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 …

As I was reading this excellent article from Matt Heusser, I couldn’t refrain from chuckling as I could relate a lot from what I was reading as an ex-software engineer, tester and now in a management position. As I’ve experienced most aspect of the spectrum, I can claim some objectivity and wanted to add my 2 cents to the article.

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 …

We’re currently designing and building a new product and there is quite a bit of work around design, usability, accessibility. A colleague just sent me the following picture (from stuffthathappens.com). It’s not only very close to reality but is a very good reminder to invest quite heavily on design. It’s good for your brand and your customers.

This article is not about the silver bullet around quality metrics you’ve been looking for ! Whether it exists or not is a vast debate. I’ve been writing about metrics in the past. Especially for important metrics to track when you’re software is out the door. I’m still scratching my head to find key relevant metrics to track during the course of a given project. I’ve been tracking a lot during the course of my career but they’ve never satisfied me fully.