As I tweeted last July, I always learn so much about both the past and future of database computing from recent Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker. I recently learned that the latest edition of Readings in Database Systems, also known as the “Red Book,” is available for free online under a Creative Commons license—or at least the introductions to the readings are. With most of these being by Stonebraker, and quite up-to-date, I consider these 43 pages required reading for anyone…

YouTube video: “Charlie Rose” by Samuel Beckett. Microsoft and Yahoo. Google…

Soon we’ll do most of our computing on our phones (see AP article PCs Losing Their Relevance in Japan, as noted on O’Reilly Radar).

I’ve written before about W.C. McGee’s 1981 article in IBM’s Journal of Research and Development covering the history of database systems from 1955 to 1980, and I left off saying that I’d devote a separate entry to his history of report generation. The creation of reports may sound mundane, but throughout the history of computers the pulling of data meeting specific criteria is the most important thing we do with computers. (Why put data in or calculate new data in the…

The original Web 2.0 conference was held in October of 2004, and now that we’ve reached the second half of the decade, Web 2.0 already seems so… turn-of-the-century. A group of bold visionaries is already creating a whole new Web 2.0 that I like to call Web 2.0 2.0.