David S. Read

A couple of my team members and I will be attending and presenting at this year's SmartData Conference. This conference is a great opportunity to learn and explore the broad offerings that make up the NoSQL ecosystem. Key-value, columnar, document, graph and semantics - it's all in there! This is the largest conference of its kind and you won't want to miss out on the chance to meet with so many different experts and vendors.

The workshop that my team-mates and I will be delivering is entitled Integrating and Analyzing Data Using Semantics and NoSQL. This session will allow participants to work with semantic graph and document stores as platforms to accelerate the creation of analytic data marts. More information is available on the infuzIT News page.

For more information on the SmartData Conference, visit its website: http://smartdataweek.com/

I just completed a report for InformationWeek entitled, Semantic Database Technology. The report's goal is to introduce technology professionals to semantic technology. The major topics within the report look at:

• Introducing semantic technology standards and terminology
• Comparing semantic and relational database technologies
• Identifying opportunities which would benefit from using semantic technology
• Reporting insights from users of semantic technology
• Sharing an overview of vendors and products in the semantic technology space

If you are curious about semantic technology I hope that this report will provide a useful starting point for you. If you are looking for additional information please check out the other links on my semantic web pages or feel free to contact me and I will try and direct you to relevant resources.

I am also interested in feedback regarding the report's content as well as suggestions for additional topic areas which you would like to see covered in similar reports.

Joe Raiti, CIO of Blue Slate Solutions and I co-authored a report for InformationWeek entitled, State of Database Technology. The report took survey data from over 700 IT professionals with database responsibilities and assessed the current strategies and challenges associated with database products. We also explored near-term and longer-term trends that IT leaders should be considering as they plan the future of their enterprise data management infrastructures.

A subset of the report was used as the basis for the cover article of the January 16, 2012 issue of InformationWeek.

All truth passes through three stages: First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

... well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you - if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers - the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think.
-Fred Brooks (from No Silver Bullet found in The Mythical Man Month)

Computers are nitpicky, precise, literal, unimaginative and disinterested in your project's success!
-David Read