I recently joined a software development project that involves not only myself and other internal Microsoft employees, but a partner and a customer as well. We are building a hybrid solution that uses assets on premises as well as Windows Azure for processing. When we put the team together we ...
NoSQL (sometimes expanded to "not only SQL") is a broad class of database management systems that differ from the classic model of the relational database management system (RDBMS) in some significant ways. These data stores may not require fixed table schemas, usually avoid join operations, and typically scale horizontally.
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Bug-Out Bags and Cloud Architecture Considerations
I served in the U.S. Military for a while, and as part of my training we had to maintain a “Bug-Out Bag”, which was a large duffle-bag full of certain items that we could live on/fight with in an emergency. I’ve carried the spirit of that idea ...
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Cloud Computing In Action: How I work with Live Mesh, SkyDrive, and Office Live Workspace
Recently I had an tweetversation with a couple of friends on some confusion around two of our products: SkyDrive and Live Mesh. Like most of our software, there’s no single way to do things. That can be a strength or it can cause that confusion. They asked if I ...
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Oracle Connects Big Data to Medium and Small Data
With the announcement of the Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle also comes up with some really cool technology stack which is being termed as Oracle Big Data Connectors (OBDC). This piece of software can be used with both Oracle Big Data Appliance and other Apache Hadoop-based systems.Among other things ...
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Stand-Up Cloud Computing
When I was very young, I asked my uncle for career advice. He went silent, thinking for a bit, and then said: “People who work sitting down make more than people who work standing up.” I’m not certain how true that really is, but my career as a technology ...
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Getting started with Apache Pig
If, like me, you want to play around with data in a Hadoop cluster without having to write hundreds or thousands of lines of Java MapReduce code, you most likely will use either Hive (using the Hive Query Language HQL) or Pig. Hive is a SQL-like language which compiles to ...
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Valentine’s Day and Your Career
The new year has begun. It’s traditional to make “Resolutions” at this time, but as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t do that. I make goals instead. I like things to be measurable, and I hold myself accountable to those goals - some of which deal with my professional ...
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Book Review (Book 7) - Think Stats
This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for year. You can read my first book review here. The book I chose for December 2011 was: Think Stats, by Allen B. Downey. Why I chose this Book: I ...
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Windows Azure Storage (WAS) Internals - Achieving Consistency
Windows Azure Storage has three primary components - a Queue, a Binary Large Object (BLOB) store (two types of these), and Table Storage. Storage of data on-premises is fairly well understood - but there components of it that you may not consider. When you move to a distributed architecture, certain ...
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How Microsoft helps you NOT break your Windows Azure Application: Storage Services Versioning
One of the advantages of using Windows Azure to run your code is that you don’t have to constantly manage upgrades on your platform. While that’s a big advantage indeed, it immediately brings up the question - how do the upgrades happen? Microsoft upgrades the Azure platform in periodic ...