Introduction to LightSwitch

LightSwicth is a new development tool by Microsoft, targeting power-users and non-professional developers, willing to write data-oriented business applications.
LightSwitch can bee seen as a kind of "VB / Access for the Cloud".
The tool is quite complete and easy to use by default but it also provides a lot of customization features.
Here is a good introduction video:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/DEV211
and another one showing extension capabilities:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/DEV354

The LightSwitch pages:
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lightswitch/default (downloads, examples, trainings...)

It is currently in Beta2 stage, but it is stable enough to be seriously evaluated.

NoSQL and Windows Azure

An excellent paper by Andrew Burst about NoSQL databases and SQL Azure:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlazure/archive/2011/05/04/10160671.aspx

Trinity: HyperGraph database

MS research is working on an HyperGraph database.
Here is the link: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/trinity/.


Trinity is a graph database and computation platform over distributed memory cloud. As a database, it provides features such as highly concurrent query processing, transaction, consistency control. As a computation platform, it provides synchronous and asynchronous batch-mode computations on large scale graphs. Trinity can be deployed on one machine or hundreds of machines.


My guess is that Semantic Networks will become more and more important in the future. We will go from a Web of Data to a Web of Information, and the semantic aspect is key here.
Needless to say, RDBMS are not well suited for graph management.
Object databases could be more relevant, but there is no doubt that specialized databases like Trinity could bring something.

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!