Sunday, June 5, 2011

Wet Umbrella Wrapper


On one of the rainy days in New York, I saw a beautiful new product at the entrance of a company - it is a "Wet Umbrella Wrapper":

from Hibernate to Normalized or OLAP database structure

In the IT world, for a long time, data was organized in a normalized form - for easier access and update operations. Later, for Business intelligence projects, the data was de-normalized (for OLAP) for faster reading and data mining purposes.

Java Programmers had to rely on the experience of database experts for database designing.

However, Hibernate software changed this scenario as data could be stored and self-managed by a middle tier between the Java-engine tier and database tier.
Hibernate organizes data in an object-oriented-structure. With Hibernate, a java programmer does not need to take the help of database experts for designing data in the database.

This type of Object-Oriented-structured data is difficult for traditional database designers to understand, as the data is neither normalized nor de-normalized.

It has created a need for a a tool which can convert Hibernate based data to either normalized or de-normalized data to be used with traditional business intelligence tools.

Alternatively, new business intelligence tools are needed which can understand this Object-Oriented-structure data.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Fresh Juice Vending Machines

The weather in NY Metro area last week was hot - above 90 F on many days.

While traveling around the metro area by public transportation - there is limited choice for soft drinks - you can get packaged soft drinks, water and juices from vending machines, but if you want fresh juice it is generally not available.

A few specialty stores do offer fresh juice, but it is very expensive due to the labor costs.

All the technology to make fresh juice making vending machines is available, and I do see some online ads about it in other countries - but is yet to be commercialized in US.