The art of Information Engineering » Databases http://www.grok.in (ignorance killed the cat, curiosity was framed) Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:30:18 +0000 en hourly 1 The Mother of All Database Normalization Debates http://www.grok.in/blog/2008/07/25/the-mother-of-all-database-normalization-debates/ http://www.grok.in/blog/2008/07/25/the-mother-of-all-database-normalization-debates/#comments Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:47:24 +0000 Siddhartha Reddy http://www.grok.in/?p=51 Over at “Coding Horror” blog, Jeff Atwood published an interesting article titled “Maybe Normalizing Isn’t Normal“.

But more than the article itself, the debate that ensued in the comments there is very interesting. The “High Scalability” blog published a compilation of some of the interesting quotes from the debate. This compilation provides a great overview of the (admittedly long) discussion.

I would recommend that you read the original article first and then the compilation of the quotes at the High Scalability blog.

]]> http://www.grok.in/blog/2008/07/25/the-mother-of-all-database-normalization-debates/feed/ 4 Machine Learning: Classification http://www.grok.in/blog/2008/03/27/machine-learning-classification/ http://www.grok.in/blog/2008/03/27/machine-learning-classification/#comments Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:00:56 +0000 Siddhartha Reddy http://www.grok.in/blog/2008/03/27/machine-learning-classification/ Machine Learning is a branch of Computer Science that is concerned with designing systems that can learn from the provided input. Usually the systems are designed to use this learned knowledge to better process similar input in the future. Machine learning can be considered as a subfield of Artificial Intelligence.

A very familiar example is the email spam-catching system: given a set of emails marked as spam and not-spam, it learns the characteristics of spam emails and is then able to process future email messages to mark them as spam or not-spam.

Read on…

]]> http://www.grok.in/blog/2008/03/27/machine-learning-classification/feed/ 3 The Database Column http://www.grok.in/blog/2007/09/17/the-database-column/ http://www.grok.in/blog/2007/09/17/the-database-column/#comments Mon, 17 Sep 2007 04:25:17 +0000 Siddhartha Reddy http://www.grok.in/blog/2007/09/17/the-database-column/ The Database Column is a new “multi-author blog on database technology and innovation.” What makes this a great resource is the amazing list of authors, which includes bigwigs from the age-old (sic) database industry like Michael Stonebraker, Jerry Held and Don Haderle from. (For those who do not know, Stonebraker and Held were the architects of INGRES and POSTGRES, the relational database management systems (RDBMSs) that started it all; Haderle was the architect of DB2.) Well known academics like Mitch Cherniack, David Dewitt, Samuel Madden, Stan Zdonik are also writing there.

This blog seems very promising. The first main post on the blog was almost proclaiming that the end of RDBMS is near and that the Column-Oriented DBMS is the next bug thing, at least for the Data Warehousing applications. (Note that Stonebraker is now the CTO of Vertica, a Column-Oriented DBMS company.) They followed it up with a couple of interesting posts on compression in Column-Oriented DBMSs.

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