Data Access discussed at Xcalia

First article about query optimizers: http://www.databasecolumn.com/2008/06/designing-systems-for-the-grid.html. I hope the following articles will give us much more information! That optimization problem is really interesting. We know it is a NP-complete king of problem. And it is even more interesting when dealing with multiple data sources. That’s one of the challenges of a modern Data Services Platform.

Seen on the ADO.Net blog this series of articles about the tooling for EDM. I especially like the fact the tools are available as wizards within Visual Studio but also as command-line scripts and APIs. That’s pretty cool, convenient and complete.

In the renewal of the ODBMS market it seems embedded applications is one of the best niches. McObject announces a Perst version 3.0, with support for both Java and .Net (with the LINQ query language).

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/persist-v3

In this paper, IBM introduces the challenge of testing applications manipulating data. The problem is even more complex when multiple heterogeneous data sources are involved. Optim is the IBM solution for data testing.

NB: You must first register before downloading this 20 pages white paper.

Interesting blog from Avi Bryant about Gemstone, Smalltalk and Ruby (Project MagLev).

For sure, dynamic languages are the best solution for persistence. It seems Smalltalk still rocks. Interesting to see that Ruby-Smalltalk coexistence in the same JVM. I really would like to see something like that on Groovy.

See also the related InfoQ article, with links to DabbleDB (yet another online database on the Web) and Seaside project (Web application framework in Smalltalk).

Interview of Avi Bryant about Maglev.

Video from the conf at QCon 2008 London.

Inteview of Bob Walker about Maglev.

Movie of a Dabble DB demo. (with some nice features like input and filters using some smart date filters, and dynamic schema evolution).

Even Bill Gates himself now mentions Data Access and Mapping technologies in his keynote session at TechEd 2008. Actually at around 59:38 David Campbell starts to speak about the Entity Framework and the Entity Data Model.

I think that’s a significant achievement for all of us working on data access, mapping, persistence, etc. since so many year. SQL Server Data Services is also mentioned, just before.