http://urlzr.mp/75

Creative Commons doesn’t alter BSD, GPL, or LGPL in any way. Instead, they provide human-readable and machine-readable forms that make those licenses easier to work with.

So while I can see merit in your argument for the demise of Big SQL, I don’t see that as a decline of SQL. Rather, it means one can no longer base a corporation on selling boxed SQL products and consultants.

One can’t base a corporation on selling boxed web browsers, either. They haven’t gone anywhere, nor have they declined in quality. They’re still sold (with the operating system), and increasingly sold as free software, but are no longer a cash cow in themselves.

I have no particular confidence in that prediction, however.

One interesting note, though, is that Amazon’s service is in many ways that same “take control away from the IS guys” that the personal computer was back in the late ’70s and early ’80s: I’ve got a friend who works for the USGS who’s a huge Amazon user. One of his reasons is that it’s much easier to break out his personal credit card and seek reimbursement than it is to get their computing facilities to provision and deploy a server, and not even in the same universe as getting them to both give him a server and admin access to it. So Amazon it is.

Then eventually all those cool things like referential integrity and atomic operations got added to MySQL, and Google exposed the API to a database on their app server which was a simple key value store that used SQL. And SQLite did the same thing for local apps. And those tools grew up and now we’re seeing the cycle revisited.

I think the thing about all of these solutions, especially the ones which are implementing ad-hoc distribution systems, is that they’re great for places where approximate returns to a query are okay. Like some of the weirdness we see Facebook exhibit. But getting that right can be a competitive advantage. And there are applications for which “mostly correct” will never be a solution.

(partial disclosure: about a decade ago I wrote a bunch of code for the kernel of one such that’s been serving circa several million user authenticated fuzzy match queries a day since then. When we implemented it, it was to replace an Oracle database, and the million and a half queries a day that system was serving was *huge* by the standards of the time. I said then that I think we’d do better by putting those same engineering efforts into PostgreSQL. I still think so.)

So, yeah, there’s a big market opportunity here, Oracle’s going to see challenges, but much as all applications evolve until they contain a buggy re-implementation of a lisp interpreter (or, in Python and Ruby, a simple re-implementation of one), I predict that all databases will evolve until they contain a buggy re-implementation of a relational database with an SQL like query interface.

I think there’s a critical difference between the use cases for NoSQL and SQL databases, and it’s something that analyses of the two have missed back before Philip Greenspun’s oft-debated “MySQL is not a database” statements in the late ’90s: NoSQL is great for places where approximate results are acceptable.

However, much as all applications evolve until they have a re-implemented buggy lisp interpreter embedded in them, and until they can send email, people will continue to look askance at Facebook serving up the occasional really whacked out page, and someone else is going to use getting that right as a competitive advantage.

None of this contradicts your assertion that we’re going to see the end of “Big SQL”, but I think what it does mean is that most of the NoSQL developers will eventually be implementing all of the things that make a real SQL database what it is, transactions, enforced referential integrity, etc, and that

I also remember in a previous lifetime working on the kernel of a distributed multithreaded database that replaced Oracle in an application. It was being built to deal with a load that at the time was considered amazingly high, several million authenticated queries per day.

DanLyke is right that there will still be limits to portable bandwidth: Bandwidth will always be better in some fixed locations than in arbitrary or remote locations or when moving at speed. But more processing power means we’ll need less (and less reliable) bandwidth, and more storage means we’ll be able to cache more data more intelligently, syncing (merging?) with the cloud later.

A short-term example: Google Nav on Android is great, but even in metropolitan areas, its need for a continuous network connection is a severe limitation. My Garmin GPS, with its client-side database (only 2GB), still works way better. It seems obvious there are people at Google right now working to build predictive caching of map data and points of interest, using client-side storage (my Droid came with 16GB) and processing to hide the fragility of the connection to the cloud.

I know I already have various strategies for caching stuff on and off my portable devices, and I wish my iPhone were much much better at that (I’d love to be able to cache a couple of gigabytes of Google Earth data for areas I’m in or am likely to be in). I spend a moderate amount of time in places where data connections aren’t just slow (ie: San Francisco), but non-existent (large swaths of western Marin and Sonoma counties), and that’s even more true for places I pull out my camera or other data acquisition devices (admittedly, all of which have far far lower data use than the camera).

So I guess I’m not disputing your notion that nobody’s going to get rich selling client-side storage in ten years, but I think we’ll be demanding a couple of hundred gigabytes of client-side on those machines.

Which is part of why I think the iPad is a game changer, but that’s a different discussion.

As noted in the other thread, though, I think glasses displays which provide an overlaid or floating image are very useful and will happen before too long. If we can text and browse and pull up metadata and augment reality without the implicit “my attention is split” that pulling out the smart phone communicates, I’ll be first in line.

I remember it being not quite cool enough for a geek to really lust after, but the effect was a monochrome moderately low res floating image that was good for text.

I started with a “If they cost $5 each, and half of them are in my home, then…”, and then thought “well, what are the other half for?”, and I realized that depending on where you draw the line we may already be way closer to that than we thought. Some of those may already cost $.50 each.

For instance, I was working on a device where my customer wanted to make sure that only their consumables could be used in it. Because of physical constraints we couldn’t get a set of wires to the consumable, but we could put an antenna in the host device and a wireless tag with a cryptographic processor and a little non-volatile storage on the consumable, and arrange to read the consumable’s case that way. For that customer, there’d probably have been a hundred or three of those consumables per customer over the life of the product. Didn’t end up getting to market, but that’s the sort of thing where you can start to rack up wireless devices per consumer *really* fast. And the whole thing, chip plus antenna, fits in a package the size of a dime, we were just going to embed that in plastic during the manufacture.

One technology from that era that I’d love to see again: Someone had a “clamp on your eyeglasses” display that lobbed a boom out in front that had a monochrome display that could be driven by the monochrome card in a PC (this was back when 2 displays meant one of those and a CGA card, and even though the world had gone CGA we all had both because you could run the debugger on one and show your app on the other). It was visible in one eye, and basically gave the wearer a display floating in space.

It’d be cool to have a version of that built using modern miniaturization. Couple that with a small ARM machine tied to the net with an unobtrusive interface and I can think of a couple of cool applications.

Yes, such devices assume a breakthrough in power. Perhaps they’ll be powered by natural biological processes? Blinking? Blood pressure? Our very metabolism, in the form of the differential between skin temperature and ambient?

After all, it’s likely that the power requirements of these small devices will continue to go down, so power sources that seem impractical now might be practical in ten years.

Now, if the hub you propose no longer must include a large display and speakers audible when held in the hand, it can be a blind device that only provides processing and communications to the wearable devices. Will we still carry that blind brick in a pocket? Would it be more comfortable to wear as a necklace or a wristband? Not sewn into clothes, surely, because it’s inconvenient to move it from one outfit to another, and expensive to sew into every piece of clothing. Shoes, maybe, since walking is a convenient source of power.

However the blind brick is carried, it’ll become a fashion accessory like a watch or eyeglasses. (I’m fond of my own fan-fic back-story for the earrings worn by Star Trek’s Bajorans: Not just familial markers, but vestiges of wearable devices from Bajor’s more technologically advanced past.)

And I believe even that blind hub will not often be carried in the pocket: Our homes, offices, vehicles, and public spaces all will act as hubs. The individual’s electronic personality, which today takes the form of a device we carry in a pocket or in a hand, will instead be in the cloud, accessible whenever our surroundings offer some local processing and a connection to the network.

Only rarely will we actually need to carry around a brick containing a battery, processor, and radio. Perhaps while biking or walking, if the nearby houses and buildings don’t provide any shared services.

The good: No more need to remember to put a brick in your pocket before going out.

The bad: A whole new trust infrastructure is needed in order to use shared computing for tasks we prefer to keep private. Our personal data and programs will be on a cloud server we carefully choose and trust. But we’ll need to run those personal programs and manipulate that personal data on shared, local processors provided by our employers, government, local businesses, even private vehicles passing by. I don’t think we yet have protocols that enable an untrusted local processor to provably do what we tell it to do and nothing more.

There’s a current-day parallel to this trust problem: Brad Templeton wants hotels to provide USB charging stations and keyboards, but any such device can easily infect your laptop as soon as you plug it in:

http://ideas.4brad.com/powered-usb-hub-my-hotel-room-and-more

So, all we need is bio-powered wearable UI devices and trusted computing that may be mathematically impossible, and we’re there!

Probably already on your list, but I figured I’d toss it out there.

A good portion of the stuff on my wall is printed from large format photography, or oil paintings. Even of the snapshots printed off 35mm, though, photo frames have a long way to go to match that image quality (72 or 96DPI doesn’t come close to an image that’ll still have interesting detail when viewed with a loupe, though once they hit 300 DPI or so I’ll probably get one), and then have the problem of needing cords, constant power, and lighting up the room when we go to bed (we’ve got a Chumby that does a slideshow while it’s serving as our music source, in the living room).

On the other hand, we’re also the sort of people who don’t watch much TV and for whom hiding the TV and big displays is worth some effort.

I wonder if the 3d thing is a fad, or whether after we get sick of wearing goggles, the lenticular displays will hit the market and become affordable. I’d guess the latter. I don’t know what 3d, at least from some views, will mean for video.

Finally, we’re actually, I think, going the other way: We have a TV, though on my list is to build a set of doors to hide it, and my office has a few fixed displays, which are usually turned off, but we mostly interact with laptops. However, temper that with the fact that we’re consistently shocked when we go to other people’s houses and see that they have the TV on as background noise.

And yes, I will get to mobile devices some time down the road … one of my points will be interaction between a mobile device and the world around it, which is why I’m talking about “fewer PCs” and “more displays” first, which are part of the world around it …

I don’t doubt that we’ll have lots more digital displays on the walls of our homes, offices, cars, wherever. And they’ll do smarter stuff than just rotate through canned photos. And they’ll change their behavior based on context, like time of day, who is walking by, and whether there’s a tornado warning in effect.

But the examples you chose are too specific, I think. Most specific tasks will still be done in the hand.

Now, let’s talk about what that mobile device will look like! I sure don’t think it’ll cost $500 to manufacture or be tied to an individual or a “carrier” (ptui!). Rather, the devices will be cheap and plentiful. We’ll leave them lying around in whatever state they were in when we were distracted. When we remember the task we left, we’ll pick up another nearly identical device, speak a few words, and the whole context of our task will jump right over to the “new” device so we can carry on!

There will still be mobile devices optimized to particular tasks (e-paper for e-books, hi-rez color for entertainment), but if the optimized device isn’t handy, we’ll just use a less ideal device to carry on until it is.

James Fallows recently wrote a bit about the question of all-in-one vs. optimized devices:

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/11/all-in-one_finale.php

The iPhone is a great reminder that the N^2 issue with point-to-point networks isn’t yet solved, and that there’ll need to be a substantial amount (although by modern standards that might be spelled “piddling”) of local (to that device) compute and cache.

I agree with Adrian that we’re largely going to have a device that’s a lot like the iPhone that docks/pairs with a bigger display (already monitors and televisions in the 24-30″ diagonal range seem to have roughly reached parity) and can talk to a keyboard (I’m not so optimistic as to think that voice recognition will be in place, or that our work places will tolerate everyone talking to their computers), but in which we carry around much of our identity. There might also be interop with something that looks like a netbook.

I agree that cables will be gone shortly. The phone wire comes out of my wall, and all of my cabling is within 4′ of that jack. Two of the computers, the printer, the iPhones, the Chumby (for music), are all connected to the resulting network via 802.11, and more devices (headsets, cameras) are connecting to those via Bluetooth. And I’m pretty sure that much of the house control system as that goes together will be ZigBee, or at least on hardware and frequencies that ZigBee runs on (the protocol stack may be superfluous).