Documentum

EMC World 2008: Getting Started

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As I sit here, waiting for my first session of EMC World, and debate what that might be, I wanted to share some thoughts. Before I do that, some advice: Never take a 6am flight from the East Coast to the West Coast unless you are planning on being well rested before you start. That translates into 3am in the West before you take any activities around getting to the flight on time.

  • The opening reception was a little disappointing. It was organized around the concept of communities, letting people know what was going on and allowing people to connect. Great concept, just now perfectly executed. While the snacks and drinks were fine, unless you don’t like pretzels and popcorn, there were no chairs and everything was a little tightly packed. I would have liked to see about twice the space with chairs for people to sit in and socialize. After a couple hours, my feet were hurting.
  • I must say that the opening night party is better under EMC than when Documentum did this on their own. The difference is obviously more registration fees and a larger company, but I do like concept of having a band opening.

Play the Cloud

The Developer Network has started a game, Play the Cloud, for people to build a little social network. You start by defining who you are in terms of tags and then linking to people. There are a few prizes. It will be interesting to see how it develops. If people just go after quantity and not quality, then it is just a game. If people take time to try and meet the people that their tag clouds link them to, then there may be some lasting benefit.

If you are at EMC World, signup and play. My free-form tags are:

  1. Favorite non-EMC Tech: Electricity
  2. Favorite School: Auburn
  3. Favorite Activity: Baseball
  4. Favorite Food: Beer

EMC World 2008: Rules of the Road

Okay, things haven’t started yet, but I wanted to take a minute to put some basic rules that I’ll be following regarding my blog while I’m out there. I just want to level-set the expectations before I start.

All posts that follow these rules will start EMC World 2008:. This is to clearly identify them for everyone. If I write a post during the conference that doesn’t adhere to what I am laying-out here, it won’t have that prefix.

Disclaimers

I’m going to be running a basic disclaimer in all my posts. This is because I will be writing the posts during/after sessions and I will hear things that I may misconstrue or that talk about future events.

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of EMC products and strategy are subject to change due to a large variety of factors.

As indicated, if I learn later that something I posted was incorrect, I will endeavor to correct it, but it may not be immediate.

Topics of Conversation

As a general rule, if I, or the person I am talking to at the time, has a beverage in their hand, I’m not blogging it. If it is blatantly clear that the information is public, I will share it in a constructed post during, or shortly after, EMC World.

The issue here is that I am a longtime partner of EMC/Documentum. As such, I am sometimes privy to information that is not made available to the general public. This information is used to serve my clients better.

If I started sharing this information, then I would no longer be able to learn any of it in the future. That information is by far more important any benefit that I may gain by posting it here.

There are several EMC personnel that have shared information with me since I started this blog. I have, to date, kept all confidences and will continue to do so in the future.

Message from Mark Logic

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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.

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See Pie at EMC World 2008

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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.

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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.

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Mark Logic Wants to Play with X-Hive?

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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

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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.

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ECM Design Patterns

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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.

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The Endless Security Cycle

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I have been thinking about how to write this post for a while now. I have several approaches to choose from, but then I hit on the key concept. It doesn’t matter. Here is the general pattern of James’ approach to this topic.

  • James will criticize ECM security as a whole and then point to one or more issues.
  • I then attempt to explain why those key “issues” aren’t issues.
  • James will then elaborate or comment on my post in one or more follow-ups, usually explaining something that I didn’t put in my post for one or more reasons. In the case in point, I didn’t take it deep enough. While doing this, he ignores any defenses I may have made of the “issues”. He invariably bringing up other “issues” as well.

Rather than continue the cycle, and eat my time up, I’m going to post one more time on this topic and move on for now. Some disclaimers of my own:

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Build that Taxonomy…Why? Because I Said So

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So there were a couple of good posts the other day by Johnny and the BMOC. The best thing is that they were about the same thing, yet not. Johnny wrote about how it was important to create a taxonomy, however superficial, and not put everything into one folder. BMOC looked at the same situation and talked about how it is important as consultants to guide clients away from the dark path onto the bright, safe path.

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