I get it, I just don't want it.

I recently read a white paper put out by Sybase that tries to answer the age-old question (or at least help define the question) of how to ensure that the people you trust the most with your corporate data are NOT the ones who are ripping you off. The target audience is the commercial IT manager or CIO. The paper talks a lot about Sarbanes-Oxley, as you might imagine.

My personal email goes through a domain that I own, and I use a spam filtering service to keep the amount of junk I have to download to a minimum. At $12 per quarter it's a good deal, but I'm off topic.

The service (onlymyemail.com) sent out an email today offering their JavaScript generator to mask email addresses posted on web pages from search bots.

A recent issue of Information Week carried a long piece on 'inside Google' describing some of the technologies they use. Most of it is open source, such as Linux and 'commodity servers'. The article goes on to describe how they 'Googleize' the software and hardware to maximize performance. 

The item that caught my eye was the competetive advantage of using open source software to mask the size of your operation. Since they don't buy operating systems, etc. no one can tally the numbers to get an estimation of how big their operation is.

The whole article is available in PDF format here

A recent issue of Infoworld magazine had a cover article on Viper, IBM's new release of DB2 (version 9.1). The major enhancement is that it stores XML data in native format, not as a CLOB or BLOB. Here's a link to the article:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/08/14/33FEdb2viper_1.html?s=feature

Quoting one paragraph:
For starters, it gives you the ability to access
XML data using SQL queries, just like ordinary relational tables. You
can also use XQuery to access relational tables, in addition to XML.
You can even use relational SQL to limit the range of data pulled back
from XQuery expressions. DB2 allows almost continuous intermixing of
the two languages.

I was recently involved in a discussion regarding the relationships between database tables and how they differ from the relationships between objects.

I should first say that I come to Platinum Solutions and this blog space not as a ‘java programmer’, but as an applications developer with a rich history (~25 years) of data-driven development. My only experience with Java until now has been with the late unlamented SilverStream, which lived prior to J2EE. More on this in a later entry…

The discussion centered around certain key pieces of data and the distribution of same within the database. Imagine data in a grandparent (GP) –parent (P) –child (C) relationship. The object model had relationships described between GP and P and between P and C, but no direct way for C to reach GP except through P. While this may be perfectly acceptable in an object model, this will be a problem in a relational database when you try to create a query that relates child to grandparent, and a real mess when you try to pull data from two children with the same grandparent but different parents.