solved Oracle NoSQL java.net.NoRouteToHostException

When you are installing Oracle NoSQL on an Oracle linux machine you can follow the Oracle guide which will run you through the simple installation process. There are however some things to keep into consideration. One of the steps is to do a check if you key-value store database is up and running. When you use a default Oracle Linux installation you will most likely succeed when you do a ping to the same host that you are working on. The issue however is starting to occur when you try to do a ping to another machine.

The following situation:
nosql0.exampledomain.com -- 192.168.1.80
nosql1.exampledomain.com -- 192.168.1.81

When you are on nosql0 and execute the following below command you will have a positive result.

java -jar ./lib/kvstore-1.2.123.jar ping -port 5000 -host nosql0.exampledomain.com

If you are on nosql1 and you execute the below command you will also get a positive result.
java -jar ./lib/kvstore-1.2.123.jar ping -port 5000 -host nosql1.exampledomain.com 

However, if you are on nosql0 and try to ping the nosql1 with the below command you will get an error.
java -jar ./lib/kvstore-1.2.123.jar ping -port 5000 -host nosql1.exampledomain.com  

if you use a ping command you can ping the other server (if not you have another network issue) and you can setup a SSH session however the error message will state that you do not have a route to the mentioned host. The error message will look something like the one below:

[nosql@nosql0 kv-1.2.123]$ java -jar ./lib/kvstore-1.2.123.jar ping -port 5000 -host nosql1.terminalcultexample.org
Exception in thread "main" java.rmi.ConnectIOException: Exception creating connection to: nosql1.terminalcultexample.org; nested exception is:
        java.net.NoRouteToHostException: No route to host
        at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPEndpoint.newSocket(TCPEndpoint.java:632)
        at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPChannel.createConnection(TCPChannel.java:216)
        at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPChannel.newConnection(TCPChannel.java:202)
        at sun.rmi.server.UnicastRef.newCall(UnicastRef.java:340)
        at sun.rmi.registry.RegistryImpl_Stub.list(Unknown Source)
        at oracle.kv.util.Ping.getTopology(Ping.java:332)
        at oracle.kv.util.Ping.main(Ping.java:104)
        at oracle.kv.impl.util.KVStoreMain$8.run(KVStoreMain.java:218)
        at oracle.kv.impl.util.KVStoreMain.main(KVStoreMain.java:319)
Caused by: java.net.NoRouteToHostException: No route to host
        at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method)
        at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.doConnect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:327)
        at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:193)
        at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:180)
        at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:384)
        at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:546)
        at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:495)
        at java.net.Socket.(Socket.java:392)
        at java.net.Socket.(Socket.java:206)
        at sun.rmi.transport.proxy.RMIDirectSocketFactory.createSocket(RMIDirectSocketFactory.java:40)
        at sun.rmi.transport.proxy.RMIMasterSocketFactory.createSocket(RMIMasterSocketFactory.java:146)
        at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPEndpoint.newSocket(TCPEndpoint.java:613)
        ... 8 more
[nosql@nosql0 kv-1.2.123]$

As it turns out by default Oracle Linux will have iptables configured and this will block your connection to port 5000. You can check you iptables settings by issuing the following command: iptables -L -n


This will give you something like the below:

[root@nosql1 init.d]# iptables -L -n
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination
ACCEPT     all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           state RELATED,ESTABLISHED
ACCEPT     icmp --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0
ACCEPT     all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0
ACCEPT     tcp  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           state NEW tcp dpt:22
REJECT     all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           reject-with icmp-host-prohibited

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination
REJECT     all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           reject-with icmp-host-prohibited

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination
[root@nosql1 init.d]#

What you need to do is configure iptables to allow network traffic to port 5000 or disable iptables. Disabling iptables is never a smart move however you can opt for it in some cases. 

Duqu trojan payback for decommissioning old IBM systems

Our society is more and more depending on computers. Financial transactions are done mosntly via computer transactions, industries are depending on it and armed forces are mostly blind and without information if the IT systems supporting them stop working. We do have to worry about solar storms knocking out most of our modern day communication channels and systems however somewhat closer to earth we also have some things to worry about.

One of the threads we have to worry about and which is coming from our own planet is the fact that criminals and not only criminals but also the military and secret service of countries are working on very advanced technology to knock out systems, break into them or cause other distortion and theft. We are not talking about hackers, as I still do have a mindset in which I see hackers as the good guys who do play intelligent games that sometimes are just reaching over the line of the officially legal. However in my opinion hackers are still the good guys.

It is the people who turn to the true dark side and do sell their craft to wealthy criminal organizations. Some very gifted developers and computer scientists go for the big bugs and do not care about what they develop and with what intention it will be developed.

The second group is the group of computer scientists who do sell their craft to governments in the form of working for an army of secret service. This group is somewhat more discussable on the fact if they go for the monetary pleasure or not. It is without any doubt that governments are willing to pay top dollar for gifted developers and computer scientists however we have to keep in mind that one man his terrorist is the other his freedom fighter.  We can state we do agree or disagree with some of the thoughts of other governments however I do think that this is less dollar driven.

That a lot of money is paid to developers to develop virus code and tools to cause mayhem is shown again by the people from the Kaspersky security lab. The Kaspersky lab is currently trying to find out how the new Duqu Trojan is developed and how it is working. What they have found up until now is what it is doing and how it is communication. The scary part however of this Trojan is that it is developed in a language that we do not know. It is tested to see if it is developed in C++, Objective C, Java, Python, Ada, Lua, or any other languages however all tests are currently negative.

Developing a new programming language is a very long and costly process and will need very experienced developers. Developing a new programming language needs a wealthy backing in the form of a government or very wealthy criminal syndicate. However there is another option, the option that it is not a new language however a very old language.  Some people claim that it might be the result of an old IBM compiler used in OS400 SYS38 and the oldest sys36 systems.

“That code looks familia:r
The code your referring to .. the unknown c++ looks like the older IBM compilers found in OS400 SYS38 and the oldest sys36.




The C++ code was used to write the tcp/ip stack for the operating system and all of the communications. The protocols used were the following x.21(async) all modes, Sync SDLC, x.25 Vbiss5 10 15 and 25. CICS. RSR232. This was a very small and powerful communications framework. The IBM system 36 had only 300MB hard drive and one megabyte of memory,the operating system came on diskettes.


This would be very useful in this virus. It can track and monitor all types of communications. It can connect to everything and anything.”

Some parts of the current Duqu Framework are “simple” C++ code however some parts are written in the unknown code which might be related to the above quote from As400tech (looking at his knowledge and his name would be a very experienced AS400 developer). If this turns out to be true it could mean that it could be that the developer of this part of the Trojan is an experienced AS400 developer. As we see that companies are decommissioning AS400 systems daily and that they leave an entire community of AS400 developers behind without a proper job this could mean a large group of people comes to the market that are potentially very interesting to governments, secret services and criminal syndicates. Whoever stated that AS400 developers where out of the market was apparently wrong.

However, it is only a thought of one person and not necessarily correct. Some people do think it is coded low level assembly code. This would mean that someone has taken the task upon himself to write all the assembly code himself instead of using a compiler to build it into machine language. However the person is who created the Duqu Trojan (and the Stuka) it must have been a very good programmer or a team of good programmers ( in my humble opinion).

You can condemn the writing of such a code from an ethic and moral point of view, you can agree with it, in any case whatever your point of view on this is you have to admire the craftsmanship of the developer.

When to use Hadoop

Hadoop is one of the big players in the big-data and can be seen as one of the main engines running the big-data machine. We however still do not have a clear picture on what is big-data. we do have some definitions on when we call a lot of data big data however giving it a number has not been done up until now and will most likely never been done. I already zoomed in into this definition question in the "Map reduce into relation of Big Data and Oracle" post on this blog. A number of key components state if data is big-data, to name them; volume of the data, the velocity in which the data grows, the variety of sources which add to the volume of the data and the value it can "potentially" hold. These factors can help you decide when data is big data.

Then we have the question on when data (even big-data) can still be handled in a standard relational database and can still be handled by a "standard" approach. There are some guidelines that can help you. Please do note this is a comparison primarily  for handling data in a relational database or in Hadoop. This is not for storing data.

	RDBMS	Hadoop / MapReduce
Data Size	Gigabytes	Petabytes
Access	Interactive and batch	Batch
Structure	Fixed Schema	Unstructured schema
Language	SQL	Procedural (Java, C++, Ruby, etc.)
Integrity	High	Low
Scaling	nonlinear	linear
Updates	Read and Write	Write ones, read many times
Latency	Low	High

By taking this into consideration when you are struggling with the question if you need to use a MapReduce approach or a RDBMS approach it might be a little more easy to make your decision.

Setup Cloudera Hadoop in combination with Oracle virtualization

One of the things Cloudera is propagating is that they have a very easy to use and easy to start implementation of Apache Hadoop. If you check the Cloudera website you have a download section where you can download CDH3.

"CDH consists of 100% open source Apache Hadoop plus nine other open source projects from the Hadoop ecosystem. CDH is thoroughly tested and certified to integrate with the widest range of operating systems and hardware, databases and data warehouses, and business intelligence and ETL systems."

You can deploy it in several ways and the most easy one for people who do start testing with Cloudera and Apache Hadoop is to use one of the pre-created virtual machines. Currently they are available for KVM, VMWare and Oracle VirtualBox. Below is a very quick step by step guide on how you can start using the downloaded Cloudera distribution within Oracle VirtualBox Reason for this, there are some guides on "old" versions of virtualbox and when I do refer someone to a step by step guide I would like that guide to be accurate.

When you have download the Cloudera distribution you will need to unpack the downloaded ..tar.gz file as you would normally do and store the resulting .vmdk file (probably named cloudera-demo-vm.vmdk) at a location where you normally save your virtual machines.

Step 1:
Start VirtualBox and click the "new" button to start the creation of a new virtual machine. 

Step 2:
Give you new, to be created, virtual machine a name. In our case this was Cloudera_0. You have to select a operating system and a version. In the screenshot below you see I have selected Debian 64Bit this however is wrong. It is working however the distribution officially used by Cloudera in this release is a CentOS 5.7 64Bit version using a kernel version 2.6.18-274.17.1.el5 .

Step 3:
You have to state the amount of memory. Cloudera claims you can run the system 1 GB however recommends at least 2 GB to be able to start everything properly. In the below screenshot you can see I am using 2048 MB however I did double that after playing with the system for some time as more memory if quite convenient

Step 4:
Now it is time to select your hard disk. For this you have to select the .vmdk file. Within this file is the complete Cloudera distribution with Apache Hadoop. Their is no need to create a new disk.

Step 5:
Now you will see the final results and when you select create your virtual machine will be created.

Step 6:
Your VirtualBox is created, when you select the newly created Cloudera virtual machine and start it you will see the system boot and within no-time you will have your first Cloudera instance up and running.

Oracle Enterprise Manager patch advisory

A lot of software companies are pushing patch advisories to there customers in the form of a popup telling them that a new patch has been released and that it would be good if they installed it. Oracle traditionally did not do that however already since one of the first releases of Oracle Enterprise Manager you can connect your Oracle Enterprise Manager installation to the My Oracle Support website and there you will get automatically information about which patches are available for you and which you can install.

For good reasons some companies do not allow their Oracle Enterprise Manager to connect with the outside world. You do connect out of your comfortable secure environment and with every link to the outside world you create potentially a security issue. Even though it is very unlikely it could potentially be a security thread and if you are hosting confidential and/or high valuable data it is your responsibility to guard this in every way possible.

The other side of the coin is that having a proper patch management strategy in place is also a very important part of your security. If you have a large estate of Oracle products it is almost not humanly possible to keep up with all the patches and patch advisories so you do want to have a automated patch advisory system. This decision has to be made in your organisation with security as one of the main questions on the table.

Above you can see a screenshot of a 11GR1 patch advisory for a database installation from An oracle manual.

The Patch Advisor in Enterprise Manager describes critical software patches for your installed Oracle products. To help ensure a secure and reliable configuration, all relevant and current critical patches should be applied.

The Patch Advisor provides support for Remedies. When you select an advisory, you can view the calculated remedies from the context of that Advisory, as well as the affected Oracle homes.

The Patch Advisor also displays a list of available patches and patch sets for your installation, along with the name of the feature that is impacted. You can choose to display only patches for features that are used by your database, or all available patches.

linkedin buzzwords

Most people have created a resume at some point in their career when they where looking for a new job. The interesting part and the interesting question when creating a resume, or letter of recommendation, is always; how do I stand out between the others. People have been looking at ways to phrase and re-phrase parts of their resume just to be able to standout. When all the resumes where looked into the person who was looking into them could find out (if he bothered to do so) what the most popular phrases (buzzwords) where that where used. This however would require some manual "computation" on paper resumes.

Nowadays most people do have a linkedin account so we could potentially do a data mining action on all the digital linkedin profiles and find out what the buzzwords of today are when it comes to describing your career and yourselves as professionals. Linkedin has done this in 2010 and now also for 2011 with the following results for the united states:

  

It turns out that the top 10 buzzwords in the united states over 2011 used on linkedin where: Creative, Organizational, Effective, Extensive Experience, Track Record, Motivated, Innovative, Problem Solving, Communication Skills and Dynamic. 

Also included in the blog post in the LinkedIn blog is a infographic showing the top buzz words used on LinkedIn globally.

For all people looking for a job or updating their LinkedIn profile the big question now is; if I use those words will it help me or not? Will I stand out if I do not use them or do future employers expect me to use those words.......

Oracle Big Data approach

In a previous post I already zoomed in at the way Oracle is thinking about big data. The post Map reduce into relation of Big Data and Oracle there was a outline on how Oracle is defining big data and how they are intending to use map reduce and Hadoop in their approach to handling big data. As you might know Oracle has launched a big data appliance which integrates and makes use of a couple of important components in the big data components currently used. The Oracle big data appliance will provide you an out of the box working solution where the supplier has engineered all the components like in all the other solutions in the Oracle Exa- stack. Or as Oracle likes to state "hardware and software engineered to work together"

As you can see in the above diagram the Oracle Big Data Appliance makes use of some of known and important components. The decision is made to run the entire system on Oracle Linux, an option would have been to run it on Solaris however due to the wide adoption of Oracle Linux and the fact that a majority of the Hadoop solutions is primarily focusing on Linux and not on Solaris it is running on Linux (assumption from my side)

For the rest we see the Oracle NoSQL database as integrated part of the appliance which is also not a big surprise as Oracle is pushing its NoSQL solution into the market to gain market share in the NoSQL market. Looking at the Oracle NoSQL solution they do a quite good job and have launched a good NoSQL product with a lot of potential. 

As we are talking about big data Hadoop is part of this appliance and this comes as no surprise, what also not comes as a surprise however is very good to see is the integration in this appliance with the Oracle loader for Hadoop and the Oracle Data Integrator. 

Oracle Loader for Hadoop:

"Oracle Loader for Hadoop is a MapReduce utility to optimize data loading from Hadoop into Oracle Database. Oracle Loader for Hadoop sorts, partitions, and converts data into Oracle Database formats in Hadoop, then loads the converted data into the database.  By preprocessing the data to be loaded as a Hadoop job on a Hadoop cluster, Oracle Loader for Hadoop dramatically reduces the CPU and IO utilization on the database commonly seen when ingesting data from Hadoop. An added benefit of presorting data is faster index creation on the data once in the database."

Oracle Data Integrator:

"Oracle Data Integration provides a fully unified solution for building, deploying, and managing real-time data-centric architectures in an SOA, BI, and data warehouse environment. In addition, it combines all the elements of data integration—real-time data movement, transformation, synchronization, data quality, data management, and data services—to ensure that information is timely, accurate, and consistent across complex systems."

The Big Data Appliance fits into the overall exa strategy from Oracle where they are delivering appliances and it also fits in the overall big data strategy.

As you can see a lot of the steps in the acquire and the organize stages of the big data approach from Oracle are covered by the big data appliances. 

State Of The Social Media Agency

The people at socialfresh.com have launched their invest in social website in 2011 as a listing and search engine for social companies. The hope of socialfresh was and is to be able to find all social companies and show what they are working on.

Today there are over 920 social media companies listed on the directory. 555 of those companies are agencies. It is very interesting to see what companies start in this field, who are working on what and how employees of companies are using social. For companies who are looking into ways of interacting more in a social (media) way it can be very interesting to look at other companies and companies who provide services in this field.

The below infographic is created by socialfresh to show a breakdown of what they have found since the startup of the "invest in social" website.

The online social side of food

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.

Map reduce into relation of Big Data and Oracle

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.

How did data become big-data

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.

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.