Almost two years ago the late lamented Steve Jobs declared that we had entered the post-PC era. Maybe he was a little late to the party. The post-PC era was heralded when mobile phone sales by unit began to outnumber PC sales buy unit and that was over ten years ago. Its arrival was confirmed [...]

NoSQL became a buzz word in the last 12 months. Why? The short explanation is that there are a number of new databases which don’t depend entirely on SQL (which we can think of as Not Only SQL databases) and some which don’t depend on SQL at all (which we can think of as absolutely [...]

This question goes right to the heart of many of the problems that we experience in building business systems. We can think of there being two distinct positions in this. One is the object oriented (OO) approach to data, the other is the relational approach. The OO Approach: From the OO perspective, an object consists [...]

Long before metadata became a problem, it was a blessing. Prior to the invention and proliferation of databases, the contents of any given file were defined only within the programs that used them. Files never declared anything about the data they contained in any standard way. This meant that you had to depend upon a [...]

I first read about “the democratization of data” a few years ago in a Google blog by Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist. The use of the word “democratization” is a little misleading, here. It’s not about data getting to cast votes and elect representatives. It’s about the consumer being able to consume data in a [...]