Tube Party?

When Kimberly and I moved to London, some of her co-workers couldn't believe that in Canada you can't drink in public places.  They'd ask her questions like: "So, you can't have a picnic in the park and bring a bottle of wine?" and "You can't even drink on the tube???".
 
Well...looks like Canada was ahead of the UK on that one.  When mayor Boris (I can't believe he got elected) came into power, one of his first acts was to ban alcohol on buses and tubes.
 
In typical British fashion, this was met with much opposition...and the plans to have one last big tube party.  People will be "coming dressed as their favourite tube station".  I'm sure there will be plenty of "Old Street" and "Angel" people...but I'm mostly NOT looking forward to seeing who's dressed up as "Cockfosters" :)
 
My brother's in town for the celebration and I'm sure we'll get to experience this first hand.  Go London go!

Published: May-23-08 | Comments | 455 Links to this post

Enterprise Data Fabric: The Database Killer?

Recently, I've seen a lot of interest at our clients in Enterprise Data Fabric.  Two of our major finserv clients have purchased GemFire and we've started getting some hands-on experience with it.  We're helping to build a Market Data System which uses GemFire as the transport layer and the caching layer which sits between the clients and the database.  Several things strike me from my early experiences with this product:
  • It's totally distributed.  I can distribute GBs and even TBs of data across nodes.
  • Since it supports seamless failover, it's possible to design an application so that every single call for data hits the cache and does not hit the DB.
  • If I was a messaging middleware provider (Tibco/Reuters, MQ Series, etc), I'd be very, very worried.
  • This technology relegates the database to the role of 'permanent data storage'.  Once you've got GemFire setup to cache your data,  you can drastically reduce the number of DBs deployed across your enterprise.

You should definitely expect to see more raves (and the occasional rant) in this space about our experiences with GemFire in the coming weeks as we get deeper into our MDS implementation.


Published: May-14-08 | Comments | 10913 Links to this post