Federated databases are a dream that have not materialized. The SQL/MEDextension to the ANSI/ISO SQL specification is a step in the right direction. In addition, both SQL Server and Oracle have proprietary extensions that make it possible to query external data sources. If all of this technology is available today, why aren’t more people using…

One of the biggest problems facing businesses today is integrating data from multiple sources. The holy grail of data integration is called a federated database system. Basically, a federated database stores meta data about other databases and makes it easier to integrate them through a single interface. Many relational databases have features that support integrating…

Past Articles I’ve written a few times about writing – The Act of Reading and The Act of Writing. I thought that it would be good to put together a grab bag of some of my favorite writing tips and tricks to make life just a little bit easier for people who want to get…

One of my favorite features of EC2 is the ability to create virtual machine templates and re-use them to create fresh copies of a virtual machine. This is great but things rapidly get onerous when you’re trying to duplicate infrastructure. Amazon recently unveiled a new service called AWS CloudFormation. There are currently many Amazon cloud…

Why Should I Worry About Licensing? You probably just have a blog, or maybe you haven’t even started blogging yet. Maybe you’re just sharing your thoughts on Facebook Notes or Google Pages. However you look at it you’re probably certain that you don’t need to worry about your writing on the web. It is, after…

Developers! DBAs! Has this ever happened to you? Surprise! It’s a database migration error! You’re chugging along on a Friday night getting ready for your weekend deployment. Your 2 liter of Shasta is ice cold, you have your all Rush mix tape, and you’re wearing tube socks with khakis. Things are looking up. You open…

A while back we talked about getting faster writes with Riak. Since then, I’ve been quiet on the Riak front. Let’s take a look at how we can get data out of Riak, especially since I went to great pains to throw all of that data into Riak as fast as my little laptop could…

A friend of mine half-jokingly says that the only reason to put data into a database is to get it back out again. In order to get data out, we need to ensure some kind of durability. Relational databases offer single server durability through write-ahead logging and checkpoint mechanisms. These are tried and true methods…

It’s a bit early to be updating my goals for 2011, but I’m really excited about this one. Over the course of last week, I wrote an article about loading data into Riak. I had a brief conversation with Mark Phillips (blog | twitter) about adding some of the code to the Riak function contrib.…