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.

Often times, I don't get to get my hands dirty at work. Not being one to let myself atrophy, I keep my eyes out for new and exciting things to catch my fancy, and spend hours and hours writing new code: usually reinventing the wheel, often times poking and prodding, just trying to figure out what I'm going to do with what I find.

One of the projects that caught my eye a bit over a year ago was CouchDB, a RESTful document storage engine, that happens to have Map/Reduce support. Being the database freak that I am, I started thinking about all of the projects I've worked on in the past that could have been improved with a document model over pseudo-relational databases. So many came to mind, and I was excited about the flexibility of CouchDB; so useful for so many things, especially with strong data analysis abilities via map and reduce.

Starting a new job is always difficult. Coming up to speed on essential projects, finding your niche, even remembering everyone’s names. Then there's the added challenge of starting a job at a partner of Google. Backing up a bit, my new job was approached by Google as both a data provider, and a partner in their new Social App section of iGoogle.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Unfortunately, it's also worth 1000 bytes or more. In my quest to build the ultimate game of solitaire, I needed cards, 52 of them to be exact. That's a lot of bandwidth for something as simple as cards. I decided to try to fix this problem by making my cards using XHTML and CSS.