I live in Austin Texas. Yesterday in Austin, in the most surreal event to happen so far this decade, a software engineer called Joe Stack (good name that, for a software engineer) flew his his Piper Cherokee PA-28 airplane, loaded with 50 gallons of fuel, into the IRS offices in Austin.

Joe Stack simply snapped. It was an irrational gesture born of a hatred for the IRS, with whom he’d clearly had an adversarial relationship for years. Joe snapped. He put a suicide note on the Internet. He drove his wife and child out of the house. He set the house on fire and then he got in his airplane and crashed it into the Austin IRS building.

Events like this happen in good times, but they seem more common in harsh economic times. OK It’s tough out there.

Political Art

This was no more of a political act that me putting the cat out at night. It happens every now and then. In America as elsewhere, sometimes people snap. The normal outcome is that they get a gun and shoot a few people, before they get taken down. They don’t normally crash airplanes into buildings.

The only previous examples of crashing an airplane into a building was the immensely political strike of 9/11 and the strange loner action a few months later when a 15-year-old boy crashed a Cessna into the 42-story Bank of America Plaza building in Tampa, Florida. This too was a political act, if a very strange one. The boy left a suicide note indicating that he acted alone and that he supported Osama Bin Laden.

However, in America right now, the media, especially Fox News (the broadcasting arm of the Republican Party), tries to turn everything into a political act.

“If you put your cat out at night, the terrorists win.”

I heard about this event over the phone by the way. Probably because I live in Austin. The local jungle drums may this time have worked a little faster than Twitter. My wife was on the phone to  her boss (she was working from home) who was interrupted on the call by her husband who had just been told of the event that had happened a few moments before.

The Austin press and TV were all over it instantly – and well they might be, because all the footage of everything could be syndicated across the world. Reporters were out interviewing the neighbours of the guy. There were reporters at the airfield just North of Austin, where the plane took off and there were reporters interviewing the survivors who had evacuated the building. Luckily only a few people were killed. It could have been worse.

Watching the news happen, I noticed the usual misinformation effect. There were reports, for example, that the air plane had been stolen. Not true. One wonders where they came from. Two jets were scrambled from Houston, in case some larger terrorist attack was in progress, but it clearly wasn’t.

It Was Just Life Imitating Art

We are all capable of delinquent, destructive and suicidal acts. We choose not to do them, indeed we choose not to even think of doing them. We could buy guns and shoot. We could go on the Internet and find how to make explosives and then make bombs. We could derail trains. We could drop concrete blocks onto traffic from bridges. Society has no defence against a lunatic who doesn’t mind dying. It has no defence against someone who snaps. But socity is big. It can take hits like that and move on.

If this had been a gunman, it would have been “just another crazy shooter”. But this was an airplane suicide and all previous acts of this nature in America were political. This event was tailor-made for the political amplifiers of every description.

• He was white and not Islamic. So was he another Timothy McVeigh?
• He hated the IRS. So was he a Tea Party wing nut?
• There was (almost unbelievably so) an FBI office and a CIA office in that building. So is there a conspiracy here?
• Will Fox News claim that “he was driven to this desperate act by the Obama regime”?
• Will MSNBC claim that Glen Beck has incited such crazies to acts like this?

No. He just snapped, and killed himself in a very destructive manner. That is all.

I had a long discussion yesterday about Google’s phone that kicked the ball up and down the street. It concluded in an agreement that the Google phone is a mistake. Here’s the rationale:

• The Nexus One is really not that good, compared to the Droid, for example, never mind comparing it with the iPhone. That’s bad news for brand reasons.
• Google is not a device company, yet and it shouldn’t become one. It’s a tough road. Look at the problems Microsoft has been having with Zune, for example.
• Does Google even have it to become a device company quickly or even slowly. Does it really have the ability, not just to build a phone, but to keep a phone competitive.
• If it becomes a successful device company (which is, I admit, a possible route for it) then it will lose all those companies that are enthusiastically queuing up to build Android devices (cell phones or net books or tablets). They’ll go elsewhere – to Linux probably. The Google app store will be damaged.
• Why put yourself in direct competition with Apple on Apple’s territory?
• Google’s real revenue stream in the mobile market is adverts. That means it needs to inveigle its way onto as many devices as possible (via its app store). A phone of its own doesn’t help.

Google should bury the phone and do what it does best. It should forget about Chrome OS devices too.

Having said that: Kudos to Google for standing up to the Chinese.

Despite the Kremlin-like secrecy of Apple, words has been leaking out for almost a year now about the coming tablet or (as rumor will have it) the iSlate. iSlate is a brand that Apple controls so the current reading of the runes suggest that Apple will be announcing the iSlate at the ned of january and will be delivering them by march. The rumor is so strong that it has added about 5 percent to Apple’s stock price.

Apple’s competitors (HP, Microsoft, Dell, Acer, Nokia, Motorola, and even Google) are going to find it hard to keep up pace. In fact only Google is likely to be able to. For them, the problem with Apple is that it innovates as a matter of course. Rumor has it (and you only ever get rumor about what happens within Apple) that the slate has been in preparation since about 2002. Commentators, myself including, are convincing ourselves (on the basis of no hard evidence whatsoever) that Apple has another iPhone up its sleeve.

If it does, it will be game changing.

And there’s still another shoe to drop. The reason that Apple TV is such a moribund product is the the Apple genius engine has yet to put its finger on what the home media device needs to be. The Apple TV is currently a joke of a product, but deep inside you know that eventually it is going to be something much better.

I’ll do a full New Year review of Apple in the coming week, but right now my view is that the next decade belongs to Apple and Google. They are Castor and Pollux, although which of the two is mortal has yet to be determined. (In Greek myth, Castor was mortal but Pollux was immortal).

I wrote a piece yesterday about Firefox and why I’m abandoning it, I’ve also been writing a whole series of Xmas “words you don’k know” which currently includes the following words: #1 Hwoelor-tid, #2 Brumalia, #3 Protomartyr, #4 Dulocracy, #5 Pohutukawa, #6 Hagiolatry, #7 Sinterklaas, #8 Prolicide, #9 Apophoret

There are 3 more to be added before I’m done.

The financial markets reacted positively but not deliriously to HP’s announced acquisition of 3Com. What does HP’s acquisition tell us?

Well first of all, it tells us that Mark Hurd, HP’s CEO, has a coherent and ambitious plan. HP is the biggest IT company by revenues (about $120 billion) and it’s a tough company to run. It has challenges. The printer market that served it so well now appears to be in decline. The PC market that was once so healthy is now in disarray. The only truly active part is at the low end with cheap netbooks and laptops, where the margins are thin and the Chinese are playing hardball.

When Mark Hurd took control from the somewhat unloved Carly Fiorina, these revenue shrinking challenges did not exist. Compaq had not yet properly been digested and the server market was in a much healthier state.  Hurd embarked on a series of acquisitions including Mercury Interactive ($4.5 billion) and Opsware ($1.6 billion)  to strengthen the software portfolio, EDS ($13.9 billion) establishing a large consultancy arm in one fell swoop, and now he has snapped up 3Com for $2.7 billion.

Knocking On Cisco’s Door

There’s no real mystery to the 3Com acquisition. HP is up-front in stating that it will compete head-to-head with Cisco. And that’s no surprise really, because Cisco announced its intention to dive into the server market about a year ago. You could say that Cisco and all the server vendors were on a collision course, but HP was probably the company in Cisco’s cross hairs, with its dominant share of the Intel server market. HP already had some networking jewels, with its successful Procurve switches and the acquisition of 3Com gives it a much larger customer footprint (especially in China) and a great deal more technology. So it’s game on.

Taking a broader perspective, what we are witnessing is a convergence in the IT industry. When we talk of Cisco, we’re really talking about the Cisco – EMC – VMware alliance, which gives Cisco a credible position as a “one-stop data center vendor.” We’ve never had such a vendor, HP is clearly heading in the same direction and it has a big consultancy arm that it can flex. The question I guess, is whether IBM, Dell and Oracle (with Sun) feels as though they have to join in the fun. We’ll be able to tell from customer behavior I guess.

Back to the Mainframe

From the perspective of the data center, we may be returning to “the mainframe days”, when you didn’t buy new computers so much as incrementally add to the configuration you had, boosting its power with more processing punch, memory or storage.

The server market is rapidly becoming a blade market which means you’re locked in to the blade cage. The networking is now the same, a cage into which you can slot switches or servers as you please. It doesn’t mean that data centers will fix on a single provider. Everyone understands that a vendor needs competition to stay honest. But it’s likely that the days of the commodity server are coming to an end.

Along with a few other people I noticed that in the wake fo the Great Recession, the server market collapsed much more steeply than anything else. The simpel truth is that virtual machines have freed up servers to deliver mor eof their power than they ever did before and buying server after server no longer makes sense commercially or organizationally

The game is changing.

An interesting debate is brewing about SQL databases and NoSQL database. So what are these things?

A SQL database is a relational database. SQL, the set based query processing language, pretty much defines what a relational database is: a collection of data held as 2 dimensional tables. It’s not that relational databases don’t allow other structures for data – the object relational databases, for example, are far more versatile in the structures you can store. But with such databases you have to extend SQL and when you do, it ceases to be a simple set-based language for getting at data.

And that’s where the NoSQL database enters in. The NoSQL term was coined by a Rackspace employee, Eric Evans. The name and concept generated a bit of a buzz.

NoSQL term is supposed to stand for “Not Only SQL.” However, in practice, it means not SQL-oriented, because SQL doesn’t define what the database is, so whether it has a SQL interface is irrelevant. Examples of such databases include: Apache Jackrabbit, Amazon’s Dynamo, Cassandra, CouchDB, Chordless, Google BigTable, HBase, MongoDB, Neo4j, Redis, Riak, Scalaris, Tokyo Cabinet, hamsterdb and VertexDB.

Why NoSQL is a Crock

The term NoSQL is really useful because it sets off an important debate on the limitations of Relational Database (see 6 Reasons Why Relational Database Will Be Superseded) but it aint never gonna be a reasonable classification of database because all it says is “none of the above”. Some of the “NoSQL databases” are for accessing large data heaps, some are for cheap indexing (that does force you to do an oh-so-expensive-in-processing-power SQL join), some are for storing documents and so on.

Try defining a ball point pen by what it isn’t. Well it’s not a fish and you can’t watch video on it and it has no nutritious value and its useless for accessing the Internet and it’s not made of uranium and it doesn’t make the sun shine. So what is it? It’s an airplane propeller, isn’t it?

The list of databases I’ve provided have been classified on Wikipedia as NoSQL. But they could be extended to include all the Codacyl databases and the in-memory databases and the XML databases and the Object-Relational databases and so on.

But there’s an important point here.

Accessing Data Is Nine Points of the Database

What makes a database any different from a file system?

Not much. A database is a coherent heap of persistent data. A file system is the same but lacks coherence, so you have multiple interfaces for accessing the files in the file system.  The persistence is important, of course, because that means that the data can be reused – so databases also tend to have capabilities like logging, replication, etc. built in, to guarantee data persistence in the event of failure. But the key point is data access.

SQL is a comprehensive access language only for data held in tables. The “relational theory”, that SQL emerged from,  is really set theory applied to sets of data, with the odd nuance thrown in. It’s viable for data held in tables, but semantically, it’s flat out inadequate.

Let me illustrate this with a simple very common example. The relational model would say that there is a one to many relationship between an ORDER-HEADER and an ORDER-LINE, there being one or more ORDER-LINEs for each ORDER-HEADER. It would also say that there is a one-to-many relationship between PRODUCT and ORDER-LINE, there being multiple ORDER-LINES for every PRODUCT. But nothing in relational theory semantically states that an ORDER-LINE is part of an order and is not part of a product. There is no semantics of composition in relational theory. None at all.

You can usually get around that inconvenience, but in some situations, such as the fairly common situation of a parts explosion, the way round generates work for everyone, the programmer, the database designer and the user.

The relational theory of data is either incomplete or horribly wrong. The NoSQL debate may help by drawing attention to that, but I suspect it won’t. In the NoSQL debate there is lots of criticism of relational database for not scaling – which in reality is criticism of relational products. There are relational database implementations that do scale well because of how they physically manage the data and access to that data.

There is very little criticism of the semantics of SQL, but that’s where the real problem is. If the semantics of SQL were any good then every new product that came to market would hold its data in a relational database. But that just doesn’t happen. Just about every new application that we see builds it own file system  – and that’s because the semantics of data access in SQL are hopelessly inadequate for most data.

The fault is in the semantics of composition. It simply isn’t there in SQL.