Overheard in the tech blogosphere » Oracle

Terabyte – two terabytes in the news

Margaret Rouse — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:18:58 +0000

The National Archives lost a terabyte disk drive filled with sensitive data from the Clinton administration, including Social Security numbers and Secret Service procedures. Had this data been on a self-encrypting drive, we would not have heard of its loss.

Pete Steege, The National Archives lose a terabyte drive filled with sensitive data

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is terabyte. A terabyte (one trillion bytes) is in the news today for two reasons — a terabyte of data of data from the Clinton administration is missing from the National Archives and Amazon has announced a new cloud service called Import/Export for moving terabytes of data to the cloud.

The interesting thing about missing data from the Clinton administration is that it was on a 2-terabyte hard drive that was left sitting on a shelf for a couple of months. And guess what? The data on it was not encrypted. What the heck???

The Amazon announcement is another WTH. The Import/Export service is being promoted as a way to move large datasets to and from the cloud (meaning Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).)

A terabyte is a lot of data and trying to push it up to Amazon over the Internet takes a lot of bandwidth. With Amazon Import/Export, you can move the data by off-loading it to a portable storage device and then shipping the device to Amazon. Amazon has a handy-dandy calculator for estimating the cost of service. They will charge you $80 for moving the data from the portable device to the storage you’ve purchased at Amazon (along with a $2.49 per data-loading-hour surcharge) and then they’ll ship the device back to you. It might sound pricey until you consider that uploading a terabyte of data over the Internet with your T1 line is likely to take 82 days.

And oh yeah, you may want to take a lesson from the National Archives and encrypt that data before you ship it out.

Overheard: In blogging, it’s not the individual — it’s the network

Margaret Rouse — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:17:08 +0000

Individual blogs are not very interesting in themselves. What is important is how they link to each other to create a massive network.

Professor Henry Farrell, as quoted in In which I muse about what “Oracle blogging” means

Overheard: There’s no killer app for GRC software

Margaret Rouse — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:04:27 +0000

Most people assume that so-called GRC software–governance, risk and compliance–will continue to gather steam, as big boys like Oracle and SAP continue their marketing. It makes sense to automate compliance and risk issues, but the reality of this nascent field is that there really isn’t a single point solution.

John Hagerty, CFOs face complex GRC software decisions

Overheard: Sun and MySQL — was Oracle behind it?

Margaret Rouse — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:06:14 +0000

I’m close to being convinced that Oracle wanted to buy MySQL to kill the product, but knew it couldn’t pull off the stunt itself. So it sent in a stooge to do the job.

John C. Dvorak, The Sun-MySQL deal stinks

Let’s begin by putting MySQL in perspective: It’s the most competitive and biggest threat to Oracle Corp., if for no other reason than it’s cheaper, and in many applications, more practical.

It’s used extensively by the open-source community and is the engine that runs almost all the blogging software — including the successful WordPress, which is used as the blogging-content back end for the New York Times, among other large commercial enterprises.

I love a good conspiracy theory. The drama, the suspense, the twisted plot lines — and when Larry Ellison is a main character, it’s even better.

Overheard: DBAs and developers

Margaret Rouse — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:55:37 +0000

“That we DBAs and Oracle developers frequently come across as grumpy old men (and women) who oppose change and who want the IT world to remain the same as it was in the 1980s is partly our fault. And honestly, isn’t there some truth to it?”

Sandy Mamoli (Nomad8), Bridging the gap between DBAs and developers

Sandy writes: One of the things I have learnt from the development community are agile methods which certainly aren’t the answer to all problems but which represent an honest and intelligent attempt to improve our systems by applying an empiric approach which is based on reality rather than wishful thinking about how things should be. For me those methods are worth to be looked into and to be tried in real life.

Overheard: Tech acquisitions psychic predictions

Margaret Rouse — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:34:52 +0000

“My money would go on IBM buying SUN at this point. But again, at the end of the day, Sun is a hardware company, despite noise to the contrary by pony-tail boy.”

Marc Fleury, To consolidate or not to consolidate