sent anywhere, We both effectively look up the same info at Gmail somewhere. So why then have all this email messaging overhead? It’s like using Canada Post to send a letter to someone in the same house. Why not just leave me a note at my Gmail account directly?

It all works relatively easily now because we’ve gotten so good at adding layers upon layers upon layers of software to hide each layer of complexity under the next but do we really need all those layers now? And even if you are on Hotmail and I am on Gmail surely those giants can figure out a way to connect things together without every individual user addressing every individual message. What a waste.

Something like the facebook wall makes some sense but then it sends me an email every time someone writes on it. Sigh. (I think I can turn that off right?)

Old magazines

I was cleaning out some old IEEE magazines from the late 1990’s recently

It is interesting to review some of the predictions from those days.

When the Sony PS2 was launched there were predictions it would overtake the Wintel PC, based on its low cost and fast graphics.
Instead the price of a Wintel PC dropped to about the same as the new PS3 and its performance eclipses the PS2. Of course, PS2s cost next to nothing now, no one wants them

Wireless broadband was predicted to replace dialup because 3G wireless would be so cheap, it would be almost free. So much broadband capacity would be built it would be almost free too. A lot of broadband was built and Nortel’s stock hit $100. A lot of it still sits unused and Nortel’s stock is essentially worthless. None of it is free but I must admit it is pretty cheap. I didn’t have broadband in 1999, I do now.

There was a whole area of OO application technology that completely missed the web. Languages like Ada and Modula and things like CORBA and MS DCOM for interconnecting apps. CORBA and DCOM may still exist somewhere under the covers but no one talks about them now. Ada and Modula? Gone.

The pointless webserver wars between IIS and Netscape Webserver, completely missing Apache which would make both of them irrelevant.

The pointless browser war between IE and Netscape, as if that would define the internet. The real issue was the web application server stack and by the time those two had finished their scuffle, neither one mattered. MS had to scramble to create .NET just to crash the party late.

The Big Switch

Wrote this almost a year ago and forgot to post it. A review of Nick Carr’s “The Big Swtich”, I received my pre-ordered copy sometime in January 2008 and read it immediately. Remember that back then “cloud” computing was something new and wild. Amazing how far it has come in only 1 year. Hell, BusinessWeek is doing a cloud computing issue sometime soon.

Anyway, here’s the review as I wrote it over a year ago.
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For anyone in IT read this book and then look around and see if you will still have a job in 2/5/10 years. If you are a CIO, will you soon be a captain without a ship or crew?

It is an easy read, more of an intro to the subject than an indepth analysis.
It begs for more depth, especially on the business side. It begs for a follow-on book really.

On the consumer side, with Google, Facebook, Flickr, etc we already can see what the future might look like. On the buisness side, it isn’t so clear. Yet here is where profound impacts on employment and competetiveness of the economy will be felt.

Perhaps too much time spent on the eletricfication metaphor. I have an interest in the period of Edison, Telsa Westinghouse and the history of electrification and I found this stuff interesting and well written but it does take up a lot of the book. Those who just accept the metaphor and want to get to the point may gloss over quite a bit of it.

I didn’t get much from the last chapter and largely just glossed over it.