Sunday, September 8, 2013

Not Only SQL

NO SQL is basically a highly scalable disruptive data storage technology. The basic downsides included proprietary APIs (no standard SQL), evolving capabilities, loads of vendors, lack of skills.

Here’s some information from the net…

FoundationDB – has the added advantage of providing data consistency.
 
MapR - SQL capabilities over large-scale distributed systems including Hadoop and NoSQL databases
 
GridGain - brings in-memory capabilities to MongoDB. Achieves elastic scale and automatic transparent re-sharding
 
Scientel - Gensonix® stores structured/unstructured data in Relational, Hierarchical, Network, and Column formats, and scales to trillions of real-time transactions.
 
Accumulo - enable online model building and dynamic indexing to support both retrospective analysis and enrichment of streaming data.
 
Microsoft - Windows Azure Tables offer the best of both scalability and ACID guarantees.
 
RavenDB - a schema-less document database that offers fully ACID transactions, fast and flexible search, replication, sharding, and a simple RESTful API
 
eXist-db - High-performance native XML database engine and all-in-one solution for application building.
 
Cloudant - providing strong-consistency for single-document operations.
 
Aerospike - optimized for SSDs through a highly parallelized, distributed architecture.
 
StarCounter - an in-memory database that processes millions of database transactions per second on a single machine.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Role of Senior Architects

A key strategy is delegation. This works well if you are comfortable with it.

I espouse a personal philosophy that says if a decision can reasonably be made by someone with a more narrow scope of responsibility, defer the decision to that person or group.

Trust, but verify. Review. Review. Review. Ask open ended questions and have an open channel of communicating early ‘red flags’.

And then hold the group accountable to see through the results of the decision into a tangible deliverable.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

10. ATAM Phase 3 and Conclusion

 

Purpose: Follow up. This phase is conducted after the conclusion of the ATAM evaluation.

Phase 3 Step 1: Produce the Final Report

Purpose: To write the final report.

Evaluators will write the final report that summarizes the entire ATAM evaluation.

Phase 3 Step 2: Hold the Post Mortem Meeting

Team members fill out

  • Evaluation team post-exercise survey
  • Method improvement survey
  • Evaluation team post-exercise effort survey

Team leader arranges and facilitates meeting and

  • Collects process observer’s report
  • Collects effort data

 

Phase 3 Step 3: Build Portfolio and Update Artifact Repository

Six months after the evaluation the team leader arranges for the customer to complete the long-term benefit survey.

Conclusion

ATAM is a stakeholder-oriented cross-functional team facilitated architectural review process that results in Risk Themes. Founded on Quality Attributes, Tradeoffs, Sensitivity Points and Risks this process is a proven repeatable method of evaluating software architectures. This process and it’s templates should be customized.