by John McDowall
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| Technology Musings by John McDowall |
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Friday, September 20, 2002 Information should be location Independent - Part II EnterpriseI had been thinking over this issue and a headline on Slashdot brought a lot of focus to my thoughts: Should Open Source Content Management Inter-operate?. This is an oxymoron similar to should network computers inter-operate, I would go further and drop the "Open Source" from the headline. This illustrates how badly we have screwed up the whole information model when this question even needs to be asked! We have developed the compunction to store everything away in transactional silos, I have been to a couple of conferences in the last week where the issues around enterprise integration were discussed. Everyone, myself included, got caught up in how to integrate the silos we did not ask why they were there in the first place. We are turning them into an institution by not questioning why they even exist - we are taking the attitude, that silos are natural and the way to solve for them is to develop complex integration software rather than removing the need. Nearly all data should be secure and stored reliably and not subject to corruption, but does it need full ACID level integrity - my bank account sure, purchase orders and other accounting information, but not too much else. Lets think of a model where everything is stored reliably, securely and with user level locking, more ACID level functions should be properties of the data not a fundamentally new way of storing information. One of the major innovations of XML is schema (including namespaces) that separate the description of the data from the data. This allows the data to be stored efficiently and multiple data models to be built separately from the data, if necessary rather than the current relational model where the schema is an integral part of the data design and must be done before the data can be stored. Today search engines can index almost a billion pages, with minimal human intervention, why do I need to design a schema every time I want to use a database. The biggest database of them all is the web and is was definitely not designed but finding information is fairly efficient, in a local intranet it is very efficient as all information can be indexed, whereas I think we are still trying to index the whole web. We appear to be digging ourselves into a bigger and bigger hole by making the technology more complex and assuming that silos are natural - it is time for information to be pervasive and accessible! posted by John McDowall | 10:58 PM |
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