About interview with Mike Stonebraker on ODBMS.org

 ODBMS.org published an interview with Mike Stonebraker, who is a well-known scientist in database technologies and founder of several database products.

Mike repeats his main statement that one size does not fit all, which he proves with founding and developing different database products specialized for different application sizes. Examples of such products are in-memory OLTP database VoltDB and DW/BI database Vertica. Mike argues that current data operated by ACID transactions, should be managed by an OLTP engine, e.g., VoltDB, while historical data should be moved into analytical database system, such as Vertica. Thus getting much better performance for the two different tasks and I fully support him.

For the benchmark comparison, Mike refers to TPC-C benchmark and comparison between VoltDB numbers and legacy DBMSs numbers. Unfortunately, this comparison is unfair. VoltDB runs a modified version TPC-C, which does not follow the TPC-C specification and, thus, the benchmark results are not published on TPC-C web page. VoltDB implementation of "TPC-C benchmark" is biased towards to VoltDB, since VoltDB does not allow concurrency on the same database partition. Note that the original TPC-C is biased to legacy database and limits benchmark result by underlying hardware. (I hope to find time and write a small post about problems with TPC benchmarks for OLTP databases)

In general, Mike Stonebraker plays important role in modern DBMS development. I highly recommend to read the interview, read his papers and listen his presentations.

Cool presentation of F#

I am investigating Visual F# as an additional tool to C# under .NET Framework. To get quick overview of F# I watched a presentation by Luca Bolognese at PDC2008: An Introduction to Microsoft F#. This was a very good choice: very cool presentation and very good introduction into F#. I recommend to watch it and have a fun together with getting good overview.

Some comments about F#:
A functional language for .NET, which syntax makes it easy to use for:

1. Declarative processing of lists or sets in a pipeline fashion.
2. Asynchronous and parallel processing.

Another important point is that F# is not just functional, but it is useful, i.e.,  it can be easily used with other .NET languages and applications. It provides object-orientation of CLR and has interfaces to call in and call out CLR assemblies built in other .NET languages.

ACM Webinar on Security

Yesterday I attended second ACM Webinar: Security: Computing in an Adversarial Environment by Dr. Carrie Gates from CA Technologies.

It was high level introductory lecture in general security. I cannot say that it was a computer science (CS) lecture. The only connection to computer science was that security in modern world is much related to computers and Internet. Since the webinar was from ACM I was expecting more CS technological lecture.
At the beginning Dr. Gates asked why security discipline is different from any other major CS disciplines such as AI. My answer was:

Most CS disciplines help to get solutions for primary tasks or services of applications or software, while security is often hidden behind those tasks and services in background. Security does not help with solving primary tasks, instead it is often opposite.

This one was not in the list of the question answers at the end of the presentation, but it was indirectly mention during the lecture.

By the way, I was using Firefox during the webinar and noticed bad quality of the sound and inability to get slides from there. Later I switched to IE to get the slides and the sound was improved. I have not tested with Chrome.