In Nick Halstead’s (Tweetmeme) session NoSQL – The Death of the Relational Database at #FOWA – the message was it’s not about saying SQL should never be used but more about when you should use it along with something else – so ‘not only SQL’ is more appropriate. The ‘something else’ includes open source database systems like Cassandra.

Microsoft’s Andrew Fryer acknowledges developers don’t always see the need for a relational database, and the expense of coding to use one is a frustration even if the database engine itself is free, but doesn’t think we can chuck SQL in the bin just yet either. Read his post to find out why…

‘Deep Zoom’, by Andrew Fryer

Andrew Fryer (aka Deep Fat) is an IT Pro Evangelist on the DPE team (Developer & Platform Evangelism). Andrew ‘covers the wider issues facing IT professionals in the UK, such as cloud computing,  infrastructure optimisation against uncertainties about the economy and the environment’.

Stuffing your data under the mattress…?

You would think in this cloud era that keeping your own data and running applications on a PC  is the high tech equivalent of stuffing your money under a mattress rather than trusting a bank with it.  But in this country, despite the previous conservative governments effort to boost wider share ownership, many of us see property ownership as more secure and over time this has consistently out performed shares.  The only way this would change is if there was some significant change to taxation, as a growing population’s demand for housing will always be at a premium.

Getting back to PC’s. If I could rely on cheap and ‘always on’ communications, would I need to store any local data or cache any applications? Possibly, but if I did, I would use more than one provider/ location much in the same way as I wouldn’t invest in just one bank in case it went to the wall. 

So why do I have a PC of my own? Ownership and control.

I can use my PC to control where I put my stuff:

• Stream it to from my TV/ games console
• Dump my music to MP3 players whichever one I choose
• Move stove to interim storage like USB drives and SD cards
• Transfer my legacy analogue assets to the digital world using record players and scanners for my negatives
• Upload and backup to the various digital vault sites like SkyDrive
• Share content on any Social Media sites e.g. Flickr/ Facebook /Slideshare as they come along
• Get in to eBooks when those devices match my success criteria for a good eBook reader
• Store secure credentials for online banking etc.

If some gadget comes out that can do all of this stuff and connect to all the stuff I have now (or will have), then I might reconsider. However we don’t even have the communications yet and certainly not where I live (~1Mbs). Moreover, I have to pay excessive charges in hotels and airports for the most basic of connectivity while I am out and about.

I realise this has probably got nothing to do with Ray Ozzie’s article in the LA Times, but I think he may well have a point, the PC has an even bigger role to play in a cloudy world than in an unconnected one.