Oracle had some PR coverage this week for their launch of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, their new enterprise search solution. Oracle can now compete not only with traditional enterprise search vendors such as Vautonomy and FAST, but also with fellow database vendors who already have enterprise search solutions, such
Here's a mind-expanding idea: what if the reason you couldn't find something was because it didn't exist? This occurred to me the other day when speaking with a friend who works in a big company's market intelligence department. He faces the
Databases
Early in my career, I interviewed at Gartner for a job as an analyst. During the meetings, I met with Mike Braude, then head of research. Mike had made himself famous by declaring the death of IBM’s SAA about two days after it was launched. I remember when we
One near-universal pattern I've noticed with content software is that the process for using it usually looks like this: * Step 1: prepare your content to be loaded in the system * Step 2: load the content into the system * Step 3: get the benefits of the system The
My friends joke that someday I should write a business book based on 1960's bumper stickers because I often re-use 1960's maxims (e.g., "question authority") as basic rules for business. Today's posting is based on the idea of "the
I first used a relational DBMS in 1984 while working at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. At the time Oracle (then called Relational Software, Inc.) was a $15M company. It was about 2 minutes after sun-up on the dawn of the relational era. I liked Ingres, the RDBMS I used at
As a self-described data turncoat, I confess that one of my goals in hopping the data/content border when I joined Mark Logic was to bring lessons from the data world to the content world. I felt that far too few people had lived in both worlds and there
I often hear the question asked: "what's after search?" "Find," one would hope. After all, searching's not the point. Finding is. So the real question is: "how can we improve find?" And answering it requires separating the cases of Internet
Everyone knows that content is largely unmanaged, untapped as an enterprise resource. We've all heard the soundbite (usually attributed to IDC) that 80% of enterprise information is unstructured and not kept in a database. We all believe there is a lot of value in tapping into that content.
Microsoft put WinFS into Beta today, so it seems like a good time to talk about WinFS and what it tells us about the future of file systems and databases. WinFS is a new file system that was originally supposed to be in the Windows Vista release (né Longhorn), which
They say if your only tool's a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. That's certainly a good way to think about how relational DBMS vendors have approached content. After all, if you're running a multi-billion dollar database business, then you are
I run a company that is defining a new category of data management software, known as an XML content server. I've decided to create this blog to record and communicate my experiences in watching this technology / market develop. It' s a fascinating market to watch, because XML
