Johan Louwers Personal Blog "my view on the IT world".
The personal view on the IT world of Johan Louwers, specially focusing on Oracle technology, Linux and UNIX technology, programming languages and all kinds of nice and cool things happening in the IT world.
There is only one reason I am not a big user of Foodspotting is simply because I do not visit restaurants as much as I want to. Even though that is stated I do use the foodspotting app as it makes food more social from a online perspective. Foodspotting is becoming the foursquare for food. I do personally think Foursquare did miss their target here and they could have kept Foodpotting out of the game however they failed at it. From a user perspective this is not a negative thing as Foodspotting is doing a great job.
Foodspotting is one of the startups started by real and true believers in the subject and that is what you see in the final result, a great passion of developing a real cool and great product.
In the above videio you can see a interview done by Robert Scoble who is talking to the people behind Foodspotting. Foodspotting is one of the companies who are jumping into the next OpenGraph from Facebook and who do see the potential of this new options coming from Facebook.
Everyone is talking about big-data, we are still trying to define when data becomes big data and we are just at the doorstep of understanding all the possibilities of what we can do with big data if we apply big analysis on it. Even though this field of (enterprise) IT is quite new we see a lot of companies who are taking big data very serious. For example Oracle is taking this point very serious as they are seen as the company which should be able to handle large sets of data. Oracle is teeming up with some of the big players in the market, for example they are teeming up with Cloudera which is one of the leading players in the Hadoop field.
As the data company Oracle is spending a lot of time on thinking about big data and building products and solutions to work with Big Data. Meaning Oracle is trying to answer the question "how did data become big data" or to rephrase that question "when is data big data". The answer which Oracle is coming with and what was promoted by Tom Kyte is coming as this slide in their latest presentation
Oracle states that big data can be defined based upon 4 criteria. It should have a certain volume, it should have a certain velocity (speed of data growth), the variety (all kinds of sources and forms the data is coming in) and the value as in the value that the data has or potentially value it can have as you are able to extract the true value from it.
Extracting the true value and unlocking the true value of your big data will take a lot of computing power and for this you will need a superb compute infrastructure. We have the map reduce solution which is developed by Google and has been released a couple of years ago. In the below slide you can see how the map reduce compute infrastructure / algorithm thinking works. This is the map reduce picture used by Tom Kyte during its presentation on big data.
MapReduce is a framework for processing highly distributable problems across huge datasets using a large number of computers (nodes), collectively referred to as a cluster (if all nodes use the same hardware) or a grid (if the nodes use different hardware). Computational processing can occur on data stored either in a filesystem (unstructured) or in a database (structured).
"Map" step: The master node takes the input, partitions it up into smaller sub-problems, and distributes them to worker nodes. A worker node may do this again in turn, leading to a multi-level tree structure. The worker node processes the smaller problem, and passes the answer back to its master node.
"Reduce" step: The master node then collects the answers to all the sub-problems and combines them in some way to form the output – the answer to the problem it was originally trying to solve.
MapReduce allows for distributed processing of the map and reduction operations. Provided each mapping operation is independent of the others, all maps can be performed in parallel – though in practice it is limited by the number of independent data sources and/or the number of CPUs near each source. Similarly, a set of 'reducers' can perform the reduction phase - provided all outputs of the map operation that share the same key are presented to the same reducer at the same time. While this process can often appear inefficient compared to algorithms that are more sequential, MapReduce can be applied to significantly larger datasets than "commodity" servers can handle – a large server farm can use MapReduce to sort a petabyte of data in only a few hours. The parallelism also offers some possibility of recovering from partial failure of servers or storage during the operation: if one mapper or reducer fails, the work can be rescheduled – assuming the input data is still available.
As Google is the company who came with map reduce it might be good to check what Google has to say on it when they are explaining it. In the below video you can see a recording of the Google Developers Day 2008 where Google was explaining the map reduce solution they had developed and where using internally.
Map reduce and and Hadoop which is the primary solution for map reduce coming from the Apache foundation as an open source solution fits in the statement "the future of computing is parallelism" and which is to my opinion is still very valid. In that article we zoomed more in to the parallelism where Hadoop and map reduce talk about a more massive scale parallelism however in essence it is still valid and the same.
Big data is currently a buzz word and as we all know buzz words are not always good. It has happened in the past that a buzzword made that a perfectly good solution or product was killed because it was simply so buzzed it could never live up to the expectations. Big data is currently seen as a solution to everything as also cloud computing is seen. Ass long as your solution has big data and cloud computing in its foundation it must be a great solution. This sounds crazy however a lot of (less tech minded people) do tend to believe it somewhere deep in the back of there minds.
Big data is, even though a buzz word, is something to pay attention to. Big data is very real and we have to take into consideration the amounts of data that are coming available. Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created and 90% of the data in the world today was created within the past two years. IBM has done quite some research on the growth of data and you can read some interesting figures on their website.The amount of data coming from all kinds of devices which are from time to time operated by humans and are part of human interaction or which are fully automated and to provide sensory data all is now stored. As stated in one of the presentation on big data by Pentaho and also stated in the blogpost "sub transactional big-data and data analysis"you can find references to data lakes.
Where we used to throw away all data we could not use due to the effects on storage costs and handling costs we now store all data we are able to receive in what is called data lakes. we might not be able to give meaning to it at this moment in time however within one or two months it might turn out that this data is of vital importance. Also the data might never be of any value to us however it can be of extreme value to other people and companies.
The saving of data in data lakes and the handling of enormous sets of data is what is part of what we refer to as big data. We are now getting capable of receiving, storing and handling this massive amounts of data from a technical perspective however we have to learn what we can do with it in the upcoming times.
As an example, the below video is showing a new way of shopping which is introduced by Tesco in Korea where people can shop based upon QR codes in the subway and have their goods delivered to their home at a later moment.
We used to be able to know which goods where sold on which day thanks to simple store keeping in the past. Recently there was the introduction of loyalty members card where we could bundle purchases and state that a person who was buying product A was most likely to also by product B a couple of days later. This is already a start of a huge amount of data. with the above example of Tesco you can also state when someone was buying the product and where this person was when he did so and where this person lives. Your options to create a profile and add a geo-location part to it are now also introduced which gives an extra dimention to your set of data. The more you know from your customers the better you can create profiles which you can use to base decission on. For example decissions on where to open your new shop or where to place your adviertisment or even how to arrange the products in your store.
As stated, we are capable of storing this data now in the form of data lakes in the big data idea and we are able to process it we however have to start thinking of all the possibilities this is giving us and how we can make use of it.
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.
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.
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)."
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.
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
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
(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.
