Universal Data Access Technology Blog

Why Do I Need To Pay For ODBC , JDBC, ADO.NET, OLE-DB Drivers?

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:03:53 GMT

Payment is a function of pain alleviation (opportunity cost) monetization.

This post is about highlighting the real pains associated with the $0.00 misconception associated with Data Access Drivers: ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, OLE-DB etc.

In the most basic sense, there are some fundament aspects of data access that are complex to implement and rarely implemented (if at all) by free drivers, the list includes:

Escape Syntaxes for Dates and Functions
Metadata Calls which enable smarter ODBC compliant applications (this feature is typically missing on Driver Side and abused on the Client side i.e., making clients DBMS specific by testing for specific DBMS names)
Scrollable Cursors, this is how you deal with change sensitivity, and most drivers actually fake support and get away with it due to shortage of applications to test proper cursor types (Static, Forward-Only, Key-Set, Dynamic, and Mixed models).

Okay, so we're done with actual driver sophistication re. implementation of critical features. Let's Up the ante by veering into the area of security. At the most basic level, It's extremely important to understand that all data access driver types provide read-write access to your databases; thus, it's imperative that data access drivers address the following:

Read-Only or Read-Write Access scoped to specific Users
Ditto applied to specific User Groups
Ditto applied to Database Names
Ditto applied to specific ODBC compliant applications
Ditto applied to specific ODBC host operating systems
Ditto applied to specific IP addresses or Ranges on your Network
Any combination of items 1-6 as part of a configurable data access rules/policy system.

Once you're done with security, you then have the thorny issue of data access and data flow management. In a nutshell, your driver needs to be able to handle:

Protection against cartesian product network flooding (e.g., user clicks on Customer Table via an ODBC compliant application without comprehension of back-end implications)
Enabling or Disabling of key DBMS engine data access optimization features (e.g. DBMS specific extensions exposed via Environment Variables of SQL commands based settings)
Conditional Connection Pooling across User, User Groups, Applications, Host Operating System, IP Address dimensions.

Once you've dealt with Security and Data Flow, you then have to address the enforcement of these settings across a myriad of ODBC compliant host, which is where Zeroconfig and centralized data access administration comes into play i.e., configure once (locally) and enforce globally.

When OpenLink Software entered the ODBC Driver Market segment in 1992, the issues above where the fundamental basis of our Multi-Tier Drivers. Thus, although we distinguished ourselves via performance, stability, and specification adherence, our fundamental engineering focus has always been skewed towards security and configurability, alongside high-performance and scalability.

As we close 2009, the security issues that pervade Native DBMS Drives, ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, OLE-DB etc. Drivers have only increased, courtesy of ubiquitous computing, sadly though, there remains a fundamental illusion that Data Access Drivers simply connect you to DBMS back-ends, and since you can get these drivers at $0.00 from most DBMS vendors they can't be that important.

I hope that this post brings some clarity to a very serious security and general configuration management issues associated with Data Access Drivers. Free ODBC Drivers offer nothing, when it comes to the real issues of Open Data Access. If they did, they wouldn't be worth $0.00!

Note: wondering if this has anything to do with Linked Data (my current data access focal point)? Well, remember, the Linked Data meme is fundamentally about REST based Open Data Access & Integration via HTTP; thus, what applies to Relational Model databases naturally applies to their more granular Graph Model relatives. Basically, data access security never goes away, it just gets more granular, complex, and ultimately, mercurial.

OpenLink Universal Data Access Drivers Overview - clickable diagram exposing features and benefits
OpenLink Multi-Tier ODBC Drivers
OpenLink Multi-Tier JDBC Drivers
OpenLink Multi-Tier ADO.NET Providers
Multi-Tier Drivers Overview (1993 White Paper excerpt)
OpenLink ODBC White Paper (actual 1993 White Paper)
OpenLink Virtuoso - which provides a Virtual Conceptual Model (via HTTP, RDF, based Linked Data) Layer above ODBC or JDBC accessible Data Sources
Oracle Security Auditing Horror Stories -- Social Dimensions of Security compounded by Value (literal username and password) Based User Identity
Database Security Strategies Need to Grow Up in 2010
First Law of Data Quality
Who's Data is it? Part 1
Who's Data is it? Part 2

DataSpaces Bulletin: December issue now online!

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 18:09:00 GMT

The highly anticipated December 2008 issue of the DataSpaces Bulletin is now available!

This month's DataSpaces contains material of interest to the Virtuoso developer and UDA user community alike —

Introduction to Virtuoso Universal Server (Cloud Edition).
Links to Virtuoso and Linked Data mailing lists.
UDA license management tips and tricks.

OpenLink Software Releases new Universal Data Access Driver Suite 6.1

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 13:38:14 GMT

  New ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, and OLE DB Drivers for Major Databases

Burlington, MA. Tuesday, January 15, 2008 - OpenLink Software, Inc., technology leader in the development and deployment of secure, 
high-performance universal data access middleware, announces the commercial availability of Release 6.1 of its high-performance and 
secure Universal Data Access Drivers.  

The updated components support new and older releases of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, IBM DB2, IBM Informix, Ingres, Progress
Open Edge, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Firebird, across Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX.

New features across then entire suite include:

- XA-based two-phase commit across ODBC, JDBC, and ADO.NET

- Microsoft SQL Linked Server compatible ODBC provider for OLE DB (32 & 64 Bit)

- ODBC Bridge for JDBC accessible Databases (32 & 64 Bit)

- Ruby on Rails Adapter for ODBC- and JDBC-accessible databases

- Support for 64-bit Windows running on x86_64 (e.g., Opteron, Xeon) and IA64 (e.g., Itanium2) Processors across all Data Access APIs -- 
   ODBC, JDBC, OLEDB,  and ADO.NET

- Support in Mac OS X Universal binaries for PPC and Intel 32-bit mode on Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5), plus Intel 64-bit mode on Leopard

- ADO.NET 2.0 Support (and an ADO.NET 3.0 Beta Provider on request)

- ADO.NET integration with Visual Studio 2005 

"The new product release builds on our legacy as leading provider of quality, secure and high-performance data access drivers to all major
DBMS engines," said Kingsley Idehen, President & CEO.

"We are at a critical juncture within the enterprise and across the Web, where data access, portability, and unobtrusive integration require
the technological prowess and leadership qualities we've consistently demonstrated over the last 15 years. Standardized data access
middleware that enables the development and deployment of database and operating system independent applications remains a critical priority
for organizations worldwide," he added.

About OpenLink Software
=======================  

OpenLink Software is a privately held software company with offices in the U.S.A., United Kingdom, Russia, and Bulgaria. It has been the
leading provider and technology innovator in the universal data access middleware market since 1993, with over 10,000+ companies currently
using its products worldwide.

Additional information on OpenLink Software can be obtained from the web site: http://www.openlinksw.com/.

Contact:
Helen Heward-Mills,
OpenLink Software, Inc.
Tel: 781 273 0900
Email: hmills@openlinksw.com

Announcing ODBC Data Adapter for Ruby on Rails, release 1.1

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 17:03:03 GMT

OpenLink Software are pleased to announce release 1.1 of the ODBC Adapter for Ruby on Rails (ActiveRecord).

This unifies data-access from a plethora of individual adapters to one common configuration in Rails; rather than having a multitude of DBMS-specific Rails Adaptors with inconsistent functionality and behaviour, you can now focus on a single data adapter with consistent behaviour across ODBC-accessible databases on all Ruby-supported platforms. This release adds support for DB2, MySQL, Sybase and SQL Server. The supported DBMSes now include: Oracle, Informix, Ingres, OpenLink Virtuoso, SQL Server, Sybase, MySQL and DB2.

The adapter can be downloaded from rubyforge: http://rubyforge.org/projects/odbc-rails/

Technorati Tags: odbc, rails, ruby, webdevelopment

Why Web 2.0 clones are not innovative

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 16:02:56 GMT

Why Web 2.0 clones are not innovative:

Richard MacManus at ZDNet writes his view on Web 2.0 clone applications. He observed that every country has its set of Web 2.0 clones — bookmarking sites that looks del.icio.us, photo sharing sites that like Flickr, social networking sites like MySpace, community news sites like digg, etc. He criticizes those Web 2.0 clones being non-innovative.

It’s true that most of the clone apps don’t come with innovative ideas, but it would be unwise to think that they totally have no values. Contrary to Richard’s point of view, I think clone apps are essential ingredients in helping the IT business in developing countries to become innovative.

Innovative ideas don’t usually born in the thin air. They requires extensive testings and experiments. The mature IT business in the US has extensive knowledge and experience in developing innovative ideas. People here have a general idea about what works and what doesn’t. In many developing countries, however, the settings are completely different.

Take China for an example. Its IT market is still in an infant stage comparing to that of the US. Chinese businesses that recently entered the market are still in the stage trying to figure out how to make profits and establish a sustainable business model. The need to be innovative now, perhaps, is not on the todo lists of the business executives.

Furthermore, the past generation of Chinese engineers and developers were not exactly trained to be innovative and think outside-the-box. They were trained with impressive memorization skills and obey orders from superiors. It’s unfair to expect this generation of Chinese IT workers to live and breath with innovations as their US counterparts do.

Given this type of harsh environment in many developing countries, it’s quite natural to act as copycats and repeat business ideas that have good track records. In fact, it’s a good business if being a copycat can bring profits.

We don’t criticize Yahoo! Maps being a copycat of Google Maps. We don’t criticize Google Notebook being a copycat of del.icio.us. Why should we criticize foreign Web 2.0 clones when their intention is to learn how to enter a global IT market and to become prosperous? Maybe in the cloning process, copycats will discover innovative ideas by accident.

Technorati Tags: business, web2.0

What Problem Does Natural Language Search Solve?

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 16:02:55 GMT

What Problem Does Natural Language Search Solve?:
Matt Marshall recently posted a story about a new search engine looking to raise a lot of money at a very high valuation, which has created quite a bit of buzz as people argue over whether or not the company has a chance, or deserves such a high valuation. Matt followed up with more details on the company, though he still expresses some reasonable skepticism. Like many people, my first reaction on hearing about it was that I can't remember a year that's gone by without someone claiming to have come out with a revolution in natural language search. However, when it comes to search engine news, no one can go through the history and explain why something is a bad idea quite like Danny Sullivan can. He lists out all the attempts at natural language search, and shows how each one failed (in some cases, miserably). He also points out that the problem with natural language search is that it requires everyone to change their behavior. As with any startup, when you're looking at their chances, the big question to ask is pretty simple: what problem does it solve? Plenty of people have figured out how to search with keywords. In fact, many of us find it more natural and faster than trying to construct a natural language query. So, while all the natural language search engines that come along insist that searches suck because they can't understand the the searcher, it's not clear that's the real problem. When people want to use a search engine, they want to find what they want. That means being able to search quickly. Dumping two or three keywords into a box is always going to be a lot faster than figuring out the natural language equivalent. So, perhaps someone can enlighten us. What is the problem natural language search solves?

Technorati Tags: search

(via Techdirt)

Technorati Tags: natural-language, search

Planning the Software Industrial Revolution

Fri, 13 May 2005 17:33:19 GMT

Here is another timeless article by Brad Cox titled: Planning The Software Industrial Revolution.

Enjoy!

Social Construction of Reality

Fri, 13 May 2005 11:31:42 GMT

An interesting article by Brad Cox. (inventor of Objective-C) that's provides great foundation for a understanding number of issues that are relevant to social networking systems.

Standards Contempt Revisited

Thu, 12 May 2005 15:11:14 GMT

My entire time in the IT industry has been spent primarily trying to develop, architect, test, mentor, evangelize, and educate about one simple subject: Standards Appreciation!

The trouble with "Standards Appreciation" is that vendors see standards from the following perspectives primarily:

Yet another opportunity to lock-in the customer
If point 1. fails then undermine the standard vociferously (an activity that takes many covert forms; attack performance, security, and maturity)
Developers don't like standards (the real reason for this is to-do lists and timeframes in most cases)

Korateng Ofusu-Amaah provides insightful perspective on the issues above, in a recent "must read" blog post about how this dysfunctionality plays out today in the realm of HTML Buttons and Forms. Here are some notebable excerpts:

"Instead my discourse devolved into a case of I told you so, a kind of Old Testament view of things instead of the softer New Age stylings that are in vogue these days. Sure there was a little concern for the users that had been hurt by lost data, but there was almost no empathy for the developers who had to lose their weekends furiously reworking their applications to do the right thing especially because it appeared that they would rather persist in trying to do the wrong thing.

The sentiment behind that mini tempest-in-a-teapot however was a recognition of the fact that those who have been quietly evangelizing the web style were talking about the wrong thing and to the wrong people."

...

"..As application developers we should ask for better forms, we should be demanding of browser makers things like XForms or Web Forms 2.0 to make sure that we can go beyond the kind of stilted usability that we currently have. Our users would appreciate our efforts in that vein but for now, they know what to expect. Until then application developers should push back when we are told to "do the wrong thing".

There is an unfortunate mindset trend at the current time that espouses: "Sloppiness" is good, and "Simple" justifies inadequacy at all times. Today, the real focus of most development endeavours is popularity first and coherance (backward compatibility, standards compliance, security, scalability etc.) a distant second, if you can simply make things popular then that justifies the sloppiness (acquisition, VC money, Blogosphere Juice etc.). Especially as someone else will ultimately have to deal with the predictable ramifications of the sloppiness.

Standards are critical to the success of IT investment within any enterprise, but standards are difficult to design, write, implement, and then comprehend; due to the inherent requirement for abstraction - it's a top down, as opposed to bottom up, process.

Vendors will never genuinely embrace standards, until IT decision makers demand standards compliance of them, by demonstrating a penchant for smelling out "leaky abstractions" embedded within product implementations. Naturally, this requires a fundamental change of mindset for most decision makers. It means moving away from the "this analyst said...", "I heard that company X is going to deliver....", "I read that .....", "I saw that demo..." approach to product evaluation, to a more knowledgeable evaluation process that seeks out the What, Why, and How of any prospective IT solution.

Knowledge empowers all of the time. It's a gift that stands the test of time once you invest some time in its acquisition (unfortunately this gift isn't free!). Ignorance with all its superficial seduction (free and widely available!), is temporary bliss at best, and nothing but heartache over time.

A Collection of PHP and ODBC How-To Links

Sun, 01 May 2005 15:46:45 GMT

In 2005 I am somewhat surprised at the steady level of emails and commentary expressing confusion about the use of PHP and ODBC.

Here are a few links that resolve any confusion about this matter:

OpenLink's PHP and iODBC HOWTO doc: http://www.iodbc.org/index.php?page=languages/php/odbc-phpHOWTO
PHP Everywhere's guide: http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/node/view/9
Zili Zhang's piece from 1999 (time flies!): http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/MSSQL6-Openlink-PHP-ODBC.html
Zend's ODBC Tutorial: http://www.zend.com/zend/tut/odbc.php

Or simple google on PHP and ODBC or PHP and iODBC ...

Point, Counterpoint: Mac OS X Is Great for Fortysomething Unix Hackers

Sun, 01 May 2005 14:31:01 GMT

There has been a lot of well deserved attention going the way of "Mac OS X Tiger". A the current time, a lot of this attention tends to focus on the consumer constituency comprised of Aunt Milly et al, designers, and new media aficionados. The Daring Fireball posts an article titled: Point, Counterpoint: Mac OS X Is Great for Fortysomething Unix Hackers . This particular post applies to OpenLink Software in general across a myriad of fronts, especially the essence of this excerpt:

On the surface, Grahamâs piece seems like a nice pat on the back to the Mac platform. But thereâs an implication in his piece that the worldâs most prodigiously talented programmers are only now switching (or switching back) to the Mac, when in fact some of them have been here all along. GUI programming is hard, and for GUI programmers, the Mac has always been, in Brent Simmonsâs words, âThe Showâ.

I.e. the idea that by the mid-â90s the Mac user base had been whittled down to âgraphic designers and grandmasâ is demonstrably false â someone must have been writing the software the designers and grandmas were using, no? â but I donât think itâs worth pressing the point, because I suspect it wasnât really what Graham meant to imply. And the main thrust of his point is true: there is a certain class of hackers â your prototypical Unix nerds â who not only werenât using Macs a decade ago, but whose antipathy toward Macs was downright hostile. And it is remarkable that these hackers are now among Mac OS Xâs strongest adherents.

Itâs another sign of Mac OS Xâs dual nature: from the perspective of your typical user (and particularly long-time Mac users), it is the Mac OS with a modern Unix architecture encapsulated under the hood; from the perspective of the hackers Graham writes of, it is Unix with a vastly superior GUI.

Read on....

Ajax, Hard Facts, Brass Tacks ... and Bad Slacks

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 20:11:22 GMT

By Mark Bierbeck:

Ajax, Hard Facts, Brass Tacks ... and Bad Slacks

A number of people have contacted me recently about Ajax [1] -- a catchy name -- coined to provide an umbrella term for a particular group of technologies used to build web applications. The use of the word comes from Jesse James Garrett in a recent blog [2], and describes a class of internet applications written using JavaScript in a browser. By using JavaScript these apps have full access to the DOM, and as a consequence are able to make all sorts of changes to the page that the user is interacting with, without having to go back to the server. When the application does need to go back to the server -- to deliver some data and get a response -- the idea is to keep the DOM intact so that the user has a smooth experience. This means that all communication with the server needs to take place outside of the normal HTML form mechanism, since this would obviously replace the current page. Ajax addressed this, with what it calls 'asynchronous-JavaScript' -- retrieve only the data you need, and then directly manipulate the DOM to get the effect you want. 'Asynchronous-JavaScript' accounts for the first few letters of the name, with the remainder being the obligatory 'X' for XML (although XML is not really key to this technology, and many of the applications that are often cited as Ajax-apps don't use XML as the data medium). BuzzingThe response to Ajax has been pretty positive. In fact the only negatives have been either to suggest a change of name or to moan a little that "I've been doing this for years, why hasn't anyone noticed me?" (I won't put any links to those sort of articles, since they are a little embarassing -- after all, everyone has been doing this for years!) Anyway, despite a couple of sour-pusses, the software community is almost universally excited, and the blog wires have glowed over the last few months with descriptions of Google Maps, GMail, and so on. Just about everyone who has asked me about Ajax has expected me to be disappointed. Surely, they say, this makes the case for XForms weaker? But my answer is the exact opposite -- XForms and standards-based web applications are in every way superior to the techniques described as Ajax, since the whole raison d'Ãªtre of XForms and XHTML 2 is to address the very problems that Ajax-like techniques suffer from. That may come across as a little bold...so perhaps I should explain. From Workaround to FeatureWe've all been using HTML mark-up for years now, and the language hasn't changed much in that time. As a consequence, the increasing demand for more complex web-pages has meant that the balance in our documents has shifted increasingly from vanilla mark-up to 'the workaround'. Whether it's providing tooltips, dynamic/repeating data sections, or small portions of our page that change without having to request a new document, we've generally had to dive into script. But the shift from mark-up to script has meant that the mark-up language itself has been relegated to a mere carrier for programs. Unfortunately this means that no-one gains -- it's annoying for the programmer to have to produce ever more convoluted spaghetti JavaScript to meet the demands of their audience, but it's also annoying for the non-programmer, who probably only wants a tooltip. And its particularly annoying for those who want to use documents on the web for more ambitious applications to find that most of the important stuff in a document is hidden away in script. All is not lost, however, since this collection of 'workarounds' provides a rich source of real-life patterns that appear for authors and programmers, time and again. They may be workarounds, but they are much-needed ones. The aim of the new generation of languages like XForms and XHTML 2 is to take these 'common patterns' and turn them into mark-up. Just like the HTML elements <a> and <form> pack an enormous amount of functionality into deceptively simple tags, so too can new declarative mark-up capture patterns that have emerged 'in the wild'. (Note that this is the opposite of so-called folksonomies, where popular practice that occurs in the wild is left it the wild, and codification is regarded as a dirty word.) The XML HTTP Request ObjectLet's take the much talked about XML HTTP Request Object (XMLHttpRequest). If you are not familiar with it, it was originally part of Microsoft's XML parser, and allows you to send and receive data outside of the normal HTML form processing. Since it's a handy feature to have in a client, other browsers have followed suit and it's now becoming the 'standard' way to communicate with servers without messing up your page. It's a corner-stone of Ajax. (A good summary with examples is on Jim Ley's jibbering.com site [3].) But...we need to be clear that we're using XMLHttpRequest to get round a weakness in HTML forms. The problem we have is that even if you know that a server is about to give you some data, and the server knows it's about to give you some data, there's no way to tell your form that -- instead your page will be wiped out and replaced with whatever the server sends back. Of course, constant round-tripping doesn't make it completely impossible to produce applications, and a lot of books and airline tickets are bought every day without the facility to get 'just the data'. But we all know it would reduce network traffic and create a smoother user experience if we could just send a list of books or seats, rather than a whole new page. Over the years applications such as Microsoft's Outlook Web Access (OWA), have had to step around the HTML form to get just the data they need. But, whilst OWA considerably predates GMail, until the advent of XMLHttpRequest, the techniques used were quite difficult to manage. (Google Suggest is often cited as a good example of an Ajax-app, but interestingly merges old and new techniques; XMLHttpRequest is used to obtain a piece of JavaScript from a server, and this script contains a call to a client-side function, but using server-provided parameters. It's one of the techniques you might have used in the past with a hidden frame.) So as many have said on their blogs, XMLHttpRequest is not a newly devised technique, but rather a generally accepted replacement for a very old technique. But ultimately that technique is a workaround since the real problem is that HTML forms will always replace the current page. Beyond HTML FormsWhilst XMLHttpRequest gives us a way to get data to and from the server without losing our document, we've unfortunately thrown the baby out with the bath-water; whatever the weaknesses of HTML forms, you have to acknowledge that they are pretty simple to use. Here's an abbreviated version of Google's search form (note that the mark-up is HTML, not XML): <form action=/search name=f> <input type=hidden name=hl value=en> <input maxLength=256 size=55 name=q value=""> <input type=submit value="Google Search" name=btnG></form> As you can see, the simple problem with HTML forms is that we don't say anything about where the data should go when we've received it from the server. The assumption in HTML of old is that we are just doing a kind of 'super-navigation', and no matter what we send to the server, it will only ever give us back a new web-page. (To put it a different way, you could say that <a> and <form> are pretty much the same thing.) To see how this problem is resolved, let's code the same Google search in XForms: <xf:submission id="sub-search" action="http://www.google.com/complete/search?hl=en" method="get" separator="&" replace="all"/> <xf:input ref="q"> <xf:label>Query:</xf:label></xf:input> <xf:submit submission="sub-search"> <xf:label>Google Search</xf:label></xf:submit> Although it will do exactly the same -- right down to replacing the current page -- it's a little different to the HTML mark-up. But the changes in structure have given us some major benefits, from accessible labels on our form controls, to the possibility of many different submissions for the same data. But what it has also given us is the possibility of solving our data update problem. The replace attribute is actually optional in XForms, but I showed it in the previous mark-up so that you can compare it to this: <xf:submission id="sub-search" action="http://www.google.com/complete/search?hl=en" method="get" separator="&" replace="instance"/> In this example the data returned from the server will just replace the instance that was sent, and our page will remain completely intact. (The replace attribute can take the values all, instance, or none.) I won't show the full equivalent using XMLHttpRequest since it's pretty large, but I'll give a flavour of it. (Jim Ley's page -- referenced earlier -- shows how to search Google with XMLHttpRequest.) The Script VersionFirst we need to create an XMLHttpRequest object, but we need to do it in such a way that it will work on both Mozilla and IE: var req; function loadXMLDoc(url) { // native XMLHttpRequest object if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { req = new XMLHttpRequest(); req.onreadystatechange = readyStateChange; req.open("GET", url, true); req.send(null); // IE/Windows ActiveX version } else if (window.ActiveXObject) { req = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); if (req) { req.onreadystatechange = readyStateChange; req.open("GET", url, true); req.send(); } }} When a document is loaded via this function, the readyStateChange() method is invoked: function readyStateChange() { // '4' means document "loaded" if (req.readyState == 4) { // 200 means "OK" if (req.status == 200) { // do something here } else { // error processing here } }} From a programming point of view, I guess you could say that there isn't a lot wrong with this, but then from a programming point of view there wasn't a lot wrong with Z80 or 6502 assembly languages -- I just wouldn't want to go back to them! But the most important issue is that we have lost the very thing that was responsible for HTML's success -- the use of simple, clear, declarative mark-up, in which we simply state our intent, without having to write a program to do it for us. After all, the web took off because authors only had to master <a> in order to enter the exciting new world of 'hypertext' -- but XMLHttpRequest raises the bar again, and takes us right back into the heart of geek-world. Beyond XMLHttpRequestBut in keeping with the principle that I outlined above -- that XForms and XHTML 2 try to provide mark-up for commonly existing design patterns -- let's see if there are any other patterns that XMLHttpRequest has thrown up. You will have noticed in the earlier script that we had tests for success and failure: if (req.status == 200) { // do something here} else { // error processing here} XForms provides the same functionality through the use of events -- on success do this, on failure do that. This is far more powerful, since it hides the protocol-specific aspects of this code ("200" may be 'success' for HTTP, but it isn't 'success' when saving data to the hard-drive or sending an email). XForms uses declarative mark-up to express those events, which again dramatically reduces coding: <xf:action ev:observer="sub-search" ev:event="xforms-submit-error"> <xf:message level="modal"> Submission failed </xf:message></xf:action> But there's lots, lots more in the submission part of XForms: it can provide full XML Schema validation before submitting the data; there is built in support for numerous types of serialisation, such as multipart/related; abstract methods are used so the code is independent of protocol. For example, since put means the same thing whether the target URL begins http: or file:, a form with relative paths will run unchanged on a local machine or a web server; it's extensible -- in formsPlayer 2.0 we have used the submission element to read and write from an ADO database, allowing programmers to convert forms from using the web to using a local database by doing nothing more than changing a single target URL. (Try doing that with XMLHttpRequest!) The submission part of XForms is in fact so powerful that it will eventually form a separate specification, for use in other languages. From Patterns to Mark-upAnd there are plenty more patterns out there that were crying out to be turned into mark-up, and which are now incorporated into XForms and XHTML 2. Do you remember the days when if we wanted a tooltip that contained mark-up -- perhaps an image, or bold text -- we had to use a carefully placed <div>, a CSS display: none;, a mouseover event handler and a timer? Nowadays the programmer with better things to do than work with spaghetti-JavaScript just uses the XForms <hint> element, and for free they get platform independence (and therefore accessibility), as well as the ability to insert any mark-up. And what about the days when we had to write code to open up a text-to-speech engine, and then invoke the various methods on the object to get it to speak its mind? Nowadays who wouldn't just use a CSS property on their XForms' messages? Bad SlacksAnd do you remember...I'm sorry, this one always makes me laugh...do you remember how we used to write lots of JavaScript to recalculate the shopping-cart when a new item was added? I know it's hard to believe -- it's like looking at old photos of us all wearing flares. Anyway, thank God for straight trousers and the XForms dependency-engine. But enough of the good old days, the days of assembly language, C and JavaScript...let's stick with the new. Do Try This at Home To round all of this off, we'll take a look at Google Suggest, and we'll use XForms to implement it. I'll walk through the demo in a separate blog [4] so that this one doesn't get too cluttered -- and hopefully by disecting this simple but useful application, we can show how declarative mark-up scores over scripting. [1] Will AJAX help Google clean up?, c|net, http://news.com.com/Will+AJAX+help+Google+clean+up/2100-1032_3-5621010.html [2] Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications, Jesse James Garrett, Adaptive Path blog, http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php [3] Using the XML HTTP Request object, http://jibbering.com/2002/4/httprequest.html [4] "Google Suggest" Using XForms, http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/2005/04/google-suggest-using-xforms.html Tags: xforms | xbl | webapps | ajax | javascript

[via Internet Applications]

Microsoft: Longhorn Is Great, XP Is Lame

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 16:11:01 GMT

Microsoft: Longhorn Is Great, XP Is Lame Software vendors walk a fine line when pushing upgrades -- tout the new version without slamming the old one. Microsoft threw that strategy aside in pumping Longhorn to the WinHEC faithful, as execs >belittled Windows XP in the process. One VP said that XP hadn't been thought through and at times "failed to deliver." The surprising part is not that XP has major shortcomings -- early on its enhancements were recognized as little more than href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20010824/0856205_F.shtml">improved stability and href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20011008/0111217_F.shtml">a bunch of bug fixes. Rather, the interesting part is Microsoft actually admitting to drawbacks at all, even several years late. But Longhorn, now there's a >real operating system! align="right">[via href="http://www.techdirt.com/">Techdirt]

SAP, IBM Make Play for Oracle Database Customers With New DB2 Version

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 21:52:55 GMT

CNET reports:

There are a whopping 44,000 SAP customers running on Oracle databases, and IBM wants them. To get them, for the first time ever, it's optimized its enterprise database for a specific vendor's applications. The new version of DB, 8.2.2, will include a slew of SAP-optimized features, including self-tuning, self-configuration, silent install, dynamic storage allocation and more.

Wouldn't SAP be better served by simply making their application database independent via ODBC? This process really could have commenced years ago and prevented today's dilema: Your Partner has become Your most aggressive Competitor!

SAP tuned for specifically for DB2 or SAP tuned likewise for Microsoft SQL simply reeks of: "Same Sh*t different Pile". Microsoft and IBM will emulate Oracle in due course regarding their assault on SAP's market if DBMS specificity remains the SAP data access API strategy (this is a simple fact).

SAP should be using its quest for DBMS independence to stimulate or contribute ODBC enhancements (should ODBC be lacking in areas critical to its application needs; it is available in Open Source form and across all major platforms). Should the ODBC API not be the problem, then it can push ODBC Driver vendors (DBMS vendors such as IBM included) to get their Drivers in shape (should they be lacking, I know our ODBC Drivers are absolutely fine for this kind of task).

Database specificity gets application vendors nowhere. You can only control your business development destiny by being database independent. When applications are database independent the intellectual capital that drives your applications is preserved. This is akin to building physical and logical firewalls around the ecosystem created by your products. This is much better that being a pseudo DBMS engine reseller for a future competitor.

Advertising In RSS

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 19:56:05 GMT

Advertising in RSS is just starting now, for all practical purposes. If we wanted to, as an industry, reject the idea, we could.

[via Scripting News]

When XSL stylesheet integration becomes a standard feature across a majority of RSS readers the issue becomes moot. There is no need for industry wide rejection as this will ultimately come down to choice: "To Filter" or "Not To Filter".

Adsense based RSS Advertising as currently implemented (bearing in mind the fundamental intent to perpetuate obtrusive advertising in a popular new realm) is hillarious when you really come to think about it.

XML and Obtrusiveness are mutually exclusive. This attempt to inject advertising into RSS may go down as one of the greatest pieces of XML tutorial material of all time. It could also serve as yet another example of how Web 2.0 is fundamentally different from Web 1.0.

Will we ever truly comprehend the unadulterated meaning of: "Free Will" ?

A History Of Communications

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 21:17:55 GMT

A History Of Communications A History of Communications Timeline (via xBlog)

[via nixlog]

WebDAV, SQLX, and my Weblog

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 03:54:43 GMT

Uche Ogbuji comments in his blog about the use of WebDAV and SQLX in my blog as part of his commentary about Pyblosxom & WebDAV. To provide some clarity about Virtuoso and Blogging I have decided to put out this quick step by guide to the workings of my blog (there is a long overdue technical white paper nearing completion that address this subject in more detail).

Here goes:

Blog Editing

I can use any editor that supports the following Blog Post APIs:

- Moveable Type

- Meta Weblog

- Blogger

Typically I use Virtuoso (which has an unreleased WYSIWYG blog post editor), Newzcrawler, ecto, Zempt, or w.bloggar for my posts. If a post is of interest to me, or relevant to our company or customers I tend to perform one of the following tasks:

- Generate a post using the "Blog This" feature of my blog editor

- Write a new post that was triggered by a previously read post etc.

Either way, the posts end up in our company wide blog server that is Virtuoso based (more about this below). The internal blog server automatically categorizes my blog posts, and automagically determines which posts to upstream to other public blogs that I author (e.g http://kidehen.typepad.com ) or co-author (e.g http://www.openlinksw.com/weblogs/uda and http://www.openlinksw.com/weblogs/virtuoso ). I write once and my posts are dispatched conditionally to multiple outlets.

RSS/Atom/RDF Aggregation & Reading

I discover, subscribe to, and view blog feeds using Newzcrawler (primarily), and from time to time for experimentation and evaluation purposes I use RSS Bandit, FeedDemon, and Bloglines. I am in the process of moving this activity over to Virtuoso completely due to the large number of feeds that I consume on a daily basis (scalability is a bit of a problem with current aggregators).

Blog Publishing

When you visit my blog you are experiencing the soon to be released Virtuoso Blog Publishing engine first hand, which is how WebDAV, SQLX, XQuery/XPath, and Free Text etc. come into the mix.

Each time I create a post internally, or subscribe to an external feed, the data ends up in Virtuoso's SQL Engine (this is how we handle some of the obvious scalability challenges associated with large subscription counts). This engine is SQL2000N based, which implies that it can transform SQL to XML on the fly using recent extensions to SQL in the form of SQLX (prior to the emergence of this standard we used the FOR XML SQL syntax extensions for the same result). It also has its own in-built XSLT processor (DB Engine resident), and validating XML parser (with support for XML Schema). Thus, my RSS/RDF/Atom archives, FOAF, BlogRoll, OPML, and OCS blog syndication gems are all live examples of SQLX documents that leverage Virtuoso's WebDAV engine for exposure to Blog Clients.

Blog Search

When you search for blog posts using the basic or advanced search features of my blog, you end up interacting with one of the following methods of querying data hosted in Virtuoso: Free Text Search, XPath, or XQuery. The result sets produced by the search feature uses SQLX to produce subscription gems (RSS/Atom/RDF/ blog home page exists as a result of Virtuoso's Virtual Domain / Multi-Homing Web Server functionality. The entire site resides in an Object Relational DBMS, and I can take my DB file across Windows, Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, and SCO UnixWare without missing a single beat! All I have to do is instantiate my Virtuoso server and my weblog is live.

Oracle To Support .NET Runtime Hosting

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 22:54:03 GMT

Better late than never! Oracle has announced the commencement of a journey that we completed in 2002 (across Microsoft .NET and Mono). Hopefully, their support of CRL Runtime Hosting will bring added clarity to the intrinsic value of the multi-language bindings via the ECMA-CLI that facilitate the development and deployment of DBMS Stored Procedures using a plethora of languages (ditto creation of User Defined Types, Function, Table Value Functions).

I also hope that Oracle will support Mono -off the bat- rather than taking the typical "we will port to Mono sometime in the future..." type message which will not be acceptable, especially as we pulled this off first time around in 2002 (as atop Mono then). Thus, I am sure they can do it in 2005 :-)

Hopefully we should be able to add Oracle 10g Release 2 and DB2 to our SQL CLR hosting features comparison document that currently only covers SQL Server 2005 and Virtuoso.

A Cynical View of PR and Blogging

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 13:36:24 GMT

A Cynical View of PR and Blogging

Exhibit A: From The Submarine by Paul Graham

PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.

Exhibit B: From My Dinner With Microsoft's Jim Allchin in Thomas Hawk's weblog

Last night I had a unique opportunity to sit down with Jim Allchin, Microsoftâs Group Vice President for Platforms, for dinner along with a group of other bloggers and technologists and discuss the future development of Longhorn as well as see an early demo of the Longhorn technology firsthand.

Exhibit C: From A comment on Slashdot by Thomas Hawk about the dinner

I do feel that there is room in the world of journalism for hard news, op/ed and yes, openly biased writing where the blogger places him or her self as a participant in the news itself.

Was I thrilled to be having dinner with Allchin? Of course. I'm a huge Microsoft enthusiast. I have been an advocate of the digital home for many years and I think that Microsoft may represent our best chance possible of making the digital home of the future a reality.

Was I really enthused about Longhorn? Absolutely. From what I saw it was really was amazing. I spend hundreds of hours every year organizing digital media in front of all five of my Windows PCs. The technology that I saw will save me hundreds of hours of work going forward. This is really exciting to me at a personal level.

[via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life]

Blogs Will Change Your Business

Fri, 22 Apr 2005 13:37:47 GMT

Blogs Will Change Your Business Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later

[via BusinessWeek Online -- Magazine]

Microsoft's New Mantra: 'It Just Works'

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 21:44:04 GMT

So doesn't Windows work right now? Not quite so (until next year sometime) according to this Fortune Magazine article. Ironically, Apple have always assumed "It should just work" (their raison d'ÃÂªtre I believe) and when it comes to their technology (software or hardware) at the very least they assume "it does work".

I think this marketing message for the next release of Windows is broken, especially for someone whose been using what appears to be a not "just working" operating systems since Windows 2.0 :-(

Mac OS X and its potential impact on Windows

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 20:25:16 GMT

We are at an interesting crossroads in the computer industry (IMHO) . Apple is about to unleash Tiger (ETA: one week from now), and this operating system release could end up being the crucial round of the titanic battle between Apple and Microsoft. The battle which starts at the Operating System level reminds me of the "Rumble In The Jungle" (circa. 1974, Kinshasa, Zaire); Apple in the role of Ali (aka "The Greatest" who was the overwhelming underdog at time) and Microsoft in the role of George Foreman (who at the time was logically invincible).

The shakesperian tale of Macbeth also comes to mind as depicted in the excerpt below:

".... Macbeth goes to visit the witches in their cavern. There, they show him a sequence of demons and spirits who present him with further prophecies: he must beware of Macduff, a Scottish nobleman who opposed Macbeth's accession to the throne; he is incapable of being harmed by any man born of woman; and he will be safe until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Castle. "

Having used all the major operating systems on a serious basis for a number of years in a variety of modes; user, developer, and administrator. I have always felt that a RISC based UNIX operating system (of BSD genealogical branch extraction), if somehow combined with a user interface that is superior to Windows, would ultimately unravel the Windows Desktop Monopoly. That operating system exists today in the form of Mac OS X (its lastest Tiger release simply kicks the differential up a notch).

Back to the Macbeth correlation:

"Birnam Woods coming to Dunsinane" is the metaphoric equivalent of desktop users and first time computer users being forced (by the scourge of virus and spyware) to revaluate Windows as the only choice for productive desktop computing. What would you recommend to "Aunt Milly" when she tells you she wants to get on the Internet? Especially if "Aunt Milly" isn't living with you?

"Man not born of a woman" is no different to saying: UNIX with a superior user interface to Windows!

I don't think you need me to tell who play the characters of Macbeth and Macduff in this drama :-)

The Windows security vulnerabilities quagmire (google juice on this phrase is currently 6,620 pages) has basically created an inflection of monumental proportions adversely affecting Windows and creating great visibility and evaluation building opportunities for Mac OS X ("once users experience a Mac they don't come back to Windows!").

Paul Murphy of cio-today.com has also written a great article sheds light on the often overlooked hardware aspect to the security problem for Windows Here is a poignant excerpt:

Software and Hardware Vulnerabilities

At present, attacks on Microsoft's Windows products are generally drawn from a different population of possible attacks than those on Unix variants such as BSD, Linux and Solaris. From a practical perspective, the key difference is that attacks on Wintel tend to have two parts: A software vulnerability is exploited to give a remote attacker access to the x86 hardware and that access is then used to gain control of the machine.

In contrast, attacks on Unix generally require some form of initial legal access to the machine and focus on finding software ways to upgrade priveleges illegally.

Consider, for example, CAN-2004-1134 in the NIST vulnerabilities database:

Summary: Buffer overflow in the Microsoft W3Who ISAPI (w3who.dll) allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service and possibly execute arbitrary code via a long query string.

Published Before: 1/10/2005

Severity: High

The vulnerability exists in Microsoft's code, but the exploit depends on the rigid stack-order execution and limited page protection inherent in the x86 architecture. If Windows ran on Risc, that vulnerability would still exist, but it would be a non-issue because the exploit opportunity would be more theoretical than practical.

Linux and open-source applications are thought to have far fewer software vulnerabilities than Microsoft's products, but Linux on Intel (Nasdaq: INTC - news) is susceptible to the same kind of attacks as those now predominantly affecting Wintel users. For real long-term security improvements, therefore, the right answer is to look at Linux, or any other Unix, on non x86 hardware.

One such option is provided by Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL - news) BSD-based products on the PowerPC-derived G4 and G5 CPUs. Linus Torvalds, for example, apparently now runs Linux on a Mac G5 and there are several Linux distributions for this hardware -- all of which are immune to the typical x86-oriented exploit.

This may even been the nullifier of that age old argument about porting Mac OS X to the x86 in order to broaden its adoption potential?

Mac OS X is certainly a breath of fresh air for anyone who needs to simply get stuff done with their desktops and notebooks.

Why Is Every Information Leak Worse Than Originally Thought?

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 22:54:06 GMT

Why Is Every Information Leak Worse Than Originally Thought? While there have been an incredible number of stories about data leaks over the past couple of months, one interesting thing is that in so many cases, the companies involved later come out and admit that the problem was much worse than they first admitted. That happened with ChoicePoint and LexisNexis, who both had to come out a second time and admit that the original data breach they discussed wasn't as limited as they had believed. The latest is that the DSW Shoe Warehouse database that was stolen included information (including credit cards) on many, many more people than originally stated. So rather than 100,000 credit cards out there, we're talking 1.4 million. What's unclear, however, is why this is happening. Is it that these companies are so clueless and unable to manage their own data that they don't realize how badly they've leaked data until they do further investigations? Or is that the companies are still trying to hide the nature of the losses until later (maybe spreading them out a bit)? Either way, you'll notice that no one ever seems to correct the damages in the other direction...

[via Techdirt]

It would be interesting to see the make up of the IS infrastructure behind these companies. If such information was possible I would have much better context for a broader understanding of my suspicions (outlined in previous comments).

Data is everything! I just wish there was a better appreciation and comprehension of the subject of Data Access .

AutoLink Hoopla Perspective: Guys Don't Link

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 02:46:11 GMT

I came across Shelley Power's blog via a recent post by Dare Obasanjo that shed light on the issue of "Minority Bloggers". After reading his post I visited every blog URI referenced, and in the process I bumped into a gem of an article titled: Guy's Don't Link.

BTW - I took the time to update my public blog-he-roll and new blog-her-roll; both being tiny snapshots of my actual blog subscription collection, which by the way, is actually so large and diverse that it's part of an internal project covering distributed XQuery and scalability :-)

Condemned To Repeat The Past?

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 16:05:11 GMT

Condemned To Repeat The Past? Last week, I mentioned one of the lessons learned from Andy Kessler's newest book, How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets. I've just finished reading it, and just in time, as well, since you can now check it out for free. While the hard copy version doesn't come out until June, Kessler is releasing the book for free download off his site in e-book form. If you read his previous book, Running Money, you might even recognize a few short passages in the new book. In Running Money, Kessler goes through his own experience figuring out the mental model that guided his investment philosophy in technology -- and part of that included a brief history lesson in the start of the industrial revolution. HWGH is basically an extended version of that history lesson, written in the same light tone -- designed to be the basic, quick history manual that anyone in the tech world (in just about any capacity, from engineer to business to investing) should read. Indeed, we're already seeing startups and companies making business decisions that seem like they're following the same bad footsteps companies took only five years ago. Is it any surprise that some are repeating the mistakes of 200 years ago as well? One of the worst things in the tech and business world these days is that many people can't view trends out past a quarter (or they simply extract one single trend, without recognizing how others impact them). Any intelligent business person needs to recognize how trends play out in the long term, and how they interact with each other. HWGH gives you plenty of trends from the past few centuries to help guide you into that longer term thinking.

[via Techdirt]

The mother of all BBC Feeds

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 15:55:21 GMT

The mother of all BBC Feeds Well, if you like your BBC News RSS feeds ( I know I do), then I think you'll rather like this lovely long Opml file listing all of the BBC RSS feeds.

Here you go: http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/feeds.opml

Nice.

[via news]

The Skype Economy

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 15:38:21 GMT

The Skype Economy Do you have a product or a platform? More and more companies are recognizing that the real route to success is not to offer a product, but a platform on which other products are offered. With that in mind, we're seeing more and more products that are building up strong and active development communities that make their initial offering more useful and valuable to buyers. Recently there have been articles about the ecosystem of companies who provide enhancements for the iPod, and now some are recognizing that Skype is moving into similar territory. Of course, the risk for companies or developers who build on these newer platforms is that they're totally beholden to the provider -- and that puts them at risk. They have no control over the environment they're working in. Skype could decide to build the same functionality themselves. Or, other products could become more popular than Skype. Sometimes it works... but many companies don't realize the danger of putting all their eggs in one basket. If they pick the right platform, it can be lucrative for a while, but it's not always easy to know who's going to win. [via Techdirt]

If the underlying platform is standards based then there is some protection (you can switch platform wholesale or a segment within the platform), otherwise, it's a count down to the inevitable. Any platform provider that isn't standards based (where standards exist in their realm), will always attack ersthwhile partners as part of its growth needs. This is a consistent and time-proven industry pattern.

IDMS and its role in general DBMS History

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 16:34:21 GMT

A great piece of DBMS history conveyed through the story of IDMS.

Gary Kildall

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 03:26:38 GMT

Here is a profile of Gary Kildall from the Internet Archive's movie library .

Back To The Future: Hypermedia

Sat, 26 Mar 2005 20:24:30 GMT

If a picture speaks a thousand words, I sometimes wonder how many words we attribute to a multimedia clip? Especially one that is now openly accessible to many who don't quite understand the high degree of: "Back To The Future" quotient of most of what we see today.

The Internet Archive initiative is building up an amazing collection of content that includes this "must watch" movie about the somewhat forgotten hypercard development environment.

As I watched the hypercard movie I obtained clear reassurance that my vision of Web 2.0 as critical infrastructure for a future Semantic Web isn't unfounded. The solution building methodology espoused by hypercard is exactly how Semantic Web applications will be built, and this will be done by orchestrating the componentary of Web 2.0.

When watching this clip make the following mental adjustments:

Swap hypercard stacks for discrete and/or composite services that have published endpoints exposed by Web 2.0 points of presence
Think of information taking the form of XML based content e.g. RSS, Atom, RDF, FOAF, XFN, and other future XML based data contextualization formats; all accessible via URIs
When the Apple Mac operating system is mentioned (or infered) think of the Internet (you don't need Windows, Mac OS, Linux, UNIX etc. to realize the vision, the network provided by the Internet is the Operating System)
When the Apple computer is mentioned simply think about a plethora of function specific devices (computers, mobile phones, PDAs etc.) that overtly or covertly provide conduits to the new operating environment (the Internet)
As you hear term "whole new body of people that are non programmers contributing there ideas" think about yourself and the increasing ease of participation that's beginning to take shape in this emerging frontier!
As for "Whole Earth Catalog", think Wikipedia or more recent efforts such as Answers.com.

Web 2.0 is a reflection of the web taking its first major step out of the technology stone age (certainly the case relative to the hypercard movie and "pre web" application development in general).

SOA, AJAX and REST: The Software Industry Devolves into the Fashion Industry

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 15:20:36 GMT

Dare Obasanjo ponders about: SOA, AJAX and REST: The Software Industry Devolves into the Fashion Industry .

I absolutely understand the frustration expressed in Dare's post. An additional comment from my perspective is that this devolution has been in motion for a while and it is an integral part of the Misinformation and Disinformation based marketing strategies of many companies.

Misinformation and Disinformation only work when the target audience is apathetic (unfortunately the sad reality to date!). The bad news for marketing strategies that assume perpetuation of the aforementioned apathy is that the Internet is fundamentally reducing the cost of knowledge acquisition; by implication today's naive customer is tomorrow's knowledgeable decision maker. Vendors have a choice: build valuable products, and then market these products by disseminating knowledge. If a competitor's product is better than yours, get back to the labs (developers are actually stimulated and motivated by constructive challenges; especially as any developer worth his or her salt intrinsically believes they are the best at their craft deep down; and so they should!).

In the imminent future (Internet time) I expect to see the Wikisphere, Blogosphere, and other Web 2.0 (and beyond) realms bring clarity to the futility of Misinformation and Disinformation based marketing and PR (see my post about the Wikipedia induced inflection on Marketing and PR ).

BTW -- Does anyone know what's the difference between an ESB and a Universal Server? Likewise, the difference between a Virtual Database and an EII solution?

The Lost 1984 Mac Video

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 20:20:47 GMT

A great piece that reminds us of Apple Computer's contributions to desktop computing history.

What You'll Wish You'd Known

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 21:04:48 GMT

What You'll Wish You'd Known Paul's advice to high school students.

[via Paul Graham]

This is an essay of global relevance to all students (and I suppose parents of students!).

OpenSearch & Potential Patent Abuse?

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 22:47:49 GMT

It finally dawned on me what OpenSearch does. Basically you tell it about different search engines by showing it how to query something in each, and get back an RSS return. Then when you search for some term, say foo+bar, it performs the search in all the engines you have configured it for. So it's a way to group a bunch of search engines together and command them all to look for the same thing. It is clever. It is something that hasn't been done before, to my knowledge. That's the good news. The bad news is that Amazon is a leading patent abuser. So as good as this idea is, it's bad for all the rest of us, unless they tell us that they're granting us some kind of license to use the idea. [via Scripting News]

I am no fan of Amazon's moves in the patent arena. At the same time I am very confident that OpenSearch isn't headed down this part. Virtualization isn't new or unique (irrespective of context), and the prior art defense should be pretty trivial.

For now, I like what OpenSearch offers, and would continue do so as long as there is no patent abuse associated with this (I certainly understand Dave Winer's concern; their track record isn't great re. this matter).

I should have an OpenSearch variant of this dynamic collection of Amazon and patents related blog posts in the coming days (you will see a new OpenSearch gem alongside RSS/Atom/RDF).

BTW - Here is the dynamic collection of all my Amazon.com posts to date.

Google Tweaked

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 18:25:59 GMT

Google Tweaked

Over at BB, Cory posts on Mark Pilgrim's hack "Butler" which strips out most Google ads, removes copying restrictions in Google Print, adds alternative search results to nearly every Google service, and generally does things which I can only imagine will keep give big G fits. It is still in geek stage - it requires "Greasemonkey" and Firefox - but man, it sure sounds like fun.

[via John Battelle's Searchblog]

An Interesting Marketing & PR Inflection In Progress

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 19:50:00 GMT

Wikis, Blogs, and Search Engines are collectively fuelling a huge inflection across the interrelated realms of Technology Marketing and PR.

When putting together a post yesterday about "Virtualization", I instinctively looked to Gurunet's "answers.com" service for information on the subject: Enterprise Information Integration (EII). Woe and behold! Here is what I found at the tail end of the answers.com article on this subject:

This article needs cleanup .
This article needs to be edited to conform to a higher standard of article quality. After the article has been cleaned up, you may remove this message. For help, see How to Edit a Page and the style and How-to Directory .

Now, I knew this was Wikipedia content repurposed by "answers.com", and I proceeded to clean up the article. The wikified article took a while to complete, because true to the "Wikipedia" ethos, I had to contribute knowledge as opposed to the original weenie marketing gunk. Its naturally easier to cut and paste marketing fluff for a misguided quick win attempt than it is to embed links, add knowledge, and discern Wiki Markup (but "Wiki" don't play that!).

This little exercise has broader implications for marketing as a whole, especially for the IT sector. The end of days for "Misinformation based Marketing" are nigh! Wikis, Blogs, Search Engines, Web Services, and Social Networking are rapidly destroying the historically prohibitive costs associated with customer pursuit of facts.

I am very confident that product quality will soon overshadow market share as the key determinant for both product selection on the part of customers (this is no longer a pipe dream!). I also have increased hope that IT product development and associated product marketing by technology vendors will veer in the same direction.

Longhorn: Fixing Your Own Mess?

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 17:42:00 GMT

Via the always-on network I stumbled across a great article by Pip Coburn that posed the following question: "should Microsoft benefit from the mess it helped create?".

The article discusses most of the key issues, but it should also have included and discussed he following question: "should Microsoft benefit from the mess that we let them create?". By "we" I mean the extensive pool of Microsoft product consumers, developers, and partners etc.

I have worked with Microsoft products (as a developer and user) for more years than I would like to remember; I have personally experienced the journey from Windows 2.0 to Windows XP (and played around with Longhorn).

I added my question to this dialog as without it's resultant perspective, history will simply repeat itself. If IT technology decision makers don't change their product selection and acquisition habits, then why should Microsoft or any other vendor change their ways? Especially when a perpetual promise-under deliver-repromise cycle works absolutely fine. This isn't rocket science, it basic common sense (but we know that common sense ain't that common).

Microsoft like most software companies seek significant portions of their revenue growth from product upgrades. In a sense, it inherently implies that these products will always be millions of miles away from the "silver bullet" promises espoused in the pre product release marketing and PR hype. Sadly, there was a time when Marketing and PR hype used to be about new features; a time when there was a clear line between a new feature and a fundamental product bug.

Buying products from any company simply because they have the largest market share is dumb! All it does is encourage other vendors to focus on product market share rather than product quality, which ultimately results in the following:

You basically end up paying (rather than at least being credited) for opportunity costs arising from all the time lost now your PC now works slower than you do.
You pay for bug fixes and architectural flaws instead of new features

Microsoft isn't a unique source of this problem, but hey! They are the largest Software Company (the one with the vital market share), and their software products are on some 80-90% of desktops on this planet, and the planet isn't at its most productive at the current time, and no matter how you look at it, this loss of productivity has something to do with the increased nuisance of desktop computing.

If Microsoft could just focus on its core competence (BTW - I can't quite pint point this anymore since they are in every software market that exists today), it would have at least have an iota of a chance in hell of cleaning up this mess.

Speaking of the Mac

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 13:14:13 GMT

Speaking of the Mac A little humor for the day, from one of my fav sites.

[via Handbook of Software Architecture]

Windows is a character buidling operating system for our youth :-)

The Information Machine

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 13:10:09 GMT

The Information Machine Check out this charming movie from the late 50's, developed for the IBM Pavilion at the 1958 World Fair in Brussels.

It's been a while since I've seen punched cards (which reminds me, I still have the first program I'd ever written, on punched cards written for the IBM 1130).

[via Handbook of Software Architecture]

Enjoy this timeless masterpiece!

Google Pollutes Links Stream With Evil Precedent For Market Censorship

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 22:45:48 GMT

Google Pollutes Links Stream With Evil Precedent For Market Censorship

[via BetterBadNews]

Enjoy!

Virtualization: AMD set to detail multi-OS plan

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 16:51:41 GMT

AMD set to detail multi-OS plan Will its "Pacifica" virtualization technology be compatible with Intel's? If not, that's a potential headache for some software makers.

[via CNET News.com]

Virtualization is clearly in the air! We are seeing it at the file storage, operating system, and processor layers. I can only assume the Virtualization at database layer is imiment. Of course we know it has been around in the database realm for a while (see the original Virtuoso 1.0 white paper). Today, most EII products pitch the essence of "Virtual Databases" as their value proposition while strategically staying away from the use the dreaded "V" word.

Udell to event promoters on leveraging folksonomy: 'Pick a tag'

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 15:57:28 GMT

Udell to event promoters on leveraging folksonomy: 'Pick a tag' I'm now trying to figure out why InfoWorld's Jon Udell is a journalist and not a millionaire technologist (or maybe he is). Udell keeps coming up with one brilliant idea after another. The first of these -- which I thought was just plain obvious -- was Udell's idea for vendors ...

[via Berlind's Midnight Oil]

I prefer to describe Jon Udell as a Technologist Type 3 (according to Tom Bradford's Technology Types nomenclature) who is also a journalist. His insights, thought stimulation/leadership, and power of articulation defy monetization.

I do know Jon (albeit primarily via emails and phone interviews), he even put me forward for an innovators award in 2003 re. Virtuoso etc.

Full disclosure aside, you only need to trace back in time to see that he has been a Type 3 Technologist for a very long time. When I read one of Jon's articles I always sense that they are the end product of the following steps:

1. Hypothesis Development

2. Hands on Experimentation

3. Experiment Obersvation

3. Conclusion Attainment

4. Report / Article generation

5. Share findings with interested parties

On the subject of "sharing his findings", the blogosphere has become a very effective dispatch outlet. He starts conversations about Google Maps, Querying Web Data via XQuery/XPath for instance, that stimulate further discussion (in the form of related blog posts of varying relationship density which might discern from these posts by Tom and myself for instance ).

Blog conversation replaces the need for a "Jon here is our take on this..." or "Jon here is our implementation of what you demonstrated" phone call or email (you know he sees the discussion threads coalescing around his origninal post exprimentation conversation; most of the time setting up the next batch of experiments).

To conclude, Jon is more than likely a tech Thrillionaire :-)

OpenSolaris: Great Business Strategy or Dumb Luck?

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 18:46:13 GMT

Great Business Strategy or Dumb Luck Interesting read here today at ZDNet -- Open Solaris and strategic consequences. Here's a bit of the conclusion:

Open Solaris may go down in history as one the finest examples of business strategy ever -- unless, of course, it's just dumb luck.

So, we are so brilliant -- to the extreme -- that when OpenSolaris succeeds it will be characterized as "one of the finest examples of business strategy ever." Ever? That would be quite an achievement. But even if we are successful -- shifting to the extreme polar opposite now -- we could just as easily be considered "dumb" and that our achievement was "just lucky." What? Why the extremes? Sorry. I just can't factory that. I realize I'm a pretty simple guy, but this makes no sense to me. Why do people look at issues this way? I think this is why some conversations are so confusing. People argue to the extremes. Why can't Sun's open sourcing of Solaris be seen as simply the natural evolution of a company, a development team, a product, and a market? Or the genuine attempt of the Solaris kernel engineers to engage with external developers in a community co-development model to improve the system for everyone involved? Why can't it be that simple? What am I missing here?

[via Jim Grisanzio]

Jim makes a great point!

Also note that Open Source Solaris is a huge contribution to the Open Source community from a company (that IMHO) has actually been one of the largest Open Source contributors in history period. We just don't track history very well these days thanks to the kind of zealotry written about here (*strong language*), and here (in this case by Rory Blythe).

BTW - Here are some of my previous posts on the subject of Open Source.

Friendster befriends blogs--and fees

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 14:58:28 GMT

Friendster befriends blogs--and fees Two Web trends converge as the social networking site prepares to launch blogs through partnership with Six Apart.

[via CNET News.com]

We are finally beginning to understand that Social Networking (YASN - Yet Another Social Network), Blogs, Wikis, and more.. go hand in hand. There are profound implications here for vendors in the Blog and Wiki hosting business, the same applies to end users who increasingly own a myriad of disparately hosted Blogs/Wikis/Social Networking Zones etc.

Does this look at all familiar? By this I mean the imminent integration challenges and issues relating to vendor lock-in etc.. Our Virtuoso technology evangelist Tom Bradford wrote an insightful post about these issues a few weeks ago.

I also know that we have been working on resolving these issues since 2003 (as part of the Virtuoso Blog/Wiki/YASN Platform effort), and like our initial Virtual Database work (making disparate SQL/XML databases appear as one), expect to see single solution that brings Blogs/Wikis/YASNs together also.

The coming crackdown on blogging

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 14:35:22 GMT

The coming crackdown on blogging Federal Election Commissioner Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political expression on the Internet may be about to end.

[via CNET News.com]

Note, this post is strictly under my Humour category!

Yahoo! Web Services

Wed, 02 Mar 2005 03:35:05 GMT

Today is one of those days where one topic appears to be on the mind of many across cyberspace. You guessed right! Its that Web 2.0 thing again.

Paul Bausch brings Yahoo!'s most recent Web 2.0 contribution to our broader attention in this excerpt from his O'Reilly Network article:

I browse news, check stock prices, and get movie times with Yahoo! Even though I interact with Yahoo! technology on a regular basis, I've never thought of Yahoo! as a technology company. Now that Yahoo! has released a Web Services interface, my perception of them is changing. Suddenly having programmatic access to a good portion of their data has me seeing Yahoo! through the eyes of a developer rather than a user.

The great thing about this move by Yahoo! is two fold (IMHO):

It certainly makes Yahoo! a little more interesting of late. And it will certainly helps to distinguish Yahoo! from Google. Of course these companies overlap somewhat, but they are also pretty different in focus. I see Yahoo! increasingly as a portal platform play providing content access via syndication, publishing, and web services.
It will impact their bottom line pretty rapidly, and I hope they realize the impact of Web 2.0 when trying to explain the growth increments whenever they next report to their investors :-) In a previous post I expressed my sense of some confusion on the part of Jeff Bezos regarding the total contribution of AWS to Amazon's growth (BTW - my articles to date re. Amazon and Web 2.0 are available from here in a variety of XML syndication formats: Atom, RSS 2.0, RDF).

The great thing about the Platform oriented Web 2.0 is the ability to syndicate your value proposition (aka products and services) instead of pursuing fallable email campaigns. It enables the auto-discovery of products and services by user agents (the content aspect). Web 2.0 also provides an infrastructure for user agents to enter into a consumptive interactions with discrete or composite Web Services via published endpoints exposed by a platform (the execution aspect).

A scenario example:

You can obtain RSS feeds (electronic product catalogs) from Amazon today, although you have to explicitly locate these catalog-feeds since Amazon doesn't exploit feed auto-discovery within their domain.

If you use Firefox or another auto-discovery supporting RSS/Atom/RDF user agent; visit this URL ; Firefox users should simply click on the little orange icon bottom right of the browser's window to its RSS feed auto-discovery in action.

Anyway, once you have the feeds the next step is execution endpoints discovery within the Amazon domain (the conduits to Amazon's order processing system in this example). At the current time there isn't broad standardization of Web Services auto-discovery but it's certainly coming; WSIL is a potential front runner for small scale discovery while UDDI provides a heavier duty equivalent for larger scale tasks that includes discovery and other related functionality realms.

Back to the example trail, by having the RSS/Atom/RDF feed data within the confines of a user agent (an Internet Application to be precise) nothing stops the extraction of key purchasing data from these feeds, plus your consumer data en route to assembling an execution message (as prescribed by the schema of the service in question)for Amazon's order processing/ shopping cart service. All of this happens without ever seeing/eye-balling the Amazon site (a prerequisite of Web 1.0 hence the dated term: Web Site).

To summarize: Web 2.0 enables you to syndicate your value proposition and then have it consumed via Web Services, leveraging computer, as opposed to human interaction cycles. This is how I believe Web 2.0 will ultimately impact the growth rates (in most cases exponentially) of those companies that comprehend its potential.

Payroll hole exposes dozens of companies

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 23:24:24 GMT

Payroll hole exposes dozens of companies Flaw in PayMaxx Web site exposed the financial information of customers' workers, the payroll-services firm acknowledges.

[via CNET News.com]

Unfortunately we have more of this come! The combinaton of backend Database Engine and Application Layer Data Access technology choices play a major role in these kinds of security vulnerabilities . Databases used to confined to access from dumb terminals and PCs within the enterprise. Today, these same databases are exposed to the Internet in a myriad of ways, and a physical firewall and password protection alone one cut it, not in an increasingly social oriented cyberspace. Social Engineering is a major aspect of hacking!

Hosted applications are currently the rage; there are many benefits, but there are also some serious security vulnerabilties that will "dope slap" those organizations that carelessly head down this route. You have to take a look at the underlying architecture driving the systems in question.

Anyway, you can track past and future commentary relating to databases, data access, and security using this dynamic blog query. Naturally, I expect content exposed from the query URI to grow, and to ultimately integrate content from other sources around the blogosphere.

The Future of Search: Perspectives

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 21:08:00 GMT

I have yanked out a key segment from the TECH TALK: The Future of Search: Perspectives post that I find really poignant regarding the changing shape and form of the Web:

It is clear that in comparison to the Web of the last century, the nature of data on the Web later in this decade will be very different in the following aspects:

Volume of data is growing by orders of magnitudes every year
Multimedia and sensor data are becoming more and more common.

Spatio-temporal attributes of data are important.

Different data sources provide information to form the holistic picture.

Users are not concerned with the location of data source, as long as its quality and credibility is assured. They want to know the result of the data assimilation (the big picture of the event).

Real-time data processing is the only way to extract meaningful information
Exploration, not querying, is the predominant mode of interaction, which makes context and state critical.

The user is interested in experience and information, independent of the medium and the source.

Effectively, the nature of the knowledge on the Web is changing very fast. It used to be mostly static text documents; now it will be a combination of live and static multimedia, including text, data and documents with spatio-temporal attributes. Considering these changes, can the search engines developed for static text documents be able to deal with the needs of the Web? [via E M E R G I C . o r g]

No, but this doesn't render them useless since we wouldn't be at this point without the likes of Google, Yahoo! et al. But building upon the data substrate that web data oriented search engines provide is where the next batch of Information access and Knowledge discovery solutions will carve out their space. The symbiotic relationship between Google (data) and Gurunet's Answers.com (Information and Knowledge) is one interesting example.

The Web is a distributed collection of databases that implement variety of data storage models but are commonly accessible via protocols that rely on HTTP for transport (in-bound and out-bound messages) services. These databases increasingly using well-formed XML for query result (data contextualization) persistence and URIs for permenant reference. 'What Database?" you might ask, "What you once called your Web Site, Blog, Wiki, etc.." my time-less reply.

When you have the database that I describe above, and a collection of entry points from which discrete or composite Web Services can be invoked available from one or more internet domains, you end up with what I prefer to call "Web 2.0" presence, or what Richard McManus describes as: "The Web as a Platform".

Here is a collection of posts I have made in the past relating to Web 2.0, note that this list is dynamic since this blog is Virtuoso based (predictably):

Free Text Search with XHTML results page (with Virtuoso generated URIs for RSS, Atom, and RDF): http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/search.vspx?blogid=127&q=web+2.0&type=text&output=html

It's also no secret that I believe that Virtuoso is a bleeding edge Web 2.0 technology platform (and more..). The URIs that I am exposing provide the foundation layer for other complimentary Web initiatives such as the Semantic Web (Web 2.0 provides infrastructure for the Semantic Web as time will show). They are also completely usable outside the realm of this blog.

BTW - Jon Udell is writing, experimenting with, and demonstrating similar concepts across feeds within his Web 2.0 domain.

These are indeed fun times!

Analysis Paralysis

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 20:11:56 GMT

Analysis Paralysis

Fred Wilson writes:

I was talking to an entrepreneur today and advised him not to surrender to "analysis paralysis".

It's tempting to want to analyze every option and figure out exactly the best approach before jumping in.

But it's the wrong way to go in most cases.

As a contrast, I attended a board meeting today where the CEO presented the board with a post-mortem on some decisions he made that turned out to be suboptimal. That was a stand up thing to do and the board appreciated it. But I am not sure that the CEO in question did the wrong thing.

Because I believe that Teddy Roosevelt (one of my favorite Presidents) had it right when he said: "In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing."

I think action and risk taking is what separates great entrepreneurs from the pack. I am not advocating blind risk taking, but I am advocating making a decision based on less than perfect information and going for it. More often than not, you will be rewarded for doing that.

[via E M E R G I C . o r g]

Have RSS feeds killed the email star?

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 20:36:19 GMT

Have RSS feeds killed the email star? silicon.com Feb 28 2005 12:58PM GMT

[via Moreover - XML and metadata news]

RSS and other XML based syndication formats (RDF, Atom, etc.) allow organizations to syndicate their value propositions via feeds. Thus, instead of, depending solely on sending out HTML based advertorial emails (which end up in Spam Folders 75% of the time anyhow) to targets such as; suspects, leads, and customers. You can rely on the Web 2.0 fabric for auto-discovery of syndicated feeds covering marketing collateral such as; features & benefits data, product documentation (ODBC/JDBC Multi-Tier, ODBC/JDBC Single-Tier, and Virtuoso ), product functionality tutorials, and screencasts (UDA , Virtuoso, and ODBC Benchmark & Troubleshooting Utilities) etc.

Creator of first Apple Mac dies

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 17:50:03 GMT

Creator of first Apple Mac dies Jef Raskin, who led the design team that created the Macintosh has died, aged 61.

[via BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

The Cost of Database Specificity

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:57:24 GMT

The cost of writing database specific applications (Open or Closed Source) adversely affects application developers/vendors and end user alike. This article in Network Computing (regarding Oracle and PeopleSoft's DB2's user base) provides great insight into the time-tested problem of writing or acquiring database driven applications that are database specific.

DB2 users of PeopleSoft and IBM (the DB2 developer and vendor) suspect that Oracle will obviously try to use its ownership of PeopleSoft to covertly coerce DB2 users into becoming Oracle DBMS users. This strategy would take the form of new features and fixes discrimination as somewhat echoed in these excerpts:

"..In the crescendo surrounding the Oracle-PeopleSoft merger, one question has been repeatedly drowned out: What happens to users of PeopleSoft's DB2 database? Oracle chief Larry Ellison has repeatedly assured DB2 users--and IBM--that Oracle will continue to support DB2 and PeopleSoft's interfaces to IBM's WebSphere platform. But IBM isn't taking any chances, announcing an initiative to alter DB2 to work with products from Oracle rival SAP."

"..IBM has good reason to be concerned. Oracle vies with SAP as the leading vendor for enterprise applications, but it's under pressure to show concrete benefits from the merger by combining assets and pumping up revenue. One obvious tactic will be to use the PeopleSoft applications to steer enterprise customers toward the Oracle database by optimizing performance and features toward the Oracle back end."

If PeopleSoft's application core was ODBC based, the vulnerability to this predictable competitive tactic would at the very least be significantly alleviated. DB2 end-users and IBM the product vendor would have a much stronger basis for countering Oracle by taking them to task about their claimed inability to implement new application functionality enhancements against DB2 etc. especially as this would have morphed into a generic database issue as opposed to a DB2 specific issue -- by virtue of the application and data access layer seperation provided by ODBC's architecture.

Cognitive Dissonance

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 00:58:21 GMT

Cognitive dissonance is how Dare Obasanjo aptly describes the emergence of some of the Smart Tags concepts previously introduced by Microsoft and now emulated by the new google toolbar's autolink feature (Greg Linden explains the problem with clarity).

Anyway, back to cognitive dissonance. Could this be the reason for the following?

Open Source products are increasingly database specific even though they could be database independent via Open Source ODBC SDK efforts such as iODBC and unixODBC. We increasingly narrowing our choices down to database specific "Closed Source" or database specific "Open Source" solutions and somehow deem this to be progress
The prevalent use of free standards compliant data access drivers (ODBC, JDBC, and ADO.NET) or their native counterparts that remain vulnerable to simple password hacks (there are databases behind those dynamic web sites!!) as none of these have any notion of "rules based" authentication and data access policy
The time-tested fallacy that: "select * from table" defines a viable RDBMS engine since Transaction Atomicity, Concurrency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) mean zip! Ditto scrollable cursors, stored procedures, and other presumably useless aspects of any marginably decent RDBMS engine
Failing to comprehend that a Weblog is your property (if you have a personal blog) not the property of the vendor hosting your service (that important issue of separating data ownership and data storage again). You may have heard about, or experienced, total loss of weblog and/or weblog archives arising from weblog engine or blog service provider changeovers
Failing to see the synergy between personal/group/corporate information stores (aka infobase) such as Wikis, Weblogs, and the burgeoning semantic web. Jon Udell for instance, is trying to get the point across via his tireless collection of XQuery/XPath based queries aimed at the blogosphere section of the burgeoning semantic web. Here are some of mine (scoped to this weblog):

Security related posts to date (XPath query)
Infobase related posts to date (Free Text search)

And more...

Proof That (Almost) No One Reads End User License Agreements

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 19:49:10 GMT

Proof That (Almost) No One Reads End User License Agreements John sent this in -- though, there's no date on it, so it's not clear how recent this is (also, it's on the site of the company in question, and it doesn't appear to be published anywhere else as of yet, despite being written by well known columnist Larry Magid). Apparently in an attempt to prove that no one reads end user license agreements (EULAs), anti-spyware firm PC Pitstop buried a note in its own EULA, saying they would give $1,000 to the first person who emailed them at a certain address. It only took four months and over 3,000 downloads before someone noticed it and sent an email (and got the $1,000). While this is an amusing story, it should also serve to show that EULAs shouldn't be valid at all. They're designed specifically to scare people off from reading them. It's hard to see how they can be binding, when they're designed in a way that almost no one will ever read. It's hard to show that users were willing participants in the agreement. So far, when EULAs show up that are simple to read, they actually get attention. Meanwhile, isn't it great to know that the company that has written one of the more misleading and impossible to follow EULAs is now advising the government on privacy issues?

[via Techdirt]

IBM Flexes XML Muscle

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 17:19:09 GMT

Here is another article titled "IBM Flexes XML Muscle" that covers the same general theme: IBM's appreciation of Unified Storage.

As indicated in an earlier post: IBM is clearly validating what we have done with Virtuoso (as was the case initially with their Virtual / Federated DBMS initiative ala DB2 Integrator). Here is an excerpt from today's eWeek article supporting this position:

To achieve maximum XML performance, bolstered indexing attributes in the technology will enable advanced search functions and a higher degree of filtering. IBM is also adding support for XPath and XQuery data models. This will allow users to create views that involve SQL and XQuery by sending the protocol through DB2's query optimizer for a unified query plan.

Read on..

Virtuoso has been doing this since 2000; unfortunately a lot of

Amazon's Invisible Innovations

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 18:23:50 GMT

Amazon's Invisible Innovations Fortune Nov 11 2004 9:42PM GMT

[via Moreover - E-commerce news]

Making Web 2.0 Business Opportunities a Reality

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 22:03:00 GMT

Here is an article (by me) about a cost-effect route for expoiting Web 2.0 business opportunities. As was the case in an earlier post, this articles shed light on the shape and form of underlying server technology that's essential to making the promise of Web 2.0 a reality.

Loosely-coupled systems in action

Sun, 19 Sep 2004 21:43:21 GMT

Loosely-coupled systems in action The BBC reports on a new service that lets people track down the nearest hotspot using a mobile phone. Users find a local wi-fi hotspot by sending a text message to a short code. Sounds simple and useful. I love services that leverage loosely-coupled systems to create a better experience.

[via musings of a social architect]

Software that lasts 200 years

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 19:12:27 GMT

Software that lasts 200 years I just posted a new essay that grew out of my exposure to the state of Massachusetts' work on open source and open standards, as well as from my thinking about open source and software development business models in general.

It looks like the structure and culture of a typical prepackaged software company is not attuned to the long-term needs of society for software that is part of its infrastructure. This essay discusses the ecosystem needed for development that better meets those needs.

Read "Software That Lasts 200 Years".

[via Dan Bricklin's Log]

The truth about blogging [Julian "Geek" Guppy]

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 21:46:22 GMT

The truth about blogging [Julian "Geek" Guppy]

[via Ecademy: user blogs]

Windows 911: Michael Moore takes a closer look at Microsoft

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 01:54:45 GMT

Here's one for the humour bucket!

The other day I was

History leading up to today's IE Security and Backwardness Debacle

Wed, 07 Jul 2004 19:30:28 GMT

Another insightful piece on the same painful subject of IE and the costs of vendor monoculture. The IE debacle is an

People Search on Mobile Phones?

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 00:53:58 GMT

MOBILE USERS IN SINGAPORE MAKE NEW FRIENDS WITH BEDD BEDD, a new communities application that is phone-to-phone not using any server and utilizing wireless Bluetooth technology, is literally bringing people together. “It’s very thrilling to see user’s reactions just after they receive the software and start filling out their own profiles, and having so many potential matches start pouring into their phones. Even more exciting is the rush of contacting the other person for the first time,” says Carlton. “The BEDD software is fun for the end user because it’s carrying the most demanded content in the world - people content. Content about who you are and about what you want… content about you!” The fact that this is a revolutionary concept was further endorsed this week when Nokia’s Series 60 Platform named BEDD “Application of the Week.” BEDD, as result of creating a new mobile social medium, also gives service providers and handset manufacturers something to look forward to: user’s fee revenue, network traffic revenue, increased handset sales revenue and ultimately the carrying, distribution and propagation of third party content - both mobile-to-mobile and fixed-point to mobile. “The possibilities of finding, communicating and interacting with other people, and finding products, have now moved from the traditional medium of newspapers and the Internet to the mobile phone,” says CTO Olle Bliding.

[via musings of a social architect]

Preventable SQL DBMS Vulnerabilities

Tue, 18 May 2004 00:41:39 GMT

Here are some excerpts (inlined) with my comments (outlined)

Interesting Search Product

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 23:27:44 GMT

Mark Cuban introduces an interesting new search product. His blog post also sheds light on a somewhat forgotten approach to entrepreneurship and investing. Check out the blog post excerpt below:

Today was a very good day Busy, busy, busy. To start things off, the SEC filing for my purchase of shares in Mamma.com hit the tape.

I think mamma.com has that potential. It's not Google or Yahoo, nor will it be a top 5 search engine anytime soon. But it is a good metasearch tool that I use and have used. Google and Yahoo have become carbon copies of each other, and for me, other than usenet and news searches, it's too big. I like the way Mamma.com organizes websearches, and I use it for picture searches. I'm not going to make a big investment in a company just because I use its product. I invested in the company because it generates cash. I'm not into PE ratios, Price to Sales, etc., etc. I'm into good ole fashioned cash.

The company has a simple business proposition: sell its web traffic and keep expenses very low. As long as it can continue to grow its traffic and keep costs down, it will do what I expect of it -- put money in the bank at a rate of 15 pct or more of sales.

Hopefully, I will be able to help it along by cross-promoting it with other businesses I have, and providing technical and marketing support for their management team. Nothing in the business world is a sure thing, and please don't invest in this company because I did, but I obviously like the company's prospects.

[via Blog Maverick]

Microsoft and Google: Nasty tactics reported

Thu, 05 Feb 2004 17:51:00 GMT

Microsoft and Google: Nasty tactics reported A story that Microsoft is behaving like a bully and threatening Google.

The search engine war between Google and MSN is generating some nasty tactics reminiscent of the Microsoft vs. Netscape battle of the mid '90's. Those who remember that battle will recall the almost surgical methods used by Microsoft to all but destroy Netscape. Today, Netscape is a shell of its former self, kept in a dull corner of the Time Warner empire and denied the attention or funding it needs to reemerge as a viable entity in the browser market. Many will also remember the tactics used by Microsoft to destroy Netscape generated years of anti-trust litigation and almost led to the break-up of the world's richest corporation and largest software maker. At the end of the day of course, Microsoft got off with a wrist slap and the knowledge that the US Government will not kill a goose that lays golden eggs (and whose products run much of the national infrastructure). Microsoft is obviously feeling free to resort to some its old tricks and the search engine wars are about to go mainstream, possibly becoming public entertainment. Remember the film, Pirates of Silicone Valley? This script promises to be even more interesting.

Search is the fastest growing sector of the Internet and the advertising industry. Currently considered a $2 - 2.5Billion industry, industry experts expect search and search technology to generate over $8Billion per annum by 2007. As a yardstick to measure by, the logging industry in British Columbia is valued at approximately $5Billion per year. Search, in other words, is a serious global business that is projected to generate staggering revenues and growth over the next half-decade. That much money tends to generate a great deal of motivation.

According to yesterday's New York Times, Microsoft has officially turned its great eye on Google and is specifically targeting Google and its employees. Microsoft recruiters are said to be calling Google staff at home, telling them that MSN's new search tool will bury Google and that they had better defect north to Redmond Washington as soon as possible before their jobs and soon to be stock options are worthless. Executives from both companies were seen watching each other like hawks at last week's World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland. Wherever a Google representative went, a MSN exec was steps behind, and vica versa. Meanwhile, back in the United States, Microsoft employees are examining Google patents looking for potential weaknesses to exploit. Microsoft is obviously playing for keeps and appears to be preparing to head off the inevitable legal battles that will stem from the introduction of Microsoft's new operating system, Longhorn, currently in development and scheduled for release early next year.

Read on..

[via Susan Mernit's Blog: Navigating the Info Jungle]

Newer IM Marketshare Numbers

Mon, 02 Feb 2004 22:03:08 GMT

Newer IM Marketshare Numbers

Okay, it turns out that I was less wrong than I thought a little while ago. I'd like to quote an article on Instant Messaging Planet here:

"Since 1999, when AOL served 100 percent of IM users, AOL confronted two major new IM entrants, Yahoo! and Microsoft, as well as numerous smaller entrants," the application continues, citing figures from industry researcher Media Metrix, now part of comScore Networks. "As a result, AOL has experienced a substantial decline in its IM share. Its share of unduplicated, all-location users has fallen from 100 percent to 58.5 percent in just three and one-half years."

There we have it. AOL is a bit over half the IM market. That means Yahoo and Microsoft probably have something close to 25% each. Those numbers are from April 2003, so it's anybody's guess as to which direction they've gone since then.

Thanks to Jim for the pointer to newer stats.

Update: He also IM'd me a a CNet article from August which says:

Although AOL's AIM and ICQ together make up the largest IM network, MSN and Yahoo are making strides. In March 2003, AIM had 31.9 million unique users while ICQ had 28.3 million, according to ComScore Media Metrix. MSN Messenger reached 23.1 million unique users while Yahoo Messenger reached 19 million. Both Microsoft and Yahoo launched IM clients with virtually zero market share.

So there we go. It's really a four horse race.

Another Update: Based on the international feedback rolling in, it would seem that the "A" in "AOL" really does mean America. The Microsoft Monopoly is indeed strong overseas. Interesting.

[via Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

Newer IM Marketshare Numbers

Mon, 02 Feb 2004 22:02:43 GMT

Newer IM Marketshare Numbers

Okay, it turns out that I was less wrong than I thought a little while ago. I'd like to quote an article on Instant Messaging Planet here:

"Since 1999, when AOL served 100 percent of IM users, AOL confronted two major new IM entrants, Yahoo! and Microsoft, as well as numerous smaller entrants," the application continues, citing figures from industry researcher Media Metrix, now part of comScore Networks. "As a result, AOL has experienced a substantial decline in its IM share. Its share of unduplicated, all-location users has fallen from 100 percent to 58.5 percent in just three and one-half years."

Thanks to Jim for the pointer to newer stats.

Update: He also IM'd me a a CNet article from August which says:

Although AOL's AIM and ICQ together make up the largest IM network, MSN and Yahoo are making strides. In March 2003, AIM had 31.9 million unique users while ICQ had 28.3 million, according to ComScore Media Metrix. MSN Messenger reached 23.1 million unique users while Yahoo Messenger reached 19 million. Both Microsoft and Yahoo launched IM clients with virtually zero market share.

So there we go. It's really a four horse race.

Another Update: Based on the international feedback rolling in, it would seem that the "A" in "AOL" really does mean America. The Microsoft Monopoly is indeed strong overseas. Interesting.

[via Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

No Remote XQuery Concerns Here

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 17:35:52 GMT

A very interesting exchange that came through my RSS feeds this morning - starting with Jon's piece

Planet RDF Community Weblog

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 23:24:04 GMT

http://planetrdf.com/

Planet RDF is an aggregate of the weblogs of software developers in and around the semantic web community. We hope both to take advantage of the community that exists, and also to foster more collaboration between independent developers.

Although by nature not always 100% focused on semantic web content, it provides a great snapshot of the work being done and new web sites of interest to those working on the semantic web.

The participant weblogs are sourced from Dave Beckett's Semantic Web bloggers list, http://journal.dajobe.org/journal/2003/07/semblogs/ , with a bit of additional editorial control to keep the web site focused loosely on topic. Send mail to Dave, dave.beckett@bristol.ac.uk, if you think you have a blog (with a valid RSS 1.0 feed, naturally) that we'd be interested in, and we'll check it out.

For the technically curious: web standards are used as much as possible and the usual electically invalid input of HTML from weblogs has been cleaned up to be as near XHTML-valid as we could muster, both in the web page and the aggregated RDF, http://planetrdf.com/index.rdf

Planet RDF was developed by Matt Biddulph, Dave Beckett and Phil McCarthy.

New Open Source ODBC SDK Site

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 00:10:57 GMT

A revamped iodbc.org site is now live. A cross platform ODBC SDK (for writing Drivers, or making applications database independent) remains an important part of the tecnology spectrum for the information age. The further we go into the information age, the more obvious the value of data access, and a standards base API will become.

Free XForms and RELAX NG Documentation

Fri, 05 Dec 2003 21:45:14 GMT

Interesting developments on the documentation front. I can now look at integrating either one of these books into the OpenLink Online Documentation database (which is XML, RSS, and OPML in action), but more importantly help to spread the good work of these authors, which will potentially generate revenue for them on a variety of fronts (the good work isn't going to be in vain).

XForms Freebie First Eric van der Vlist makes his RELAX NG book freely available, and now Micah Dubinko has done the same re XForms.

RELAX NG is a book in progress written by Eric van der Vlist for O'Reilly and submitted to an open review process. The result of this work will be freely available on the World Wide Web under a Free Documentation Licence (FDL).

The subject of this book, RELAX NG (http://relaxng.org), is a XML schema language developped by the OASIS RELAX NG Technical Committee and recently accepted as Draft International Standard 19757-2 by the Document Description and Processing Languages subcommittee (DSDL) of the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG 1).

[via Lost Boy]

Officially introducing Mono.Security

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 20:39:24 GMT

Officially introducing Mono.Security

I've been talking a lot about Mono.Security but until today I didn't realize that it was never officially introduced - at least in my blog.

The only existing introduction is the Mono's Crypto status page - which BTW is a great place to learn what's in and/or out Mono's cryptography.

<lazy-geek:copy-n-paste>
Rational: This assembly provides the missing pieces to .NET security. On Windows CryptoAPI is often used to provide much needed functionalities (like some cryptographic algorithms, code signing, X.509 certificates). Mono, for platform independence, implements these functionalities in 100% managed code.
</ lazy-geek:copy-n-paste>

The most important piece of information is 100% managed code. This means that Mono.Security isn't tied to the Mono runtime and/or specific class library - you're free (really it's MIT X11 licensed) to use it on any runtime you choose.

Structures

ASN1 decoding, encoding and type conversions;
PKCS #7 structures - used for Authenticode and SPC support and currently being updated for implementing System.Security.Cryptography.Pkcs in .NET 1.2;

Many security file formats including little known / undocumented formats

PVK - Private Key files. Files that contains the private part of a public key. The format is mostly used by makecert.exe. Keys can be encrypted with RC4^tm using a user supplied password. Not very secure;
SPC - Software Publisher Certificates. Files that contains a collection of X.509 certificates and/or CRLs. This is the format required by signcode.exe to append an Authenticode

Deploying .NET on Mac OS X Inches closer

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 03:49:43 GMT

02 Dec 2003: Mono 0.29 has been released

This release took us a long time to go out, but it is pretty exciting, with PPC supported. The best Mono release ever! [via Monologue]

This time last year Mono enabled us to deliver a release of Virtuoso that unveiled the power of .NET integration as a database extension mechanism on Windows and Linux along the following lines; User Defined Types, User Defined Functions, and Stored Procedures using any .NET bound language. It also enabled the deployment of ASP.NET applications on Linux, and on Windows without IIS. One item missing from my check list at the time was a Virtuoso release for Mac OS X with identical functionality.

This announcement implies we are within striking distance of a Virtuoso 3.2 release that enables .NET classes and frameworks utilization (along the lines described above) on Mac OS X.

WinFS Synchronization Architecture

Thu, 13 Nov 2003 19:55:27 GMT

Here is an architecture diagram that sheds light on the WinFS synchronization architecture. There are two things that caught my attention when looking at this diagram:

Third Party integration points are clearly identified
No mention of SyncML (although worst case this could be bootstrapped by a third party SyncML Adapter).

I hope other diagrams will be are clear as this, especially the ones relating to actual storage :-)

Creating RSS Using SQLX

Tue, 11 Nov 2003 23:33:50 GMT

Here is a practical example of how to create RSS on the fly from SQL data sources leveraging Virtuoso 3.2's SQLX implementation.

This is further illuminates the content of my earlier post on this subject.

XML Development Hindered by Lack of Conformity to Data Connectivity Standards ?

Tue, 11 Nov 2003 23:14:55 GMT

I've just read an

.Mono Roadmap announced.

Wed, 05 Nov 2003 16:33:33 GMT

The Mono Roadmap and Mono Hackers Roadmap have been released.

[via Mono Project News]

A timely document of imense importance to Architects and Strategists (See Mono Roadmap), especially bearing in mind the plethora of technology announcement from Microsoft re. .NET evolution at the recent PDC event.

WinFS validates Unified Storage Vision

Tue, 28 Oct 2003 19:13:38 GMT

I have been following the PDC event and information outflows with very keen interest. The newly published document from Microsoft re. WinFS is certainly interesting reading, especially as it articulates a vision that validates our Virtuoso universal server (as far as data storage goes). The excerpt below pretty much sums this up:

Every year, as new hard disks get bigger and faster, applications catch up by producing more data. Hard disks are commonly used to store personal information: correspondence, personal contacts, and work documents. These items are currently treated as separate entities, yet they are interrelated on some level; and it's no surprise that e-mail comes from your personal contacts list and influences the work that you should be doing and hence determines the documents that you'll create. When you have a large number of items, it is important to have a flexible and efficient mechanism to search for particular items based on their properties and content. Up until now, storage mechanisms like Outlook

HOWTO: Apache-PHP-ODBC on Mac OS X

Fri, 24 Oct 2003 15:39:28 GMT

There is a new HOWTO document that addresses an area of frequent confusion on Mac OS X, which is how do you build PHP with an ODBC data access layer binding ( iODBC variant) using Mac OS X Frameworks as opposed to Darwin Shared Libraries.

A Virtuoso of a Server

Thu, 23 Oct 2003 21:58:31 GMT

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: MARK GIBBS ON WEB APPLICATIONS

Today's focus: A Virtuoso of a server

By Mark Gibbs

One of the bigger drags of Web applications development is that building a system of even modest complexity is a lot like herding cats - you need a database, an applications server, an XML engine, etc., etc. And as they all come from different vendors you are faced with solving the constellation of integration issues that inevitably arise.

If you are lucky, your integration results in a smoothly functioning system. If not, you have a lot of spare parts flying in loose formation with the risk of a crash and burn at any moment.

An alternative is to look for all of these features and services in a single package but you'll find few choices in this arena.

One that is available and looks very promising is OpenLink's Virtuoso (see links below).

Virtuoso is described as a cross platform (runs on Windows, all Unix flavors, Linux, and Mac OS X) universal server that provides databases, XML services, a Web application server and supporting services all in a single package.

OpenLink's list of supported standards is impressive and includes .Net, Mono, J2EE, XML Web Services (Simple Object Application Protocol, Web Services Description Language, WS-Security, Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), XML, XPath, XQuery, XSL-T, WebDav, HTTP, SMTP, LDAP, POP3, SQL-92, ODBC, JDBC and OLE-DB.

Virtuoso provides an HTTP-compliant Web Server; native XML document creation, storage and management; a Web services platform for creation, hosting and consumption of Web services; content replication and synchronization services; free text index server, mail delivery and storage and an NNTP server.

Another interesting feature is that with Virtuoso you can create Web services from existing SQL Stored Procedures, Java classes,

C++ classes, and 'C' functions as well as create dynamic XML

documents from ODBC and JDBC data sources.

This is an enormous product and implies a serious commitment on the part of adopters due to its scope and range of services.

Virtuoso is enormous by virtue of its architectural ambitions, but actual disk requirements are

Using SQL-XML Based RSS Feeds to Syndicate Documentation, Tutorials, and Demos

Tue, 21 Oct 2003 03:16:07 GMT

I have embellished a number of weblogs that I oversee (Personal, Virtuoso, and UDA) as part of an OpenLink technology "dog-fooding" effort. We now have SQL-XML based RSS 2.0 feeds that make an array of content available for RSS Aggregators as well as ad hoc XQuery and XPath queries over HTTP/WebDAV.

Feed	Description
Virtuoso Documentation	Product documentation available as a collection RSS feeds per chapter with a feed catalog in an OPML file.
Data Access Driver Suite Documentation (Multi-Tier and Single-Tier)	RSS feeds and OPML file based feed catalogs for both the Multi-Tier and Single-Tier Drivers.
Virtuoso Tutorials & Online Demos	Online tutorials and live demos cataloged in an OPML file with an RSS feed for each tutorial/demo.
Animated HOWTOs	RSS Feeds for viewable features and functionality walk-throughs covering UDA and Virtuoso.

An Email User Interface to Web Services

Tue, 14 Oct 2003 21:59:40 GMT

By Bryce Curtis and Jim Hsu, IBM developerWorks

Many portable devices let mobile users send and receive e-mail over a wireless network. These portable devices include Short Message Service (SMS)-enabled devices, two-way pagers, cellular phones with e-mail service, and portable networked laptops or Personal Data Assistants (PDA) with e-mail.

Although these devices can send and receive e-mail messages, they cannot yet access and run Web applications and Web services. The Web application client is the predominant browser. However, as these portable devices become increasingly popular, using their e-mail capabilities to access the growing number of Web services and Web applications becomes increasingly beneficial. In this article, we detail an e-mail user interface that can interact with a Web application in a similar manner to that of a Web browser. In the architecture we propose, the HTML model combines with e-mail technology by routing incoming e-mails to a Web application server.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/wi-email/

RSS: The Best Of All Possible Worlds

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 02:37:52 GMT

RSS: The Best Of All Possible Worlds

The thing that most surprised me today in the SoftEdge panel on Social Software was the reaction to RSS. I should be clear that I am an RSS true believer. It seems to me that metadata as a byproduct of social software engines (be it blogging or social networking or whatever) is not only enviable, it is inevitable. RSS and FOAF and other yet-to-be-determined social software data protocols will become standards because it simply makes good sense for them to be standardized. Anyone paying attention to the unbelievable development and adoption curve of wireless can appreciate the immense value driven by standards -- and, in particular, standards that are truly standard. So it came as a bit of a shock to me that when I questioned the panelists on the implications of RSS and the Semantic Web, they were less sold on the inevitability of it all.

When asked the question of whether the proliferation of RSS and FOAF might make it possible for reader technology to be the next killer application in knowledge management, I got very strong reactions from both Reid Hoffman and Meg Hourihan. Reid stated that he did not believe that RSS was sufficiently robust to provide significant value an any level. Meg followed up with a general indictment of the semantic web, which she views merely as a geek utopia. I will admit that I'm a fan of Candide (particularly at the hands of Bernstein), but I hardly view myself as Panglos. One need look no further than, for example, the tools that Oddpost has incorporated into its web email client to allow an integrated email and blog experience. Better yet, through a relatively simple web service, Oddpost can deliver an RSS feed of a particular Google News search so that you can keep track of keywords that are of interest to you without having to visit Google repeatedly to find out if your company or candidate or favorite band has been mentioned in today's news. The same is true of watch lists on Technorati. Rather than periodically check to see if someone has linked to your blog, Technorati will do the work for you and deliver the info to your inbox only when there is information to be delivered. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg but the demonstrate the nascent power of RSS and related standards. I'll have to wait for another panel to have that argument with Reid and Meg.

[via VentureBlog]

MySQL-ODBC Bridge SDK

Thu, 02 Oct 2003 18:20:42 GMT

What Is This?

The MySQL-ODBC SDK enables you to make MySQL specific applications database independent via ODBC without wholesale re-writes of your MySQL specific application code. Thus, applications that are written directly to the MySQL Call Level Interface now end up being database independent via ODBC, and usable against any ODBC accessible database (including MySQL).

Why Is It Important?

The Open-Source community is rapidly producing innovative applications and in many cases these applications sit atop relational database management systems. Traditionally and historically, the tendency has been to look to MySQL as the default relational database service for Open Source Applications (the "M" in LAMP) which is unfortunately retrogressive since the concept of database independence has long been addressed industry wide via APIs such as ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB, and more recently ADO.NET.

In some case the existence of these APIs has been unknown to Open Source developers prior to application development, and in other cases the complexity of a port from the MySQL API to ODBC ends up being too difficult. There are numerous reasons why you can't mandate MySQL or any other database engine for that matter to every potential user of an Open Source database centric application:

Compromises freedom of choice ("Freedom of Choice" is a central theme of the Open Source movement and concept)
Database vendor lock-in reduces the deployment scope of your application, and it also potentially impedes functionality growth (what happens when the underlying database lacks the functionality that you desire? And cannot or will not deliver an implementation within your time-frame?)
Cost-Effectiveness is an Open Source value proposition main stay, so asking potential users to acquire yet another database (the real costs aren't $0.00 as resources will be required for administration, installation, configuration etc.) when functional ODBC accessible relational databases exist in house is simply contradictory at the very least.

ODBC as a concept has always been designed to be database-independent; iODBC as an Open Source project was devised to ensure platform neutrality for ODBC (just as Mono is pursuing the same goals re. .NET). When you write an application using the ODBC API database interchangeablity becomes a reality (the worst thing that can happen to you is a dysfunctional driver which is replaceable). Read on..

Universal Data Access and Security

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 15:39:02 GMT

There is an old adage that states, "there are no free lunches".

This cannot be more true than in the case of universal data access (ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, and OLE-DB) and security. There is a recently published article on our web site that sheds light on how we have engineered our data access technology to enable our customers enjoy secure and high-performance database connectivity when utilizing any of our Multi-Tier Database Connectivity drivers.

It is no secret that technologies such as ODBC, and to a fair degree JDBC, have generated a good share of undeserved criticism over the years in relation to their fundamental value propositions (providing transparent access from compliant applications to backend databases via seperation of application and database connectivity APIs), and that one of the unfortunate offshoots of this negative press is the contradictory perception that these components are valueless (i.e. they are worth $0.00). Thus, the emergence of the "free is good enough" syndrome which is predicated on the misconception that data access drivers (data source connectivity API implementations) simply provide connectivity and that's it.

If you want to open up your organization (whatever your variation internal, external, internet, extranet, intranet etc.) for the worst of all worlds (deliberate or inadvertent attacks on your data) the FREE is GOOD. Otherwise, when dealing with data access drivers you have to bear the following in mind (covered in detail in the data access security article):

Can I control

Universal Data Access Technology Blog

Why Do I Need To Pay For ODBC , JDBC, ADO.NET, OLE-DB Drivers?

Related

DataSpaces Bulletin: December issue now online!

OpenLink Software Releases new Universal Data Access Driver Suite 6.1

Announcing ODBC Data Adapter for Ruby on Rails, release 1.1

Why Web 2.0 clones are not innovative

What Problem Does Natural Language Search Solve?

Planning the Software Industrial Revolution

Social Construction of Reality

Standards Contempt Revisited

A Collection of PHP and ODBC How-To Links

Point, Counterpoint: Mac OS X Is Great for Fortysomething Unix Hackers

Ajax, Hard Facts, Brass Tacks ... and Bad Slacks

Microsoft: Longhorn Is Great, XP Is Lame

SAP, IBM Make Play for Oracle Database Customers With New DB2 Version

Advertising In RSS

A History Of Communications

WebDAV, SQLX, and my Weblog

Oracle To Support .NET Runtime Hosting

A Cynical View of PR and Blogging

Blogs Will Change Your Business

Microsoft's New Mantra: 'It Just Works'

Mac OS X and its potential impact on Windows

Why Is Every Information Leak Worse Than Originally Thought?

AutoLink Hoopla Perspective: Guys Don't Link

Condemned To Repeat The Past?

The mother of all BBC Feeds

The Skype Economy

IDMS and its role in general DBMS History

Gary Kildall

Back To The Future: Hypermedia

SOA, AJAX and REST: The Software Industry Devolves into the Fashion Industry

The Lost 1984 Mac Video

What You'll Wish You'd Known

OpenSearch & Potential Patent Abuse?

Google Tweaked

An Interesting Marketing & PR Inflection In Progress

Longhorn: Fixing Your Own Mess?

Speaking of the Mac

The Information Machine

Google Pollutes Links Stream With Evil Precedent For Market Censorship

Virtualization: AMD set to detail multi-OS plan

Udell to event promoters on leveraging folksonomy: 'Pick a tag'

OpenSolaris: Great Business Strategy or Dumb Luck?

Friendster befriends blogs--and fees

The coming crackdown on blogging

Yahoo! Web Services

Payroll hole exposes dozens of companies

The Future of Search: Perspectives

Analysis Paralysis

Have RSS feeds killed the email star?

Creator of first Apple Mac dies

The Cost of Database Specificity

Cognitive Dissonance

Proof That (Almost) No One Reads End User License Agreements

IBM Flexes XML Muscle

Amazon's Invisible Innovations

Making Web 2.0 Business Opportunities a Reality

Loosely-coupled systems in action

Software that lasts 200 years

The truth about blogging [Julian "Geek" Guppy]

Windows 911: Michael Moore takes a closer look at Microsoft

History leading up to today's IE Security and Backwardness Debacle

People Search on Mobile Phones?

Preventable SQL DBMS Vulnerabilities

Interesting Search Product

Microsoft and Google: Nasty tactics reported

Newer IM Marketshare Numbers

Newer IM Marketshare Numbers

No Remote XQuery Concerns Here

Planet RDF Community Weblog

New Open Source ODBC SDK Site

Free XForms and RELAX NG Documentation

Officially introducing Mono.Security

Deploying .NET on Mac OS X Inches closer

WinFS Synchronization Architecture

Creating RSS Using SQLX

XML Development Hindered by Lack of Conformity to Data Connectivity Standards ?

.Mono Roadmap announced.