EXCEPTION::QUERY

A Blog About Database Products and Technology.

November 2006

Beijing Daily reports, this morning, that -- according to the recently-released 2006 Third Quarter Data Test for the Chinese Database Software Market -- China's commercial database market reached 463 million yuan (about $59 million USD), a 7.53 percent increase from the previous quarter.

Analyst Liang Xingang of Yiguan International says that "international software magnates" (read: "Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Sybase") still hold 96 percent of this market. Says Liang: "Domestically made databases are used mainly in ministries and commissions involved in national defense and other classified sectors, the aviation industry and local governments."

Don't you love "international software magnates?" I hope nobody's surprised when they announce a national initiative (e.g., "Boldly Build World-Class SQL Engine") to twist those numbers.

Posted by John Jainschigg at 10:51 AM  Permalink |

One of the most impressive large-object-database apps I've seen recently is Second Life, a multi-user virtual reality environment that permits thousands of simultaneous users to share a 3D virtual world with consistent (if simplified) physics, and employ in-game modeling tools to create complex, optionally-scripted objects, which they then use and trade. Such trade has created a relatively vast economy: the financial potential of Second Life has begun attracting the attention of companies who see benefit in extending their brands into SL's virtual universe. Most recent of these is GM, who last week announced plans to build a virtual car dealership in Second Life.

The object modeling tools at the disposal of Second Life residents are -- like the databases supporting object storage and retrieval (each resident of second life can own a huge number of extremely-complex objects, and since much of the point of SL revolves around object creation, trade, and object environment enhancement, all numbers move rapidly towards asymtotes) -- both simple and powerful -- in many ways, superior to conventional engineering CAD systems. Here's a wonderful video, documenting the process whereby an artist in Second Life created a virtual guitar for use by the singer Suzanne Vega, who last August became the first top-line musical act to perform in SL's virtual reality.

Posted by John Jainschigg at 02:04 PM  Permalink |

In an article posted today, Richard Goering reports on the new release of db4objects' db40 -- an open-source object-oriented database that targets embedded applications written in Java and .NET. The vendor is claiming a significant performance gain and reduced memory consumption in a new release: up to 10x performance improvement for very large databases (they claim 2x to 3x improvement, elsewhere). Created in 2000, db40 now claims some 15,000 registered users, nearly a million downloads, and 200 commercial customers in 30 countries.

Posted by John Jainschigg at 11:42 AM  Permalink |

An article in The Record notes wryly, this morning, that Panta Systems quietly took top spot, last month, on the Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-H (1,000 GB) cluster benchmark. Significantly, the PantaMatrix rack cluster was running Oracle 10g Rel.2 on RedHat Linux -- Oracle has taken pains to adapt for high-performance computing and data warehousing applications on the kind of Dual Opteron setup Panta provides. Panta/RedHat/Oracle beat several IBM DB2 configs (topping out with the eServer xSeries 346 on SUSE Linux running), HP (ProLiant DL585 Cluster 48P, running Oracle and RedHat) and Lenovo. They're the price/performance leader, too -- weighing in at about $25 per QphH (a composite high-end database performance metric developed by TPC). According to Panta's release, the PantaMatrix system racks up four Dual-Core AMD Opteron Model 800 2.2 GHz processors running Linux, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 and Oracle Real Application Clusters with InfiniBand and SilverStorm RDS, and will be commercially available on April 15, 2007.

Posted by John Jainschigg at 10:55 AM  Permalink |

Imagine a search engine that combines the -- shall we say -- "Google Paradigm" with the ... Well, it's hard to know what to call it, except the "Clippy Paradigm." You know Clippy, right? He's the animated paperclip Help icon that used to come up on your page when you were tying in Word and say things (in onscreen word balloons) like "Hello -- it looks like you're typing a suicide note ... Can I help you with that?" Okay ... So now imagine that, instead of Clippy, you have a very beautiful, kinetic woman -- an amusing physical actress and improvisatrix -- who someone with a keen sense of timing has videoanimated in Flash, scripted with a little funny stage-business for slack times, and endowed with a little light-duty AI (a few routines in response to predictable search phrases). And then they've stuck it in front of a search engine in a very pretty (though not super-efficient) UI. That's Ms. Dewey. And I love it.

You'd think, after ... yow ... 30 years of programming, including lots of early work in AI, I'd be immune to this kind of thing. But I sat there for half an hour, today, looking at Ms. Dewey bounce around, say funny things, knock on the screen to get my attention, and respond to search phrases.

I'm not sure if this is commercially viable, or if there's some deeper logic to it (e.g., it's learning something from searches). But it's sure amusing! Check her out!

Posted by John Jainschigg at 02:37 PM  Permalink |