Black buck doe & fawn

Black buck- doe & fawn, originally uploaded by SRJP.

Black buck stag

Black buck stag, originally uploaded by SRJP.

Analytic Databases today and tomorrow

2 very enlightening articles on the state of Analytic Databases today. There are loads of them...strange to see that there seem to be more ADs than the regular DBMSes.

1) Bloor - Analytic Warehousing
2) Big Honking Databases - Please Stop Making More ADBMS Sausage

Hiking in Wunderlich County Park

Wunderlich County Park is a nice hiking area just off Highway 84, past Woodside. I did the 5+ mile Bear Gulch loop mostly under the shade of the Redwoods. It's an easy-moderate difficulty hike but well worth the hike up to The Meadows, which is the midpoint in the loop and has a bench overlooking part of the Bay Area. It's probably a gorgeous view in Spring.

Brown Fish Owl

Brown Fish Owl, originally uploaded by SRJP.

Argeopse (the smaller one is the male)

argeopse, the smaller is the MALE!, originally uploaded by SRJP.

Bonnet monkey

Bonnet monkey, originally uploaded by SRJP.

This month in Sci-Fi

Good Sci-Fi I just finished reading:

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds - I'm glad I came across this book. I simply loved the story telling. Smooth and refreshingly original. Deep space epic with a liberal dose of Hard Sci-Fi. Mmmm...

The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons. A sequel to Hyperion, which I happened to like a lot too. A part of the Hyperion Cantos, with its strange blend of hellish Time Tombs, The Shrike and the City of Sad King Billy in the background. What I liked in particular about this was the exploration of the Omega Theory - will God evolve from us as a being of supreme power and intellect or is he already there?

Spoiler alert:

It's also strange to see the similarities between The Matrix movie and the AI/Core in the novel. Especially so, when you consider that this novel came out before the movie. Hmm..who borrowed from who?

Gartner Hype Cycle 2008

A year old, but still relevant.

Gartner Hype Cycle 2008, originally uploaded by marketingfacts.

Road trip - Sequoia National Park and King's Canyon

Windowing features in PostgreSQL 8.4

PostgreSQL recently added a whole bunch of mini-analytic features in version 8.4. It also happens to be Turing complete with support for recursion. Ha! Recursion in SQL...

To me, the most interesting feature was the introduction of the partition by and related clauses. I remember using this feature in Oracle 10g in 2005, which I think was part of the Analytics package if I'm not mistaken. It's important to me because this is what inspired me in some way to start working on StreamCruncher and explore other Windowing concepts that are now standard in any Event Stream Processing product.

SELECT key, SUM(val) OVER (PARTITION BY key) FROM tbl;