DataSpaces, 2009-02

A monthly newsletter dedicated to the promotion of best practices and education in the data access and integration communities.

Brought to you by the team at OpenLink Software

February 2009

Dear OpenLink Community,

The RDBMS is dead! Long live the RDBMS!

Just kidding. The RDBMS is alive and well. It's longevity in the data management space is assured. However, its position in that space is in question. The team at OpenLink Software has seen the future, and in that future the RDBMS is no longer the dominant force. The Closed World attitude that fostered the rise of the RDBMS is losing sway as well.

OpenLink is pleased to treat early adopters, futurenauts, curious onlookers and assorted others to a sneak peak of the new data management landscape. Read this month's newsletters and get your Open World, Web-as-Database bearings straight.

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News & Announcements

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Data Access and Data Management Value Redefined

Straight from the horse's mouth -- OpenLink President & CEO Kingsley Idehen explains the decline of the RDBMS in the face of a more agile model. This model links data from diverse databases with heterogeneous schemas spanning the Enterprise, Web, and Internet as a whole -- all the while retaining conceptual and contextual lenses on that data.

Full story....

New Faceted Browsing Demo

Traditional full text pattern searches are falling away as rapidly as the RDBMS. Pattern searches offer astonishing numbers of hits, but their utility ends there. These search methods cannot present any of the context or conceptual nature of the data behind their results, because they work only with text literals. Servers conducting these searches "guesstimate" matches after milliseconds of processing -- and thus, a vast percentage of reported "hits" are generally not hits at all. They are irrelevant or non-existent.

Learn how "Faceted Browsing" facilitates meaningful data access and highly relevant hits through its interrogation of entity descriptions. Learn how use of interactively configurable search times control just how much data is searched so that those "million" hits represent real data.

Full story....

OpenLink Tech Tweets on Twitter

Get in the know and blow out your RSS feeds and Twitter clients with all tech-talk, all the time. Linked Data, Cloud Computing, RDF, Web 3.0, Semantic Search? Yeah.... Somebody at OpenLink is talking about it.

Follow OpenLink

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Developer Resources

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Our revised and expanded ADO.NET 3.5 tutorials now address use of the Virtuoso Virtual Database with several specific, 3rd-party DBMS engines:

Virtuoso ADO.NET 3.5 Data Provider.

Subscribe to our OAT, UDA, OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS), and Virtuoso- oriented Wiki-based knowledgebases:

Go....

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Tech Tricks & Tips - Post-RDBMS Edition

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If the RDBMS come-down is news to you, take time to familiarize yourself with these other new changes in the data management milieu.

Repeat After Me -- E-A-V

EAV is shorthand for Entity-Attribute-Value data model. The EAV model breaks data out of the limiting two dimensional table logic of the RDBMS, into collections of entities that have values attributed to them. Thus, many perceive EAV to provide true conceptual modeling of real world objects and information. Early implementations of the EAV models had their own shortcomings including lack of standardization (query language, API), wire protocol implementation, scalability, and so on. Neverthless, EAV had real staying power. Limitations were outweighed by this model's ability to handle data split across heterogeneous DBMS engines, database schemas, networks, and the like.

Learn about advances in the EAV model which essentially seal its fate as the dominant DBMS model for the foreseeable future.

Full story....

Move Over Driver Manager

It's time to get sponging with OpenLink's Virtuoso Universal Server! The Sponger is part of the middleware package that comprises OpenLink's flagship product. It functions much like the traditional Driver Manager in so far as it loads and unloads data extraction components -- called cartridges -- that pull data from various target data stores. This data is then mapped back to various ontologies or schemas and is ultimately exposed as RDF Linked Data. Unlike single-API driver managers and drivers, the Sponger and its cartridges can extract data from iCal calendars, REST URLs, (X)HTML pages, mpegs, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and other data formats.

Full story....

The World is Your Spreadsheet ...

Shelve that spreadsheet software, and use Faceted Browsing to turn the Web into your next pivot table. Not convinced? Let OpenLink's Faceted Browsing demo expose the familiar Northwind database database in a way no spreadsheet ever could. While traditional spreadsheet packages will undoubtedly retain some place in the foreseeable future, they will undoubtedly lose their primacy, as Faceted Browsing wrests the task of Data Pivoting out of the grips of limited, platform-specific applications.

Full story....

And the Web is Your Database

See how a combination of a Web Browser, HTTP, and Linked Data URIs can turn Wikipedia into a structured data source:

Full story....

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Administrivia

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OpenLink Software, Inc.
Making Technology Work for You

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