Wednesday, October 29. 2008

Netezza Appliance "Visited"

We've written before on the Netezza data warehouse appliance that supports the OGC simple feature specifications and hopes to offer clients exceedingly fast performance with high volumes of data (think terabytes). So,  on the exhibit floor of the GEOINT Symposium I got an up-close look at the basic device. If you've taken apart a deskside computer you'd recognize that it has the same basic components: a hard drive, processor and memory. What would be new is the "secret sauce," a silicon chip with the embedded proprietary logic to strip out certain extraneous bytes such as SQL statements and simply use the location-based data. This firmware approach to dealing with the complexities of massive amounts of data is amplied when these simple sleaves of hardware are rack mounted - 120 fold. The Netezza appliance is composed of 120 such devices described above in the company's Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing architecture. According to their literature on Netezza Spatial "each intelligent node...is an independent computer optimized specifically to accelerate analytic query performance on large data volumes."

The argument about whether you replace an Oracle Spatial or ArcSDE may be a question for some but it may not be an either/or situation. Netezza will first process the data using the ETL functions of Safe's FME which loads the spatial data into its firmware so it can bypass a typical database but many users have found an approach that works in tandem.

Attendance At GEOINT Looks Robust; Exhibits "So So"

Attendance at GEOINT this year in Nashville at the Opryland Hotel looked very robust by looking at the opening session; I'd estimate about 2500 people. Exhibitor's however thought the traffic was light to moderate. My take was that most booths were busy but not overly crowded...not even Google.

Off Topic: Christian Science Monitor to Drop Print Daily in April

I have a few connections to the Christian Science Monitor. My high school history teacher was a Christian Scientist so I learned a bit about the mother church here in Boston. And like most kids in the region spent a good deal of time in the Mapparium, an "inside out" glass globe you could walk inside. (A must see when touring the city!) Only when I reach adulthood did I read the newspaper. I liked it so much I "borrowed" the Monitor part for my first publication, GIS Monitor.

Tuesday I heard that come April 2009 the daily version of the paper will be replaced by an online and e-mail version, leaving just a weekend print edition. It's not news that print papers are having a tough time. Even the New York Times is not in the clear, now holding a "sell" rating from at least one analyst. I applaud the folks behind the Monitor for re-organizing such that the content can remain, even if the print version goes away. I'm sure we'll lose some papers altogether as the economy and technology change; I just don't want to see papers of record, like CS Monitor and the Times disappear due to poor business decisions.

- Christian Science Monitor

Quote of the Week

"The practical challenge posed by dashboard navigators, cell phones and the host of coming location-aware devices is that the systems are proprietary and fast changing. Even devices that use identical chip sets to collect geospatial data often process and store that data differently. Forensic examiners must grapple with obscure interfaces, oddball cabling and few proven software tools."

- Craig Bell, writing at Law.com about why GPS and other location data may not be ubiquitous in court any time soon.

One of First non-Microsoft Apps for Azure: Bluetooth Friend Finder

Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform, announced yesterday at its Professional Developer's Conference in LA. And, one of the first apps comes from Sentinet, a company that already offers "sports tracker" type apps. The new app is Bluehoo.

The Sentinet site allows Bluetooth users to download lists of fellow "hoos" that there are in the immediate vicinity. Presumably the idea being to initiate social interaction with fellow Bluetoothers. The pink and blue (male and female) avatars are apparently enough of a reason to try and hook up, if you will.
According to the Bluehoo homepage, some 126,000 "hoos" have already signed up to the recently formed Bluetooth user network, but don't all leap online at once to join as it will only initially work for users close to PDC in LA, or for those near London's city center, where Sentinet's sports stat service SportsDo is located.

How many of these do we really need?

- Red Herring