Information

This is the work part. Posts here relate to the craft of my career and profession.

Message from Mark Logic

1 Comment

Been a while since I posted anything. Life has been real busy, and continues to be busy. Aside from getting everything in order to head to EMC World for a week, I am working on the whole ECM/SOA world of ECM 2.0. Not really changing my view, but refining it so that I can get the point across more clearly and concisely.

Meanwhile, I found a follow-up posting by Dave Kellogg of Mark Logic commenting on my previous Mark Logic post and on the long name of EMC’s latest product, EMC Documentum XML Store OEM Edition. Now I don’t really want to enter into any debates, because

  1. I don’t have enough hands-on experience with either X-Hive or Mark Logic.
  2. As Dave points out, it turns into a “he said/she said” kind of argument.
  3. I don’t really care who wins. 🙂

I really just want people who read my blog to be aware of Dave’s latest entry. It is worth a read and is about as balanced and fair as what I hear from X-Hive people. He has three comments which I’ll very quickly address.

Continue reading →

See Pie at EMC World 2008

7 Comments

As if there was any doubt, I will be attending EMC World 2008 this year in Las Vegas (May 18-22). It is the best place to corner the product managers to see what is coming down the pike. The sessions are mostly useful, but the highlight is getting to talk to other users and the EMC staff. I strongly recommend attending if you have a Documentum installation.

Watch for the Word

I plan on blogging during/after every session that I attend. While I can’t share many of my offline conversations, some of what I hear is not for public dissemination, I will share everything from the presentations.

Continue reading →

Tips: Deleting a Lot of Rows from a Database

Recently, I had to remove a large number of rows, almost 10 million, from a very active database table in a LIVE system. Forget why for now as that is the subject of another post. The basic problem was how to remove 99.8% of the rows without impacting users or removing the few rows that we actually wanted to keep. To make matters worse, the field that was determined to have all the answers didn’t have an index.

Adding an index to the field in question would only solve part of the problem. It would take resources just to apply the key to a table that large, especially one that already had several indices. There are also locking issues and let us not forget the Transaction Log usage. We are talking Gigabytes of space for any new index and for temporary Transaction Log space.

Continue reading →

Mark Logic Wants to Play with X-Hive?

2 Comments

Dave Kellogg, the CEO at Mark Logic posted a response to my X-Hive and the Content Server post. His basic theme, is that Mark Logic is not the enemy of EMC. Maybe, maybe not. Personally, I don’t care as long as my clients are happy. I do want to comment briefly on it so as to clarify things as I understand them. Any EMC person that wants to add clarification, please do so for everyone’s benefit.

We have many common customers. They want the products to work together.

Is this Mark Logic with X-Hive or Documentum Content Server?

MarkLogic Server complements document management — we deliberately decided not to build a CMS precisely to avoid competing with ECM vendors. (Ironically, x-Hive built a competing CMS called Docato on top of x-Hive/DB.)

I’m not sure how this changes things. They complement the Documentum Content Server. So does X-Hive. The won’t compete with Content Server. It is the competition with X-Hive, the Documentum XML Store, that the competition centers upon.

Mark Logic is about doing one thing better than anyone in the world: high-performance XQuery on top of large XML document stores. I don’t believe that’s the mission statement for x-Hive/DB (now “EMC Documentum XML Store”) which I’d guess is more of “how can we get Oracle out from underneath all our implementations?”

MarkLogic is more than just a basic “store.” First, MarkLogic is a high-end product — it goes very fast and scales to contentbases in the hundreds of terabytes. Second, MarkLogic provides a new top-to-bottom XML way of building web applications.

When attending the X-Hive presentations, they claim to do what Mark Logic does, except better. This is usually where the impression of Mark Logic as the main competition, aka “the enemy”, crops up. I do want to point out that this comes from X-Hive acquired people, not from any of the acquirers.

I think the point that I have taken away is that X-Hive and Mark Logic compete, but Mark Logic can work with the Content Server. Personally, I’d be happy if I was Dave. They compete with X-Hive, but the EMC sales people may try and sell customers more that just the X-Hive product, making things easier for Mark’s people. Also, they have a fair shot of staying ahead of the performance curve as X-Hive is spending resources becoming part of the Documentum platform.

Enterprise Content Management 2.0, Still in Beta

5 Comments

The Big Men on Content, Lee to be precise, recently joined the ECM 2.0 discussion, stating that they are going to wait for EMC’s sp2 before they jump on-board. That could be a long wait. After all, we are still in Beta as far as I am concerned.

This was prompted by a reading OpenText’s Enterprise 2.0 Content Management strategy. Note the placement of the 2.0. We’ll be getting back to that.

Continue reading →

Web-Centric Content Management

2 Comments

For the past few months, I have been popping in on the Infovark blog. For those that aren’t aware, they are creating an application for the Enterprise 2.0 world. From reading their various posts you can get a fair idea of what they are creating, at least conceptually. I’m not going to go into that, as I may be off and you should check the site out if you are that interested.

What made me decide to comment was their conceptual approach to managing content. It is refreshing and clean. I’m not sure how it will work in the wild in many corporate environments. There are a lot of details that I don’t know yet, so I’ll be optimistic.

Continue reading →

ECM Design Patterns

4 Comments

Recently, the EMC Developer Network has started posting some “Design Patterns”. I use the term loosely to mirror their terminology. Each “pattern” is really just a quick description of the problem and two approaches to solve the problem. It is all very high level.

Before I get any further, kudos to them for actually taking the time to begin developing these “patterns”, starting last fall. There is a definite need, and their choices for the first two are ones that are encountered quite frequently, at least by myself. All I am doing here is offering some feedback, most of which I have already shared.

Continue reading →

Good Patching = Secure Software?

2 Comments

I’m way behind on posts, and just about everything else. So I’m just getting ready to talk about the post Bex threw out there about security. It was a simple enough post, asking people to participate in the IOUG Oracle Security Survey. Not using any Oracle product, except for databases that I don’t really control, I wasn’t going to participate. However, there was this neat tidbit:

With easy patching, easy maintainability, stable software, and a vigilant community, security is a natural by-product.

A commenter quickly mentioned how keeping up with patches can be expensive, if for no other reason than to test and verify each application during the patch process. In my more critical deployments, we roll software updates out in releases every 6 months or so, depending on a myriad of factors. To make the cutoff for testing, the patch needs to be released 2-3 months before a release so that it can be adequately tested.

Bex replies to the comment and explains how a good patch system reflects better discipline among the development team. My experience backs this observation up. Patching a system when the development team isn’t well disciplined can lead to nightmares.

Thus, in order to achieve the the goals of secure software, its more important for developers to understand the nuances of patch management, the dangers of code branching, and the law of unintended consequences.

A few hour-long seminars on security would prevent developers from making the really stupid mistakes… however, the nasty security problems are much more subtle… and frequently you don’t notice them until your system is live.

Continue reading →

Tower Falls to HP

1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago, the Big Men were speculating on potential buyers for OpenText. I opined that maybe HP would be looking to enter the market to compete with EMC. It was a brilliant piece of insight for all the wrong reasons. Right buyer, wrong target.

Turns out that HP has decided to buy their way into the market, but only with a single product, Tower Software. Like EMC, HP is looking to broaden their Information Management offering by adding Records Management and eDiscovery. If that is all they were looking to add, then buy Tower was a great move. I have always heard good things about their software for those purposes, though I always had doubts as to their complete ECM capability.

Continue reading →

SharePoint for Web Content Management, The Movie

1 Comment

A month ago I invited people to attend the Washington, DC Web Content Mavens meeting for March to hear a Microsoft partner explain how SharePoint could be used for Web Content Management. Well, that day was yesterday then you missed a great presentation.

Before I dive in, I want to thank Rob Garrett of Portal Solutions, LLC for answering my questions and being, or at least appearing, honest regarding the ability of SharePoint to provide Web Content Management. He shared areas that weren’t perfect and agreed with me on some of the limitation issues with SharePoint when dealing with large enterprises. If I had to deploy a public facing website with SharePoint, I’d bring him on board to help out.

Of course, I’d probably never use SharePoint for such a purpose.

The Architecture and Features

To use SharePoint for a website, you need the full featured Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and not the free SharePoint Services. In general you would setup a SharePoint Farm, consisting of one database server/cluster, multiple SharePoint/Web servers, and some sort of load balancer in the front.

Continue reading →