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.

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.
–
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.

WiMAX

I recently attended an IEEE meeting where the presentation was about WiMAX.

Most of it was too technical for me to really follow (this was a meeting of telecom geeks) but I did learn there are two current WiMAX standards. The old standard is fixed wireless station with no handoff, much like long-range WiFi. Apparently it is very popular in the developing world because the technology is now cheap and easy to deploy, certainly a lot cheaper than fixed copper wire. It can carry fixed station VOIP as well of course.

The new standard is mobile station, it can hand off sessions from one station to the next like a cellphone. Today it only supports data but voice calls will be added so it could in theory replace current cellphone technology completely. It is compatible with the old standard, new equipment will connect to the old fixed stations.

Several companies, most notably Intel, have chipsets on the new standard. The next Centrino chipset will have WiMAX so many notebooks will have WiMAX standard within a year or so. Some chipsets are already available in Europe and Asia, there are already WiMAX USB keys, WiMAX notebooks, and even a WiMAX handheld game console in Asia. Imagine a WiMAX enabled Nintendo GameBoy.

Interestingly, the “WiMAX” deployed here by Rogers and Bell is an older non-standard version. It won’t work with the new chipsets so anyone here buying one of the new WiMAX notebooks will be *disappointed*.  The presenter was an American, he didn’t know if Rogers or Bell plan to upgrade to the real WiMAX standard.

Oracle in the Cloud

When I received my pre-ordered copy of The Big Switch last January I read it with the mindset that what Nick Carr was talking about was 2,5, maybe even 10 years in the future.

Boom, the future just arrived.

Oracle just made its major technology products, most notably database 11g, available on the Amazon EC2.

In a sense nothing new technically was announced, you always could install a copy of Linux Oracle on an Amazon Machine Image but it wasn’t licensed or supported by Oracle. Now it is. Standard Oracle licensing applies and Oracle has supplied custom templates on Amazon virtual machines with the database already setup.

So far I don’t see any big limitations with it though I’m sure there are some kinks in it at this early stage. But once that gets worked out, I am already wondering, why would you run Oracle any other way? The fact that standard licensing applies does hurt the cloud scalability, Oracle will have to come up with another licensing model eventually.

Oracle being the 800 pound gorilla in the database market, I think they just shook the market up. I was expecting 2009 to be the year that a few open source databases started to appear on the cloud. It was only a few months ago that EnterpriseDB made a beta of PostgreSQL available on the EC2. Now Oracle has put it all out there.

From a brief test it appears to work. The hardest part is getting the SSH keys setup for the secure connection. After that, a few commands and a few minutes and the database is up and running, just like any other Oracle on Linux. Sweet.

MySQL 5.1

The GA release of MySQL finally approaches, perhaps by sometime in November, let’s just say end of the year. I think this will be a watershed release for MySQL and open-source databases in general. Meaning 2009 should be an interesting year.

The 5.1 release finally has the major features that we might say a “real” ( or “Oracle” ) database ought to have – referential integrity, ACID transaction (using Oracle’s InnoDB!), MVCC and partitioning. And now commercial support from well known and trusted vendor Sun. I think a lot of customers paying those high Oracle & DB2 license fees will be giving this a serious look in 2009.

Now of course PostgreSQL already has all this and it really hasn’t caught on yet. PostgreSQL just never built up the user base the way MySQL did with the LAMP users. As MySQL leverages that big user base with this new fuller featured release, perhaps MySQL will drag PostgreSQL along with it in 2009.

Where does that leave the Oracle DBA in 2009? With open-source databases and cloud computing coming on strong in 2009, the Oracle DBA should definitely be looking for a broader skill set.

Architecture of a Database System

Found this excellent article on RDMBS architecture. Please have a look.

Architecture of a Database System