Is business logic at home in the database?

No, this is not a joke post. Bear with me, and I will explain under what circumstances it makes sense to move your number crunching business logic from within your Oracle, IBM DB2,  MSSQL Server and MySQL stored procedures to a scalable application level.

In my opinion these are the three major reasons why business logic is best implemented in the application layer. Further reasons can be found in the comprehensive blog, evils of stored procedures, written by Tony Marston.

He with the most data wins (?)

When four years ago we consulted for the United States Geological Survey, their tape robot operated 2 petabyte data repository. Back then I thought we dealt with one of world’s largest data collections. I hear that CERN currently has 15 petabytes, and expect to add a few peta every year of its LHC operation.

Performance and scalability of in-memory databases

[Contributed by Sebastian Czechowski]

In the times where growing number of applications and services demand more and more resources for high availability and performance purposes, scalability is one of the biggest challenges for database designers. A demand for traditional databases that keep data residing on disk is going down as performance and time are the key values in every business that relies on database solutions. One of the paths to follow in order to achieve database access speed within the range of microseconds instead of merely milliseconds is to switch from disk-based solutions to much faster in-memory ones.

To shard or not to shard

[Contributed by Mateusz Kyc]

IT industry is one big word generator. Even better, it is a meaning generator. There are words or acronyms to describe every single functionality, but the same time one word can describe a bunch of different functionalities or one functionality can be described by two or more different words.Recently I have found an old article about differences between sharding and partitioning in general. This article tries to describe sharding as partitioning. It is not my aim to judge on this but I would like to write a couple of sentences about use of sharding.

Cloud computing and insurance

Observing the buzz on cloud computing, I enjoy finding pearls of wisdom among 99% gobbledegook.

The term Cloud had its luck last year. How come it made such a career in 12 months? You've heard the story x times, so here's my version. Late 2007 brought Nick Carr's "The Big Switch" which coincided with Amazon announcing EC2. These two came as a revelation to all the Grid vendors, scratching their heads as the term "grid" faded in its popularity in press. So the Grid guys willingly embraced the Cloud (luckilly equally ambiguous and broad) as their "new" paradigm. Amazon made it into the news for making the difference in the industry. Carr won applause as an instant prophet, as he predicted the Cloud and the Cloud happened. And the press folks could write tons of new material about Carr, Amazon, Salesforce, and the surprising heaps of new Cloud businesses. See? Everyone instantly happy. Added value? Very little.

Why the big data matters

This first post requires some perspective, so here you go. Why start this blog?

For the past decade I have been working on scalable systems. Six years ago I set up GridwiseTech, a knowledge company addressing scalability challenges for corporations and goverments worldwide. I was soon joined by a team of excellent experts. Together, we have built collective knowledge on designing and building distributed, robust, and scalable IT systems, capable of handling large volumes of data and large processing.