Suits are back (again and again)
"Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New
York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because
the suit was also back in February 2005, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002.
From Paul Graham.
York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because
the suit was also back in February 2005, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002.
From Paul Graham.
6/24/2005 10:45:00 pm: permalink
GeoShell
Omniscient Debugging
Rat Park: why happiness matters?
Alexander's findings - that deprived rats seek solace in opiates, while contented rats avoid them - dramatically contradict our currently held beliefs about addiction. So, how might society benefit if his results were applied to human addicts? Nobody seemed to care.
6/07/2005 01:33:00 am: permalink
Buying a Mac to use Linux?
Snippets of XQuery
XQuery works where SQL doesn't?: From a development costs perspective, the XQuery approach turned out to be a significant savings. The tree-structure was ideal for building and searching the data, but not for reporting; the XML approach was well-suited for reporting (because we could leverage the power of XQuery), but would have been both more inconvenient and worse performing for implementing the entire application. Because the data set was a manageable size -- no more than a few tens of megabytes -- it was possible to convert the data from one form to another as was most convenient from a development perspective. A larger data set, one that could not be stored entirely in memory easily, would have required the entire application to be built around a database. While many good tools for dealing with persistent data are available, they all involve a lot more work than simply manipulating an in-memory data structure. If your data set is of a suitable size, you can have the best of both worlds.
Myth: XQuery will replace SQL: XQuery brings SQL-like querying power to applications that require access, selection, integration, and transformation from one or more XML collections. While XML enthusiasts have begun to see everything in the world encoded with XML tags, the relational database model is entrenched and most of the world's digital data is encoded in tables that are composed of rows and fields. SQL will not go away anytime soon. Instead, extensions to XQuery have already appeared that allow queries to treat the results of an SQL call as part of an XML document collection.
Myth: XQuery will replace SQL: XQuery brings SQL-like querying power to applications that require access, selection, integration, and transformation from one or more XML collections. While XML enthusiasts have begun to see everything in the world encoded with XML tags, the relational database model is entrenched and most of the world's digital data is encoded in tables that are composed of rows and fields. SQL will not go away anytime soon. Instead, extensions to XQuery have already appeared that allow queries to treat the results of an SQL call as part of an XML document collection.
6/06/2005 10:37:00 pm: permalink
Tread not lightly on the RDF path you will
Two interesting articles shedding some light on the areas around RDF...
First up, from IBM DeveloperWorks, an article on SPARQL: As more data is being stored in RDF formats like RSS, a need has arisen for a simple way to locate specific information. SPARQL, a powerful new query language fills that space, making it easy to find the data you need in the RDF haystack. Take a tour of SPARQL's features and learn how to use SPARQL queries from your own Java™ applications with the Jena Semantic Web Toolkit.
Secondly, from XML.com, an article on Topic Map Query Language: Work on TMQL started more than a year ago, kicked off by a number of proposals. The editors have attempted to consolidate these approaches into an official draft specification. It is still in flux but sufficiently mature now to justify asking for public feedback. In this introduction I assume that you are at least superficially familiar with Topic Maps and how to create maps. (If not, see Lars Marius Garshol's "What Are Topic Maps?" for a refresher.)
First up, from IBM DeveloperWorks, an article on SPARQL: As more data is being stored in RDF formats like RSS, a need has arisen for a simple way to locate specific information. SPARQL, a powerful new query language fills that space, making it easy to find the data you need in the RDF haystack. Take a tour of SPARQL's features and learn how to use SPARQL queries from your own Java™ applications with the Jena Semantic Web Toolkit.
Secondly, from XML.com, an article on Topic Map Query Language: Work on TMQL started more than a year ago, kicked off by a number of proposals. The editors have attempted to consolidate these approaches into an official draft specification. It is still in flux but sufficiently mature now to justify asking for public feedback. In this introduction I assume that you are at least superficially familiar with Topic Maps and how to create maps. (If not, see Lars Marius Garshol's "What Are Topic Maps?" for a refresher.)
6/06/2005 10:27:00 pm: permalink
