MarlabsBlogs.com

What all constitite BI?

Rajesh Ramaswamy — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:54:21 +0000

What all constitutes BI? It seems like this is a perennially big subject and is easy to get lost!

Well, the answer is not simple and I do not claim to know the right answer to this question. So let me throw the question right back at you. Consider the following 3 scenarios:

1. In exhibit 1, I bring you the work of Charles Minard (1781-1870), a French civil engineer. “His best-known work, Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armee Français dans la campagne de Russe 1812-13, dramatically displays the number of Napoleon’s soldiers by the width of an ever-reducing band drawn across a map from France to Moscow. At its origin, a wide band shows 442,000 soldiers left France, narrowing across several hundred miles to100,000 men reaching Moscow. With a parallel temperature graph displaying deadly frigid Russian winter temperatures along the way, the band shrinks during the retreat to a pathetic thin trickle of 10,000 survivors returning to their homeland”. Check http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Minard.png

2. As exhibit 2, this article from the NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/09/world/europe/20091109-berlinwallthennow.html), published on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin wall demolition, displays with its innovative photo mash-ups and adjoining commentary how life has changed for the better in unified Germany.

3. Finally, as exhibit set 3, let us move to sports. Check out the ubiquitous “worm” now well publicized in all televised cricket (http://www.cricinfo.com/zim-tri2010/engine/match/452150.html?view=graph) or the much more sophisticated Guardian Chalkboards (http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/chalkboards) that allow you to create your own interactive visualizations to analyze player/team performance. Finally, for those looking forward to the football (soccer) world cup – here is the mother of all planners (http://www.marca.com/deporte/futbol/mundial/sudafrica-2010/calendario-english.html )

Now, do any or all of the above, fall under the umbrella of business intelligence? Your answer is as good as mine. What I do know of Business Intelligence is that, like our major cities, it constantly grows, evolves and stretches it boundaries.

Microsoft Revolutionizes Computing

Srinivasan Balram — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:47:48 +0000

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/08/microsoft-beats-intel-amd-to-market-with-cpugpu-combo-chip.ars

“At Hot Chips today, Microsoft’s Xbox team unveiled details of the system-on-a-chip (SoC) that powers the newer, slimmer Xbox 360 250GB model. Produced on the IBM/GlobalFoundries 45nm process, it’s fair to say that the new SoC is the first mass-market, desktop-class processor to combine a CPU, GPU, memory, and I/O logic onto a single piece of silicon. “

What does this mean?

Apple is toast…Google is getting crisped! Microsoft at this point has redefined the computing landscape for all entities, hardware and software included, for the next decade. By defining and producing a piece of CPU + GPU, they have delivered on a new vision for computing for the 21st century. What’s more, if they rearchitect/optimize Windows for this platform, it could signal the end of “Unix.” This also means that Apple’s approach of OpenCL and nVidia’s approach to GPGPU are dead. Further this kills ARM technology since nothing in the ARM platform can deliver GPU level performance — and this design is already power efficient as well. Virtualization / cloud computing is dead as well!

Tree Maps – An Excellent Method for Representing Complex Hierarchical Data

Rajesh Ramaswamy — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:44:17 +0000

What are Tree Maps?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemapping

History of tree maps from the “founder”:

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/

(Also, downloadable tools for generating tree maps along with some excellent algorithms)

How can I create Tree Maps? Most leading commercial BI tools support creation of tree maps in their dashboards, but if you don’t have access to one and want to play with and understand it, you could do worse than go here:

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Treemap.html

“Many eyes” is a great place for your information visualization needs!
A good example of tree-maps that I stumbled upon yesterday is here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10187248.stm.

The interesting stuff on supercomputers is a bonus!

4.NET 4.0 Libraries You Should Know Better – MEF, Reactive, Tasks and Dynamic

Anoop Madhusudanan — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 09:52:42 +0000

In this post, I’ll consolidate few posts on four .NET libraries/frameworks, that’ll help you write better apps

MEF or Managed Extensibility Framework – System.ComponentModel.Composition

MEF or Managed Extensibility Framework is cool. Firstly, it allows you to decouple your components pretty easily. Secondly, it supports various component discovery scenarios, and enables you to write better frameworks.

* An Introduction to MEF- Creating a Zoo And Animals
* MEF or Managed Extensibility Framework and Lazy – Being Lazy with MEF, Export Attributes etc

Reactive Extensions and LINQ To Events – System.Reactive

Reactive Extensions will soon become the de-facto for writing asynchronous code in a declarative manner .NET Rx gives greater freedom to compose new events – you can create specific events out of general events.

* What is LINQ To Events
* Concepts And First Look
* Linq To Events – A WPF Drawing Demo
* A Text Template for generating GetEventName wrapper

Parallel Extensions and Tasks – System.Threading.Tasks

With those multi core processors everywhere, support for parallelism is an already implicit requirement for any new application. NET 4.0 framework provides a wealth of easy to use primitives and abstractions to enable developers to quickly write parallel programs, targeting multi core machines.

* An Introduction to Tasks in Parallel Extensions

Dynamic Extensions – System.Dynamic

C# 4.0 introduced dynamic capabilities (duck typing) capabilities. There are a number of scenarios where the dynamic features can really simplify things for you. For example, let us assume a Reflection based scenario where you load a type (from an external assembly or so) to invoke a member, or think about a dynamic fluent wrapper on top of XML or JSON.

* An introduction to C# 4.0 dynamic keyword
* Understanding ExpandoObject in .NET 4.0
* A Dynamic Wrapper in .NET 4.0

“Core” Technology Failure of Virtualization – Software vs. Hardware

Srinivasan Balram — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:01:16 +0000

The rapidly increasing core count in hardware is pushing virtualization technology to its limits. The latest VMWare vSphere hypervisor, in its enterprise edition, can only do an eight-way virtual SMP. That is, it cannot even support a single Intel processor which has 16 hyperthreaded cores in totality!

And that’s the tale of the market leader

So which company will want to entrust their enterprise computing platform on virtualization that cannot even support two Intel Xeon CPUs (32 cores with hyperthreading)?

Also, the era of General Purpose Graphics Processor Unit (GPGPU) computing is upon us. This marks a watershed event in the computing world. Even though this started a few years ago (2007-8), the phenomenal increase in GPU core count has made it a reality that cannot be ignored in 2010, especially with the shipping of Snow Leopard by Apple.

Open CL merely plays a primitive load balancing act between the CPU and GPU.

2010 will be a landmark year in the history of computing as most software technologies have been shattered by a tsunami of ‘cores’ — virtualization, JVM/CLR (i.e. Java/C#) — even C/C++ & Unix are barely hanging in there. None of them are able to keep up with this huge wave of cores and are getting choked by a vacuum of conceptual/logical architecture.

The onslaught of GPUs will slowly but steadily erode x86 dominance.

Along with the fall of virtualization, one can clearly visualize the big ‘crash of the clouds’ i.e. large scale failure of ‘Cloud Computing’ — which is still being peddled as the magic platform — resting on the ’solidly shaky’ foundation of virtualization.

What will rise out of this destruction of procedural and object paradigms is functional programming. Procedural programming becomes too expensive due to the overhead of threads. Objects suffer and the additional burden of memory falls on large scale. Functional provides a clear break between the in models of computational logic (what) and execution logic (how). Procedural is all ‘how’– object-oriented is all ‘what’.

Once Hypervisors and/or OS’s (be it Unix or Windows or OS X or something else) are rebuilt on this partitioning principle, only then can software be back on the road to regaining the productivity mantle.

Public Cloud Offerings come with a Catch!

Srinivasan Balram — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 16:17:32 +0000

After all the ’song and dance,’ none of the public cloud computing offerings seem to be able to handle deploying high-availability (i.e. clustered) database environments or high-availability (i.e. clustered) app/web servers.

These offerings do not provide the underlying hardware infrastructure or show real ’hardware utilization metrics.’ Only web apps that are horizontally scalable by design are easily deployable on public clouds. This is to say that only small to mid-size apps are suitable with the current generation of public cloud offerings.
Therefore private clouds and hosting solutions are always going to have a huge edge when it comes to providing high-availability offerings with ’transparent hardware metrics.’

Amazon:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

Google:
http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/business.html#cost

Microsoft: (No production offerings!):
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/

Microsoft vs. Google:
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-azure-vs-google-app-engine-vs-amazon-web-services-2009-7

IBM vs. Google:http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/ibm-tries-to-blow-away-googles-cloud-computing-campaign-with-low-cost-e-mail-for-businesses/

Will Java 7 Usher in a New Maintenance Wave?

Srinivasan Balram — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:03:40 +0000

The next major Java SE release, Java 7, could potentially usher in a maintenance wave starting Sep 2010. Java7 has lot of good features . . .

http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/So much so that it almost feels like a new language . . . e.g. Multicatch, Jigsaw . . .

http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/

http://code.joejag.com/2009/new-language-features-in-java-7/

This could trigger a massive rewrite of the entire Java codebase.

Take this with C# 4.0 new features . . . and F# the new successor . . . the entire .NET platform could get a rewrite as well.

Business Process Intelligence Explained

Srinivasan Balram — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:38:43 +0000

Business Process Intelligence (BPI) is an area that is quickly gaining interest and importance in all industries alike.

But what is Business Process Intelligence?

BPI refers to the application of various measurement and analysis techniques in the area of business process management. BPI increases the quality of process execution through features such as analysis, prediction, monitoring, control, and optimization.

http://is.tm.tue.nl/bpi09/

Some early research papers:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2002/HPL-2002-119.pdf

http://www.prism.uvsq.fr/~grig/These/ci.pdf

A practical explanation:

http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/nari/2008/09/business_process_intelligence.php

What is Business Process Analytics?

http://www.wfmc.org/business-process-analytics-format.html

What is XPDL?

http://www.wfmc.org/xpdl.html

Who’s using it?

http://www.wfmc.org/xpdl-implementations.html

Free BPM tools

http://bpmfundamentals.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/free-bpm-modeling-tools/

Java Founder quits Oracle — lessons to be learnt

Srinivasan Balram — Tue, 04 May 2010 09:10:46 +0000

In a major development, James Gosling, the father of the Java programming language, has left Oracle Corporation.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/04/gosling_leaves_oracle

There are quite a few lessons to be learned here:

You can invent Java and still be out of a job!
No language lasts forever.
Nothing will replace “select *” aka SQL. It has nothing to do with computer science. The foundations of mathematics are built on set theory — unless some other language can be invented on top of set theory that betters SQL.
Time to go functional/dynamic: The object-oriented era is coming to an end.

Per the grapevine, Gosling is probably looking at the following choices:

1) Join Google.
2) Join IBM.
3) Move to academics (like Bjarne Stroustrup did).

It would indeed be something if he joined Microsoft instead! Don’t think that’s likely though…

Solid State Disk – a technology whose time has come

Srinivasan Balram — Sat, 01 May 2010 08:54:31 +0000

It seems like Solid State Disks (SSDs) on servers have finally arrived. Since most environments use storage area networks (SANs), it’s a huge performance boost to use SSDs unless there is a need for storage in excess of 250GB on the local drive for servers.

What is a Solid State Disk?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

HDD vs. SSD

http://www.overclockers.com/hdd-vs-ssd/

Going by the above article, SSDs promise 10 times faster reads/writes.

Reads 2x SSD Raid0 = .072ms * 1000 = 72ms 2x HDD Raid0 = 9.590ms * 1000 = 9590ms.
Writes 2x SSD Raid0 = .104ms * 1000 = 104ms 2x HDD Raid0 = 1.167ms * 1000 = 1167ms

Availability:

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-buyers-guide.html

1TB SSD:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/194327/want_a_cheap_ssd_oczs_4000_ssd_may_not_be_for_you.html

Budget options:

http://www.google.com/products?hl=en&q=SSD&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=94XIS5mDLoL78AaVmLCHBw&sa=X&oi=product_result_group&ct=title&resnum=3&ved=0CDYQrQQwAg