Damn ! I just realized that my latest article is almost 1 month old ! This is unacceptable for my trusted readers and as I spend a night in London I decided to share one of my latest read. I did read during the past months but for once, I indulged myself with some great science-fiction books I had in my stack: The forever war from Joe Hadelman (always trust a classic. This is an awesome read !), the Ophiuchi Hotline from John Varley and The Currents of Space from …

Following my article on high performance at massive scale, I’ve started to get really interested in the type of distributed databases the big web players are using to handle current and future volume of data. Some of the products developed in my current organization have to cope with large amount of data (personal, financial, marketing, etc.) with an increasing need to aggregate and link this data to get the most complete picture about individuals and businesses. This is especially true in credit bureau, fraud detection, Marketing, customer management etc.
As the …

The European Commission has started to listen to Oracle argument for its planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems. All eyes will be on Sun’s MySQL business unit as the talk held last month ended up in an impasse as the EC is concerned that the acquisition will seriously reduce competition in the hot databases market. Oracle will be helped by customers such as Vodafone, The UK National Health Service, BBV etc. Against this merger, you can find Microsoft and SAP.

“Oh, and by the way we’re launching our own programming language …” This is the latest news coming from Google today after a tornado of announcement last week: Acquisition of Admob and Gizmo5, new personal dashboards, free WiFi in US airport during holidays (Hey, Yahoo gives free Wifi too !), lower price of online storage etc. It looks like Go comes from an 20% time project R&D project and is becoming today a project opened to a broad community with formal support from Google. Here are its major attributes:

Compiled …

Performance and scalability are high on the list of top requirement from the customer we deal with. The largest financial institution use our products at a global scale with access through the web. They expect low latency and of course a solution that can cope with future volume of utilization.
There are today 2 Internet giants who are facing scalability challenges every single day: Google and Facebook. I’ve had a chance to touched on some of these challenges talking to some of the Google engineers last week during GTAC 2009. Google …

Forrester, has just published a very interesting study about what they think are the 15 technology trends to follow in the future: The top 15 technology trends EA should watch. Although the term is not mentioned in the report, there is a lot of concepts related to Enterprise 2.0. This is an area of interest for me as I think it will transform (it already does) the way we work in the future. As someone managing a large organization, I need to watch closely this transformation before it happens to …

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I encourage software testers and managers to attend software test conferences and webinars as part of their training toolbox. I myself try to attend as much as I can, trying to synch them with a business trip (I’ve attended SEETEST and SOFTEC this year. I Will attend GTAC 2009 in Zurich in October. It should be a good one !!)
I’ve tried to find a place where all these conferences and webinars are referenced and I’ve found a good list …

Interesting move last week from Apple ! They’ve made the source code of Grand Central Dispatch available under an Apache open source license. This is a new technology introduced in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard trying to help developers deal with growing multi-core requirement. In a nutshell, GCD is an abstraction of threads management which allows programmers to deal with them at a much higher-level. It introduce a pool mechanism and allow specific tasks that can be run in parallel to be queued for execution. A monitoring and scheduling …