4 articles in this selection

2010/11/05

Wayne Eckerson's last blog as an employee of TDWI. As of November 15th, I’ll be doing research, consulting, and speaking at a different media company, and my Wayne’s World blog will come with me. In addition, I will have my own consulting company—BI Leader Consulting—to do advisory work and assessments for user organizations. I will miss TDWI dearly....

2009/11/03

In the land of IT, the one thing you can count on is a slick vendor presentation and a whole lot of hype. Eras shift, technologies change, but the sales pitch always sounds eerily familiar. In virtually every decade there's at least one transformational technology that promises to revolutionize the enterprise, slash operational costs, reduce capital expenditures, align your IT initiatives with your core business practices, boost employee productivity, and leave your breath clean and minty fresh....

2009/07/12

I'm not sure Google's new Chrome OS announcement is that big a deal, or that the eventual product that gets released will actually have that much impact, but it's a useful milestone in marking Google's evolution towards becoming an older company with a distinctly different culture than they used to have. This is, for lack of a better term, Google's 'Microsoft Moment'. This is the point when the difference between their internal conception of the company starts to diverge just a bit too far from the public perception of the company, and even starts to diverge from reality. At this inflection point, the reasons for doing new things at Google start to change....

2009/06/16

There are a lot of false heroes in high tech. The late Dr. Edgar (Ted) Codd was the real deal. Codd came up with the notion of relational databases, by applying the beauty of math and predicate logic to the problem of managing, finding and sorting data. His work, much of which he did while employed by IBM (NYSE:IBM), forms the basis for what is now a multibillion-dollar-a-year business. Codd may not be a household name, but among those who know databases, he remains an icon a year and a half after his death. “Codd is a god,” says one longtime database expert matter-of-factly....