kirukkal.com

Google’s products are like Rahman’s music. They grow on you, atleast for me. Read ahead.

Google Reader has now become a personal choice for me. I was enthusiastic when G Reader was introduced, the excitement was put down when I learnt the Reader wasn’t compatible with Firefox. Though it was resolved in the next few weeks, it’s only for the last month, I’ve started using only G Reader to read blogs and other news feeds.

Bloglines is such a robust app on the net for news feeds while Google’s Reader is slick and has a very intuitive user interface. The G Reader has an option to read the posts both chronologically and blog-wise. Intially I wasn’t comfortable with the chronologically ordered posts from various blogs. It needed a mind-shift, after being used to read posts blog-wise in Bloglines. Now after using it for well over a month, I’ve to say that I’m enjoying this interface which allows for lazy reading. If you wonder how to migrate from Bloglines to Google Reader, see this help text to export you Bloglines subscriptions as OPML file and this help to import that file into G Reader. Just two steps and you would agree with the analogy of Reader to Rahman’s music.

BTW it seems like Rajini & Rahman‘s Sivaji music would be out by March 10. Kamal plans to showcase the h(a)unting music on March 5th. I’m hoping the news on Sivaji music is just a hoax. Whoever wants the music to be out by march and wait until Diwali for the movie. Shankar must be crazy if he is aiming for this. Thanks Radhakrish for the link.

A tipping point has been reached, and going forward, you will need only one kind of database to run both the transactional and BI parts of enterprise systems. There will still be different instances due to performance requirements to support diverging transactional and BI workloads, but they will both operate with the same database. Proprietary systems that operate with special purpose technology stacks and databases are out. Open systems – including de facto standard such as IBM DB2, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server – are in. Open source databases will remain outside the mainstream due to lack of features, functions and experience, but will exert a remorseless flattening influence on the major players in downward pressure on prices.

Just like his other articles on Business Intelligence, in this well conceptualized column, Trends for 2006, Lou Agosta makes a daring thought about the world of Data Warehousing. He throws his views on how companies could derive value from their BI systems by employing open source architecture and low-cost servers. I only wish those corporates who are thinking a zillion times to data warehouse their systems would read this. Build Data Warehouses for cheap and Warehouse the world. For this is what every Data Warehousing guy dreams about.