Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Release

The 11g Middleware release has been released. Webcast of launch is here.

Principles of Transaction Processing, Second Edition

I wanted to put out a brief note that the new version of Principles of Transaction Processing is hot off the presses. Simply put, this book is the standard reference for getting your brain around the transaction processing components of the IT landscape. It was the book I absorbed when I first started working on implementing transaction managers and one I turned to get up the speed on existing systems. I had a chance to review part of the book prior to publication, so I was lucky enough to get a free copy - Eric and Phil did a great job bringing the text up to date: it remains one of the handful of books that should be on the shelf of anyone involved in information systems implementation or management.

Russia and Web 2.0

Zdrasvoyteye.

When I was in Moscow last, a lot of the talk was centered around attracting foreign capital to tech investments in Russia. The pitch is - or should be - familiar: lower costs, big market, super-bright engineers and scientists. The downside is lack of transparency and a very unique business environment that is difficult (or impossible) to navigate as an outsider. Today's announcement that Facebook has taken $200 million at first looks like a kind of a reversal in this trend: tech oriented Russians still have capital to deploy and may be choosing to spend it on bargain opportunities in the US market, which remains preeminent in technology development.

A closer look, though, suggests this is a part of a trend that has been gaining steam. Russians have been developing and investing in Web technology for a long while. Yes, Google was co-founded by a Russian, but there has been a number of interesting developments based in Russia itself. The Russian firm Yandex is often described as the "Russian Google" and has picked up small Russian social networking companies like Moi Krug on the cheap (someday there long awaited IPO will happen). SUP, run by American-in-Moscow Andrew Paulson, picked up LiveJournal to support their Russian users, and now Yuri Milner's fund takes a position in Facebook. Milner is the founder of mail.ru, a former physicist, and Wharton alumn.

Watch carefully: the Russians are coming to Silicon Valley and it's been a largely under-noted trend. I've met some of these folks and they are very capable businessmen.

Events for SCA

InfoQ has a short synopsis of the event proposal that was released to add pub-sub style semantics to the SCA assembly model. The genesis of this lies in some ESB related work I had helped lead at Oracle back in the days when we first started to develop the SCA specifications - it took a long time to socialize this to the working group, but I'm very happy to see that that work has borne fruit. This fills an important gap in the specifications - previously, the wire driven semantics forced components to "externalize" pub-sub interactions in a way that was divorced from the SCA semantics - and is broadly applicable to many problem domains including Complex Event Processing, Queue/Pub-Sub style integration, and ESB scenarios.

I remain somewhat distressed over the way the channel abstraction has played out - the original idea divorced much of this from the assembly view and made it an aspect of system configuration. I think the current approach artificially mixes orthogonal aspects of the problem space. Having said that, this is a milestone for the specification and completes the basic assembly model nicely.

By the way, nice write up Boris!

Value at Risk

I'm not going to editorialize on this one: here's a layperson accessible view of the risk models that worked so remarkably poorly in the last several years.

Darwin Dissected

Though it may be impossible to miss, this year commemorates the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, who has justly been called the father of modern biology for this development of the theory of the evolutionary development of species. At times contentious, the fact of evolution has been long established beyond any kind of reasonable doubt - all schools of scientific knowledge are convergent in this regard. But to understand the true importance of evolution for biology as a whole, one of my favorite essays is by Theodosius Dobzhansky: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

In any case, I happen to find myself reading a facsimile of the original edition of On the Origin of Species - which I have had for many years but never read end to end. Coincidentally, the New York Times has a posted a great selection of passages by Darwin: read and enjoy.

When Finance Goes Mad

Having come uncomfortably close to working in the packaging of structured financial investments, I've been morbidly fascinated by the way in which it has led to the near-destruction of the national - if not global - economy. Here is a great article on how badly awry things went with the ratings on these instruments, and a bit of what that means for stabilizing things.