Unstructured data, for lack of a more poetic phrase, exists. In fact, there’s more of it now than at any time in history – the growth rate Forrester experts cite is 80% annually, and perhaps rising. All this year, analysts have been asking whether Microsoft would come to embrace unstructured data, or what some call “NoSQL databases.” But by now, it’s grown so large that it’s encompassing Microsoft.
So amid today’s stunning news that the company plans to integrate Hadoop support in Windows Server, even insofar as to consider adopting it as a role alongside Web server (IIS) and DNS server, there’s this structured database management system whose roadmap to general availability was announced this morning at the PASS Summit in Seattle.
There were a few updates to Google Docs last week. Discussions, a new feature we covered previously, received some improvements – most notably, the ability to see how many times a document has been viewed. Google Docs also added a new font, made it easier to restore deleted sites and the spell checker gained an additional feature.
Document Statistics
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When we talk about the benefits of using a non-relational database management system, often referred to as a NoSQL database, we sometimes lose track of what a traditional database is still good.
In a blog post at DBMS2, database veteran Curt Monash explains when it’s still best to use a relational database …
Microsoft’s Windows Azure DataMarket, the company’s online store of various large data sets, has partnered with Colorado-based web mapping software service OnTerra Systems to offer a quick map view of all data in the data store that has a geographic component.
Data marketplaces are hot and likely to get hotter. Place, space, time and streaming are all key characteristics in an increasing number of data sets of interest. OnTerra’s map app works in conjunction with Bing Maps. Bing has partnered with OnTerra on a number of mapping projects over the past several years. In January OnTerra released a service called MapSavvy WMS that helps business and security customers to capture web imagery of Bing Maps for a low subscription price …
It’s no secret that Google App Engine has suffered from reliability issues. Google is attempting to address some of its issues by making a new datastore option available: the High Replication Datastore.
“The High Replication Datastore provides the highest level of availability for your eads and writes, at the cost of increased latency for writes and changes in consistency guarantees in the API,” writes Kevin Gibbs in theannouncement. “API. The High Replication Datastore increases the number of data centers that maintain replicas of your data by using the Paxos algorithm to synchronize that data across datacenters in real time.” A detailed comparison of the two datastore options is available in App Engine documentation.
The price for the new datastore is starting out at three times the cost of the Master/Slave option, but the pricing will likely change in the future.
USB Drive that also known as flash drive has become a massive requirement in this computer era. People have various purposes of using it, such as keep their data, or maybe just as an accessories. A large company also usually make flash drive as a gift or souvenir to their loyal customer or maybe as an identity on their employee. It is even better that today, a company can order a custom flash drive with their logo in it.
Customized flash drive with a company logo can help the company to promote themselves. It is of course more convenient, cheap and useful marketing strategy considering flash drive has become a personal need of every person that uses computer. Let’s try to compare it with other promotional gift, for example a mug. It’s true that mug also very useful, but it’s place is at home, so only the owner of the home and some guest can see the mug with company logo in it. It’s very different with USB drive. The owner will take it with them all over the place, at work, school, internet café, and many more places.
That reason alone has give a big differentiation between marketing strategy. Another plus point from getting USB drive as a promotional gifts are it shows that the company has a fully incorporate with advance technology. Especially when the design chosen is describing the company. It will helps a lot of marketing without much more efforts and cost that must be paid.
Google looks to be following up the addition of its Google Chart Tools with a neat addition to Google Labs – the Public Data Explorer.
The purpose of the new tool, Google says on the new lab’s page, is to make “large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate”.
Google, with its access to an immense assortment of information, is in the perfect position to help us with ways to display this information …
One of the features that Google’s online office program Google Docs lacks is a cloud-based version of Microsoft Office’s “clipboard” feature. Although you can copy and paste when using Docs, it’s a much simpler procedure. The keyboard shortcut “Ctrl + C” copies and “Ctrl + V” pastes, but it’s a one-time process. You can’t accumulate a collection of copied items for later pasting as you can with the Office clipboard.
Some may argue that’s by design – Google likes to keep things simple. However, it appears that may not be the case, after all. As spotted by the Google Operating System blog, a new server-side clipboard looks like it may be close to launch …
Gtriage is a new service that aims to help Gmail users suffering from “information overload” due to an overcrowded inbox – a problem affecting the majority of email users today. The way the service works is that it scans all your email messages and to determine which ones are the most important to you. It then tags those messages “Important” with bright red labels so they don’t get missed.
This sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? The only question now is will it actually work? …
One of the interesting trends of 2009 has been the gradual decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news and niche topics. Many of us still use them, but less than we used to. I for one still maintain a Google Reader account, however I don’t check it on a daily basis. I check Twitter for news and information multiple times a day, I monitor Twitter lists, and I read a number of blogs across a set of topics of most interest to me.
Frankly I’m more likely to use Google Reader to search for specific information nowadays, than to scan my subscribed feeds for their latest posts [I should note however that our news writers use a variety of RSS Readers daily]. So what’s happened to RSS Readers. Do people still use them and is there still a viable market for them? …
