Legitimate Sounding

When needing two or more fairly disparate systems to work together seamlessly, having complete flexibility at the database level can be a blessing.

Take for instance the problem of a ten year old legacy system hosting millions of accounts, and an up to date content management system that needs complete access to that data as if it were its own. You can manage multiple systems with complicated triggers, methods for moving data around, expensive joins, funky stored procedures, hacks to the code, or you can simply use a writable view.

SQL is everywhere. Believe it or not there are legacy relational "schema-with" databases filled with data all over the internet. Chances are even your own office has at least one SQL database lurking in a closet somewhere.

So, how do you leverage your existing "schema-with" databases and still be able to use the power of Map/Reduce? Introducing MR SQL: A Map/Reduce Front-End to SQL.

My first few run-ins with JavaScript left me wanting. JavaScript was in its infancy, the platform was fairly immature, and I had my sites set on the server side.

Fast-forward a decade, and I found myself taking a job writing software for big-box retail product finders: the platform was Mozilla XUL, running on embedded Linux systems, the development environment a mix of JavaScript and C++ sprinkled liberally with JSUnit.