Do I need a database?

"Oh, obviously you need a database."

What?

What is a database, you ask? All you know is that it lives on the computer somewhere and keeps track of things. Why can't you just keep your paper and files? Or are you already using a computer? "Look, see - I have it all in a spreadsheet!".

The person who told you of your need for a database rolls his/her eyes and groans and says "THAT is not a database!"

Confusion reigns.

So, what is it?

Strictly speaking, ANY collection of data is a database. Your paper and files? That's a database. A bunch of index cards in a box? Database. That spreadsheet of yours. Also a database. Any one of many different software products with the word "database" in their name? Yeah, database. Really, a database is an organized body of related information. Period. The exact mechanics of it are where people get hung up.

Honestly, the person who recommended a database to you most likely meant that you would benefit from a "database management system" (DBMS) such as has been around for many years, specifically designed to manage your information. Even though your stack of paper is technically a database how long does it take you to find a very specific piece of data out of it, say, an invoice from a particular vendor? When the pile is small it is trivial. As the pile grows it becomes non-trivial.

You've moved from a small pile / number of cards / number of spreadsheets. What happens when someone else needs to get at the same information? Any more than a couple of people cannot effectively search through your pile. And when the information must be updated what do you do? Mark up the original? Attach sticky notes? Put the file on a shared drive and hope for the best? And if you want to know some kind of aggregate information like "how much money do I owe all people with outstanding invoices?" you now have a much larger task on your hands. That is where a DBMS really comes into its own.

A DBMS has been designed, from the beginning, to efficiently store your information, with methods to capture, store, analyze and create outputs based on the information stored within. They are at the core of much of the efficiency that is attributed to computer technology.

For anybody who is doing anything in their lives that requires capturing information, storing it for future use, sifting and analyzing it and creating output such as reports or simply answers to questions about the data the need for a computerized database is clear.

However, just like the question of "do I need a computer" (most often "yes") is followed by "what kind of computer do I need?" there are some questions you have to ask yourself before you start down the path of using a DBMS. As the blog title implies we will cover this in a techgnostic fashion in the next post.

For a sneak peek, the questions will be along the lines of:

• What kind of data am I storing?
• How much data am I storing?
• How many people need to get at it?
• What other requirements do I have?

That will be followed by another post wherein some of the more popular alternatives are considered, as well as some less popular choices. Come to think of it, this might become a series of posts. Stay tuned.

The rise of the Netbook

Making computers smaller was a goal from the very earliest incarnations of the technology. Down from the size of a room to the size of a few fridges. Down from that to a largish box that could sit on the top of a desk. Soon someone asked "How about one I can take with me?" Portable (in the sense that they COULD be moved, not necessarily EASY to move) computers themselves iterated through various forms. Of course someone said "What if it ran on batteries?" and computers became truly portable, freed from the tether of the electrical grid (or a generator). The same evolution has continued over the years with portables becoming smaller and more powerful with each cycle.

Until very recently these smaller and more powerful machines commanded premium prices. You could expect to pay much more than you'd pay for a desktop computer with similar power. The intent was that the portable computer should have the same power (or close to it) as a desktop. This meant all kinds of trade-offs had to be made and components had to be engineered to be even smaller. All this engineering did not come cheap and having a laptop computer was a badge of honor and the province of the technological (or just wealthy) elite.

Eventually a kind of tipping point was found, not unlike with cell phones. In the same way that the huge cell phones of the 1980's become smaller and smaller into the 1990's so that design decisions started to rotate around making the keys LARGE enough for human fingers to operate as the phones had become so small laptops started to change also. Two kinds of consumers were looking for portable machines, with two sets of criteria: as SMALL as possible (most often frequent travelers and/or gadget freaks) versus as POWERFUL as possible (the so called "desktop replacement" crowd). Each of these consumer types was provided with what they wanted, but in all cases you continued to pay dearly for the machines.

As time and Moore's Law marched on an intersection occurred. This was the intersection between relatively powerful laptops and the ubiquity of wireless internet. Again something that was once the province of the technical elite became very common, with wireless access available virtually anywhere for a very small fee, if at all. Instead of existing as an alternative to a desktop computer the laptop became basically a terminal to connect into the content of the internet. The need for the terminal hardware (i.e., the laptop) to be powerful was lessened. Beyond a certain amount of power was a waste. A simple machine could be used to read e-mail, surf the web, watch videos, etc. The hardware of a new type of laptop was ready. The other part necessary was the software.

Open source software, which languished for some years in obscurity from the public, leapt to the forefront of these new machines, dubbed "netbooks" as they are basically used to access networks and not much else. Rather than having to pay the "Microsoft tax" for every machine netbook manufacturers started to load open source operating systems like Linux onto their machines, erasing the extra payment. This dropped the price a little bit more, along with the smaller screen, small hard drive and lack of optical drive to produce a netbook for a few hundred dollars instead of almost a thousand dollars.

The effect on the market was slow to build but once it did it ran away, catching the large manufacturers unawares. Coinciding with some economic hard times netbooks flew off the shelves and accounted for most of the growth in the sales of portable computers. Now all the major manufacturers have their own netbooks out and Microsoft is scrambling to try and find a way to ensure that they are a presence in the market, albeit at a lower per unit cost as in the past.

For many people a netbook is all the computer that they need. They can use a web based provider of e-mail, store their pictures on a photo sharing site, use online applications for word processing and generally do what they need to do without very much regard to the computer that they do it on. If their inexpensive netbook bites the dust the only thing you might need to do is rediscover your bookmarks (although even those can be cached away by one of many online utilities).

There will always be a market for the more powerful and expensive laptops for people who need the power of local processing for tasks like video processing or engineering that burns up a lot of CPU cycles, in the same way that there will still be people who will spend thousands of dollars on desktop machines to do very specific tasks. In both cases, though, there are now inexpensive alternatives, often using open source software, that give people just what they need for a small amount of money.

Keeping in mind what you're trying to get done before you choose your technology is a techgnostic thing to do. Think it through the next time you advise somebody on what kind of computer to buy or examine your own needs the next time you put your money down.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Being green is seen as increasingly important for companies. Sometimes it's a stretch to find something to trumpet about but you can always find something like using recycled paper in your printers or such. If the new measure actually saves the company some money (not often), all the better.

One place that companies could definitely get more bang for their green buck is with computer hardware. The hardware itself caused a lot of pollution during its manufacture and when it winds up in a landfill it leaches a lot of nasty chemicals. If you can avoid having to buy new computer hardware you can feel better for being green as well as save some money.

Most often the things that will fail on a computer are the parts that move: the hard drive, any fans in the case and the power supply fan. Otherwise, in the absence of a power surge, the rest of the solid state electronics will keep going for years (at least five). It used to be that software always outpaced hardware and you always had to buy new hardware to keep up. Hardware is now ahead of software in most cases (unless you're talking about niche needs like high-demand video games or such). With some more RAM (inexpensive) and maybe some new parts that you interact with (monitor, keyboard and mouse) you will feel like you have a new computer.

If your needs are not directly tied to software available on Macintosh or Windows you can load one of the freely available Linux distributions and get your computing tasks done very handily, while also saving some money and making your computer more secure. If you are not comfortable with such a move you could just back up your data and do a clean re-install of your operating system and again feel the joy of a new space. If you are 100% uncomfortable with either of these suggestions you can go and buy yourself a new computer but keep in mind that the prices are much lower than they used to be and you don't need a lot of power for most things you're going to do.

As always, you need to think about what it is you're trying to do when you are considering a hardware purchase. Do you want what you're getting just because you're "due" for some new hardware, or do you have a specific need for it? Are you tied to a particular software platform? If not, when you get new hardware is an ideal time to take look at alternatives. The computer market is in flux right now and there are lots of new approaches being tried.

Obviously everyone's situation is different, but what I am advocating is not necessarily just going on to the next revision of what you've always done, instead taking a look at alternatives, including keeping your existing hardware and just refurbishing it a bit. You'll save some money and help the earth by being green.

The hard stuff is easy, the soft stuff is hard.

Technology, of whatever type, is a tool and that is all. Outside of enjoying a tool purely for its own sake (tool-o-phile?) there is no value to a tool except what you do with it. You don't buy a drill, you buy holes. A shovel might represent a crystallization of effort with a forged head and carefully turned handle, but it is just a shovel. Until someone picks it up and digs a hole with it there is nothing to see, move along.

"High" technology needs to be viewed the same way. It can become VERY complex and challenging to understand, but ultimately it is just a tool. A database without data in it is an empty shell. Even when full of data it means nothing until you DO something with it. Transform the pieces of data into information that you can use to make decisions. Again, the technology by itself is nothing. It takes people to use it to get value from it.

Technology is for most people the "hard" stuff. People skills like communication and collaboration are considered "soft" skills. Depending upon your personality type you might gravitate towards one or the other. In the end, though, the effectiveness of whatever your enterprise is will rest upon the behavior of the people using the technology. In most cases the hard stuff will come with a default setup that works in most cases, and if it doesn't you can find someone who can make it work for your situation. Really, in the grand scheme of things, that was the easy part.

The "soft stuff" is where the real challenge lies. Many technology people consider the soft stuff relatively worthless as it does not improve the speed of their hardware or software. It does not help directly with their up-time. It does not give them more disk space to store data. Very often they will gloss over the people-oriented items or leave them to others.

This is a mistake.

If you don't take into account who is going to be using your system you will fail. The end users of the system are most often not technologists. They are people who want to use a tool to get their job done. They want to get in the car, push the gas pedal and drive somewhere. They don't want to have to know any detail whatsoever about how the engine works, how the linkages between the control systems ensure that the vehicle goes in the correct direction, etc.

Gas, go, done, next.

You can build the most technically elegant system in the world but if you don't take into account the people who are going to use it you are dooming your efforts. This is true for systems that are internal to companies, or external to be sold to others. You can mandate usage internally (you WILL use the new system) but it will never be accepted and unless you have a monopoly you have no hope externally.

If you find yourself looking at a technology decision be sure to take into account the soft stuff. Who is going to use it? What are they going to do with it? What is the LEAST that you can do to make the system work? Systems do not exist for their own sake. They exist to serve people in some way. Keep that foremost in your mind and the decisions about what to do should be clearer.

Once more unto the breach

I guess a year is an unreasonable gap. Lots has gone on in my life. Many events that kept me from thinking about an online journal. Most significantly was the passing of my father, who influenced me very strongly. Few days pass by that I do not think of him and wish I could talk to him.

2008 was a year of transitions for me on many levels both personally and professionally. Now I think it's time to re-engage a few things I'd shelved during the chaos. One of those things is this blog. I will commit myself to a personal goal of posting to this blog once per week, come Hell or high water. I've already queued up a few weeks worth of topics (not yet written).

Going back and reading over the older posts I realize that my interest are more or less the same as they were, and I will be continuing in the same vein. That means more posts about the various manifestations of information and computer technology, their use in business process management and trying to make all the parts of the process dance together: people, technology and business.

And not only that, but also from the point of view that what's important at the end of the day are the results and not sticking to any one religion (e.g., Microsoft vs. Mac vs. Linux). Sometimes a post will be just because it's interesting.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.