TechnologyStory.com

Microsoft Gets Serious About Data Optimization

I am impressed with the recent move Microsoft has made into the database vertical with the purchase of an Israeli company, Zoomix, which will be moving their offices into the Microsoft Israel R&D Center.  The additional applications and intellectual property will become part of the MS SQL Server offering.   Zoomix has more than a few products that any DBA would be happy about, but the crown jewel has to be the Zoomix Accelerator ™.

The Zoomix Accelerator ™ provides solutions for cleansing and correcting data in real-time rather than off-line solutions.  I have been on massive data cleaning projects in the past where we wrote script after script with rules for every conceivable contingency, only to fail, not all at once, but little by little, as we watched humans do things we had not believed was possible to our data.

According to the Zoomix website the Accelerator system is a “scalable, high-performance, automated data processing server that solves data inconsistencies in-line with business processes”.   Impressive, sure, but what does that mean?  It means that as early as next year we will see SQL Server becoming more that just a relational database management system; it will begin to offer us actual Business Intelligence and out-of-the-box data correction that beforehand we would have acquired separately and tried to integrate.

In fact SQL Server 2008 already has so many new toys that I am lusting after it… Data types such as the storage level BLOB’s, think of these as giant nebulae of data, and the higher structure level types like XML sets, email, calendar entries, geography and spatial indexes.  OK, so that was a bit techie, I know, but think of it this way: with these new data types your developers will be able to turn out advanced, standards based applications, with things like location-aware data without resorting to third-party applications or hacks.  I know, I told you it was cool.

To learn more about Zoomix and why Microsoft made a good decision, check out the press release.

Amazon Goes On Demand

Amazon is announcing the details to the new Amazon Video On Demand service today. Taking a different route than its own Unbox platform and iTunes have taken so far, this new service allows you to store your purchases online and retrieve them from any browser.  With Amazon Unbox the viewer waits for the download to complete before the movie can be viewed, however with Video On Demand the viewer can begin watching the content immediately as it streams into the browser as a Flash video.  iTunes allows the viewer to begin watching after enough of the file is in the buffer while Netflix only offers streaming titles, so this new Amazon service seems to be giving customers what we want; fast access to the movie, an online vault to store our purchases and as usual, Amazon’s giant selection. (They already have 40,000 titles.)

I wonder how long until Amazon has a streaming iPhone application for Video On Demand?

Matt
twitter.com/mattwilliamson

Links of Interest:

• Microsoft Israel R&D Center  http://www.microsoft.com/Israel/RnD/about/overview.html
• Microsoft & Zoomix Press Release http://www.zoomix.com/pressreleases_article.asp?id=26
• Spatial Data http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/spatial-data.aspx
• Amazon Video On Demand http://www.amazon.com/gp/video/help/sr-beta.html
• Amazon Unbox http://www.unbox.com

Tags: Amazon, iPhone, IT, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, Zoomix

Related posts

• Work Anywhere (0)
• Twittering the Internet (1)
• iPhone Goes to College, Mobile Computing Anyone? (0)
• The gPhone... Should I wait? (0)
• Search News and Seeing Data (0)