Morphia = MongoDB + POJOs

Interesting reading on IBM DeveloperWorks:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-morphia/index.html

Nice to see more and more people now understand the value of directly using business models as the View part of MVC-oriented data access / manipulation patterns.

Please note MongoDB also has a .NET interface with support for C# and F#.
Would be nice to have an EF provider for it.

JEST: JPA + REST

Interesting article from Pinaki Poddar on IBM DeveloperWorks:

JEST: REST on OpenJPA

It is clearly going in the right direction!

A little bit like SDO, but based on REST instead of SOAP.
"Occasionally-connected" data access and manipulation pattern is exactly what the Xcalia technology was already doing, a few years ago, before being discontinued by PROGRESS Software.

It is nice to see the market maturing towards our original vision.

2011, the year of data virtualization

First of all, let me wish you all the best for 2011, from both personal and professional perspectives.

Who knows what this new year will bring us in terms of technology in general, and in data services / data virtualization as well.

I have just received a webinar invitation from Denodo: they strongly believe 2011 will be the year of data virtualization. For sure, the concept in gaining momentum, but it is too slowly in my humble opinion. It seems they are doing well with analysts, so let's track them.

http://www.denodo.com/en/resources/webcasts/data_virtualization_2011/mailing.html

Once again, Happy new Year!

DataNucleus 2.2.0 release

http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=61486

Congrats to the team!

SFDC Database.com versus Windows SQL Azure

http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/preliminary-comparison-of-databasecom.html

Que le meilleur gagne ! (and it is SQL Azure :-)

Data is the Next Major Layer of the Cloud

http://www.cloudave.com/8607/data-is-the-next-major-layer-of-the-cloud-a-major-victory-for-startups/

I cannot agree more.
But Amazon is not alone, Microsoft Azure and SQL Azure also provides an efficient and well-integrated solution.

Please also note the brand new initiative from SalesForce.com with database.com

Clearly, data is the sweet spot of the Cloud.

Nasdaq Data as a Service

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2010/11/08/nasdaq-continues-the-data-as-a-service-trend/

We'll see more and more business data sources exposed as data services.
This is more or less what Microsoft Azure DataMarket tends to generalize.
Today it is mostly limited to read-only kind of access, but I'm confident data manipulation services will follow soon.

Now, the 2 big questions:

1. How to widely enable all these data services, 
2. and how to easily combine these external data services with other heterogeneous data models?

This is exactly where Data Services Platforms have a great role to play.