PaaS for database as a Service

Cloud computing is able to offer you all kind of different services and most of the times when people are talking about cloud computing they actually do think in most cases on Software as a Service SaaS like solutions. A good example is salesforce.com who do provide a great complete online product as a service and are very good at doing so.

Secondly people do tend to think about IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service where basically you get computing cycles on demand. You get some capacity from a provide which has its service attached to the internet. An example of this is amazon where you can rent computing capacity and run your virtualized server on. Amazon is doing quite a good job even though we have seen some major incidents which knocked a couple of companies of the internet for longer and shorter periods of time. IaaS is also offered by for example IBM and Capgemini.

The third part is often overlooked part of cloudcomputing and sits in the middel of SaaS and IaaS and is Platform as a Service PaaS which holds sub components like Database as a Service DBaaS and things like Application server as as Service. We have seen in a previous item what the expected growth in this field is based upon research form IOUG.



Dan Burg from Oracle is explaining the role of Oracle Fusion in this model and how oracle looks at PaaS solutions. As you watch this video you will see the similarities of the vision from Oracle and the PaaS and DBaaS solutions we have been building recently within our Capgemini datacenters with Capgemini Oracle Run.

String Theory explains why the world ends

Most of us will have quite some difficulty understanding some fields of physics and understanding how all things work. Most of us will already be happy if we understand the basics of some of the leading physics theories and if we can understand bits and pieces of what Einstein was trying to tell us. People like Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku are able to tell certain parts of their specific fields in such a way that we are understanding the very basics of it. I think that the art of explaining something very complex in a way that the average person understands it is a great gift.

In this video Michio kaku explains the first steps of string theory which is a part of his Floating University lectures. After watching the video the title of this blogpost will be clear to you.

Social fit your job

With in the back of his mind a wrong fit between an employer and himself Art Papas decided to create a new kind of job site as an addition to his company Bullhorn. The site will ask you questions on all kind of subjects related to your work, your personal life and your work/life balance. The results will be added to a company profile of your current company. This will help people who are looking for a job to see if their profile matches with the average profile of the company.

If more and more people add there information to the thefit.com website the better the average of a company can be calculated. This is however also a possible trap for this website as in large companies some things do differ between departments. However, thefit.com is a great addition to the scala of tools you can use when finding a new job online.



One thing you have to realize however when you are trying thefit.com is that it is currently in beta. A lot of things are not that friendly yet however I am sure that it will be corrected in the upcoming future. One of the things also currently showing is that this is a very US based site at this moment while it has the potential to become a more global solution. You see this at a couple of points, for example you are only able to enter a US ZIP code and you are not able to state you country. Secondly the first question you get in the questionair is a google question for people who do not live in the US. The question is about how your 401(K) is, which truns out to be related to your retirement savings.

Wikipedia: "A 401(k) is a type of retirement savings account in the United States, which takes its name from subsection 401(k) of the Internal Revenue Code (Title 26 of the United States Code)."

The future of the database is as a service

Databases have been the working horse for many corporate (and none corporate) applications. Traditionally you can see that databases are part of the most guarded parts of your enterprise IT landscape and traditionally do require some of the most expensive resources to maintain. If you check the average salary charts of the past years you can see that DBA resources have been topping the lists. Also databases do often require expensive hardware and networking components to keep up with the growing demand for data within your company which adds to the total cost of ownership for a database in your company.

Departments do require a constant access to corporate databases to interact with via applications or to query to get insight into certain details of your business operations. This makes databases in many cases one of the most important parts of your enterprise IT landscape and the monetary effect of downtime is in most cases huge.

So we have a couple of things, databases are (often) expensive to host, expensive in license, do require specialized high-end hardware, do require specific expertise to maintain and to operate and besides all that they are becoming more and more critical to your day to day business operations.

Taking this into consideration the results from the IOUG ResearchWire are not that surprising. Those figures do state that a large number of companies are thinking about new ways of thinking about databases (and other parts of the Enterprise IT landscape). Where a couple of years ago you could not start a discussion of moving a database off premise we have seen that companies have been moving their databases to dedicated hardware platforms at outsourcing partners. The next step you see those companies are making is putting it now in cloud hosting solutions where they can make use of the economy of scale and the expertise of a large international group of expertise at their cloud hosting partner.

Databases (database platform as a service), Application server (platform as a service) and identity as a service are all considered to be in the PaaS domain. The PaaS domain or Platform as a Service a quickly growing market where you do see DBaaS (database as a Service) and APaaS (Application server as a Service) solution kicking in. One of the examples is the Capgemini cloud hosting solution for Oracle products named Capgemini Oracle Run that is developed recently where you can see that DBaaS and APaaS solutions are offered to customers. Oracle is also running a great article on its blogs section of the oracle.com website which is written by Anand Akela and is a great read.

how real is social media

This week I had a quick talk with some people concerning a product they where thinking of developing. It was concerning some deep tech solution for managing some very specific processes in an industry where a lot of people where involved and where in need of a workflow solution to push tasks around the company. At some point in time a decision was made and a decision was made on how to resolve this. After this we had some additional time and started to think out of the box on messaging protocols for the workflow notifications. Some people where suggesting to also provide the option to broadcast to facebook and or twitter that a task has been assignd to a person.

The reaction of one of the (older) developers came in the form of the question "how long is this social media thing staying around and are there actually people using it or making real money with it?".

Interesting is that this is illustrating that not all generations picked up on the social media wave and have not yet seen what it can unlock and who you can reach with it. Even though I cannot blame them I would like to suggest to people to read up on the subject and maybe start by quickly look at this amazing video made by the guys from werbefilmmacher.de

Secret Google lab opening doors

Rumors have been going on already for some time on what is behind the website wesolveforx.com . it was rumored some time ago by the New York Times in a article called "Google's lab of Wildest Dreams" that X was referring to a secret lab of Google where they where gathering the brightest minds to solve all kind of issues in the most futuristic ways imaginable. Accoording to the New York Times Sebastian Thrun, one of the world's top robotics and artificial intelligence experts, is a leader at Google Sebastian Thrun, one of the world's top robotics and artificial intelligence experts, is a leader at Google X.

BY looking at the WOIS information of the domain your could see the website was indeed registered by Google. Now Google is releasing more information about "we solve for X" and it turns out that is a great think tank where some great minds are gathering and where everyone else also can participate via the internet to find solutions on some of worlds great challenges in all kind of fields.



Some people already made comparisons to TED.com however in my opinion it go's way future than TED. Within TED you have a broadcasting way of communication where Google X is likely to evolve as a more continuos corporation and social interaction kind of platform. It would be good to keep an eye on the google+ page, the youtube channel and the website of Google X to see where this is heading however it might bring some intersting insights and possibly products in the future.

Or in the words of Google:
"Solve for X is a place to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems. Radical in the sense that the solutions could help billions of people. Radical in the sense that the audaciousness of the proposals makes them sound like science fiction. And radical in the sense that there is some real technology breakthrough on the horizon to give us all hope that these ideas could really be brought to life.

This combination of things - a huge problem to solve, a radical solution for solving it, and the breakthrough technology to make it happen - is the essence of a moonshot.

Solve for X is intended to be a forum to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshot thinking and teamwork. This forum started with a small face-to-face event co-hosted by Astro Teller, Megan Smith, and Eric Schmidt - the Solve for X talks are now being posted here on this site. We encourage you to watch the Solve for X talks, join the G+ conversation, and post your own Solve for X talks."

Oracle Fusion customization platform

Sara Woodhull and Gustavo Jimenez recently gave a talk on how to do changes to Oracle E-Business Suite in a correct way. The talk was part of the ATG Live Webcast series which shows you how to make changes to a GUI that makes sense without the need to do much coding. When coding is needed examples will be used in the form of forms personalization and OA Framework Personalization’s

This presentation is also a great way to have a look into how the technology components of Oracle Fusion are used in Oracle e-Business suite and how they can help you and how you can build upon them to create customizations and custom solutions for customers with Oracle e-Business suite.

You can review the webcast at the oracle website and you can see the slides used below.

Personalize, Customize, and Extend Oracle E-Business Suite User Interface

Oracle Database query indexes on table

When you are developing SQL code in Oracle it is important to keep in mind performance. One of the first things you need to keep in mind when developing code or optimizing it is if you are using all indexes that are available and applicable. Recently someone asked me the question how you can check which indexes are available for a certain object in the database via a query.

The answer is quite simple, all indexed columns of the tables are registerd under the table dba_ind_columns. Here you quickly check which columns are registerd to have an index for a certain table. If, for example, you would like to know which indexed columns are available for “mtl_system_items_b” in your database you should execute the below query:

SELECT 
      *
 FROM 
     dba_ind_columns
WHERE table_name = UPPER('mtl_system_items_b')

This will give you all the information needed on the Oracle database indexes against mtl_system_items_b

Social online consumer influence

Not even that long ago when you needed or wanted to buy a product you might check some printed adds in the paper and go to a shop and talk to the sales person in the shop who told you which item was the best item to buy. Almost no other sources of information where available and the entire marketing idea was build upon the fact that as soon as you moved your message to the consumer you where in the buying zone and could convince someone to buy your product.

Due to the internet and now to the social nature of the internet picking up you see that people do tend to want more information before the buy a product. The time between seeing a buy stimulations (for example an add on a billboard or a video) and walking to the shop to buy something this is the moment where consumers do collect additional information on your product. This moment in time is called the zero moment of truth and is something thought of by google. Google is providing a new way of thinking about how you should interact with consumers and make sure they have the best experience with your product possible.

If you look at the complete model below you see it is all starting with a stimulus. This is the moment the consumer learns that your products exists. They see a TC add hear something on the radio or read something about your product. This is the moment where consumers used to go directly to the "first moment of truth". At the " first moment of truth" you had to make sure that everything surrounding the product was perfect and stimulated the consumer to buy the product. after purchasing the product the "second moment of truth" was when the consumer unboxed the product at home and started to use it. This second moment of truth is eery important to convince the consumer to buy from the same brand or same store again. Apple has perfected the unboxing experience.

Now ZMOT, " zero moment of truth" is introduced between the stimulus and the FMOT. This is where the consumer is looking on the internet and using search or using a QR code to go to a product page. At this moment it is important that your marketing department has made sure that the consumer is provided with all the needed information and all good references. The consumer should find the product on all channels he is looking for. Product reviews on youtube and vimeo, a page on Facebook where you can see how many people like the product, a information page where all is combined, making sure you product is on all kind of blogs and forums where people discuss it (in a good way).

The difficulty is that you cannot control the ZMOT completely however you can influence it a bit by thinking about you marketing strategy. Companies who do understand ZMOT will most likely be the survivors of the upcoming time and companies who do fail to understand ZMOT will not. Google is providing a lot of information and guidance into ZMOT from their website zeromomentoftruth.com which is very beneficial to visit. Also watching some of the below videos is something worth to do.

HighLight help finding people in a party

Ever walked into a party or business drink where you did not know anyone and would love to meet some interesting people you have a common ground with. Highlight helps you finding people you have common ground with. It shows all the connected people who have a connection with you based upon common friends and or interest and shows them on your application.

Do you know the feeling you know someones face and cannot remember what this person his or her name is and you cannot place this person. You are sure you know this person and you are crunching your memories on it however cannot recall it. By making use of HighLight you can check who this person is.



Paul Davision is the showing how it is working and is talking about his application in this interview with Robert Scoble. The app is just released and is still very experimental however already working and helping you locate people with the same interest or connections based upon your geographical location.

Fun thing about this app and the company is that they recognize they started something and not sure where the application and the usability will go to and they are asking the early adopter community to help think and shape this application. If implemented correctly you could make this the next generation foursquare and if connected to other services like for example groupon\ you could share information about great deals in the surrounding or in combination with foodspotting it could tell you which places with a common interest are visited for meal. Also think about all the other things a person is showing online and you can check that before you walk up to this person, what books someone is reading, what movies someone likes, friends, relations. It might sound scary and it might sound freaky however most people already do share this information. HighLight just gives you the option to have this information consolidated into one app and show it moments before you meet each other.

HighLight, a company and application I will follow with very much interest in the upcoming time.

Stand only topless meetings

Working for a tech company can have its benefits however can also have its downsides. It is a bit how you look at it. One of the things some people might see as good is that mostly in tech company’s new ways of having meetings are tested. According to the people in the below wall street journal news item this is because tech companies are hip and happening(?).



This is however not only happeing at Atomic Object also in my current company we have stand-up meetings in which everyone is standing and indeed it is working and helping you focus and come to the point. We did already have for some meetings a topless meetings which are no stranger to most companies I guess.

“A meeting in which participants are not allowed to use laptops. A topless meeting organizer can also ban the use of smartphones, cellphones and other electronic devices. The purpose of this is to create an environment free from distraction, to foster enhanced focus and to generate more discussions.” Read more:investopedia.com

sub transactional big-data and data analysis

Pentaho is known for its BI solutions; however it is also (less) known for the dig-data and big-analysis expertise they have in combination with solutions like for example Hadoop. Big-data is not quite a set term; we cannot state when something is big-data and when something is not big-data. In general big-data refers to a very fast growing set of data where large sets of data are added to in real-time. Some good examples could be twitter who is storing tweets in a very rapid way, credit card companies who store all transactions and for example stock trading companies who store all stock transactions and the information around the market.

In this video presentation James Dixon, CTO at Pentaho, is stating that for a large set of companies Big-data is actually sub-transactional. The sub-transactional events that happen between or before a business transaction (aka buying or selling something). The information for example on how did a person came to this page on my website where he or she clicked the order button. This is commonly not seen as big-data however in essence it is big-data and a very interesting part to jump into. This means that we can see storing information about the travel patterns of people on your website as big-data and that we can see click analysis as big-analysis.

http://www.pentaho.com/resources/videos

(Big-)data analysis on website visitors and how they are clicking to finally come to your product is already done at this moment by a number of software vendors. Issue however is that this is done after the events happened. Information is stored and commonly analyzed overnight and after that it is used to improve the website. If you have a computing cluster which can do you big-analysis on your big-data fast enough your could have your website content adept to the click patterns in a more smart and faster way than current solutions are offering.

The video also gives a first glimpse of the way Pentaho thinks the big-data architecture landscape looks like and how you should think about data lakes, data marts, data warehouses and ad-Hoc queries and why you should never delete data even if you are not using it at this moment it might be needed at a later moment and could make sense to you then.

What photo models should know about computer file formats?

Thinking about why photo models should care about and know some things about computer file formats might not be a question that pops up right away. Issue is however that if a model wants to promote herself (or himself for that matter) especially in the beginning of her carrier it can she is not yet surrounded by a complete team of photographers and agencies who will help her. And it is in this period of a models career that promotion is key to success. Yearly thousands and thousands of young people like to become a model and agencies try to select the best of those thousands of young want to be models however to be able to be selected you have to be seen.

As an upcoming model you will have to go to castings and you will try to promote your pictures at model agencies by simply sending them out and hoping for the best. All these actions are quite good to undertake and still very up to date and valid however as an upcoming model you have to stand out and have to try and become noticed by the right people in all ways possible.

Possibly you, as a model, have created a portfolio and shared this on a website you have created or have asked someone to build for you. You might have sent people your pictures from your portfolio for example your friends, your family or your coworkers. Next time you do this it is good to do two things; (A) ask them to spread the pictures and post them on Facebook for example, and (B) make sure that the person who has taken the pictures has included proper EXIF format information.

EXIF information is “hidden” information in the picture file which includes for example information about the type of camera and the settings of the camera at the moment the picture was taken. However, besides information about the camera it can hold a lot more information. For example it can hold the geographical information of where the photo was taken, possibly not that much of interest to you as a model. What it also can hold is information in text on the name of the photographer, the possible copyright on the photo and free text where you can describe who the lovely person is that is on the picture, and that will be you and so it will be of interest to you.

So why is it important to have your name in a hidden EXIF format which nobody can even watch without doing some tech things? Secondly why do you need to do this as this picture is on your website and everybody can read there who you are? Well, take as an example the girl in the picture below. from the picture alone we can see that she is a girl and that there is the Acura logo in the back. If you see the original website where this is posted (flickr.com) you can read some more information about this girl, the person who has taken the picture and the setting. However posted on my weblog all this information is lost. As soon as the picture is removed from the original location is taken out of the context of the website. So if it would be you on that picture this would mean that as soon as you are placed on another website nobody knows who the person is in the picture.

The same is the case when someone downloads the picture and posts it on Facebook. Daily large number of pictures are downloaded somewhere form a website and uploaded to Facebook. For example someone could download the Acura logo girl and post on the website because he likes Acura, likes the girl who is on the picture or any other kind of reason. As soon as she is posted on Facebook nobody knows who she is and what the story behind her is. So if this was you and somebody from a model agency would like to know who the girl on the picture is to ask her for a shoot they would not know who to contact as there is no additional information. Now let’s say you add EXIF information to your picture and someone you send your picture to or who have downloaded it from your website posts it to Facebook. In this situation the EXIF information will be noticed by Facebook and will be used in the description of the picture. Meaning, you can dictate up to a certain level what the description of the picture will be when someone uploads it to Facebook. So it can be very beneficial to add your name and contact details for example to the EXIF information so everyone uploading your picture will automatically share your name and for example your website. Below you can see the Acura girl uploaded to Facebook in a situation where the EXIF information is added to the picture.

So, how do you get EXIF information in your images? You can download one of the many EXIF information editors or you could ask the photographer to add it for you. Most professionals will have something like Adobe PhotoShop installed on their machine and Adobe has added a great working EXIF editor to their product. When you check the file information from Adobe Photoshop you can edit the EXIF information. Below you can see an example of the EXIF information in photoshop I have edited on the

In this article where I have stated a photo model you can also read upcoming photographers or upcoming graphical designers. These persons also need to promote themselves and find a space in a crowded space full of enthusiastic and sometimes talented people where they have to stand out of the crowd to be seen.

Moving from VMware to Oracle VM

I have been working the past year a lot with technology around Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Manager 11 and 12C as well as that I have been playing a lot with public and private cloud concepts. Some people have asked me the past months on why I have not been blogging more on Oracle VM and the other parts I have been using and working with. It will be my intention to write more about it simply because I now have the access to a second test server at home which I can use for testing the things I like to blog about. So you can expect more on this.

As a starter I would like to show you the below Oracle video where Kurt Hackel is explaining to a former VMWare employee and a current Oracle employee, Douglas Phillips, what Oracle VM is all about.

Filemaker database and iPad development platform

Robert Scoble who blogs and video-blogs for his website building43.com is also producing a show for the rackspace.com website called "small teams big impact" which is in my opinion (just as) building43.com a great show to watch.



In this episode they talk to one of the companies from Apple which is not named apple however is named filemaker and who do provide small database solutions and a platform to create iPad applications without the need to program. Even though I do feel that you have a lot of limitations it can help small none-tech companies to start developing and running their own applications for (primary) internal use and/or external use.

Originally filemaker is developed as a cross-platform relational database where you can quickly develop applications in a drag and drop fashion. Even though some people might think filemaker is new to the market they are already up and running for some years and release version 1.0 in 1985 when they where part of Forethought Inc.

"A defining characteristic of FileMaker is that the database engine is integrated with the forms (screen, layouts, reports, etc.) used to access it. In this respect, it is closer in operation to desktop database systems such as Microsoft Access and FoxPro. In contrast, most large-scale relational database management systems (RDBMS) separate these tasks, concerning themselves primarily with organization, storage, and retrieval of the data, and providing little to no capability for user interface development. It should be noted, however, that the storage capacity of recent versions of FileMaker far exceeds most desktop database products, and indeed approaches that of many dedicated back-end systems."