No shortcuts to getting to the College of your dreams!

Suzy Lee Weiss very rightly mentioned "sour grapes" in the beginning line of her recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece "To (All) the colleges that rejected me". (WSJ, March 29, 2013)

Other than that I was able to make no sense of the article albeit getting a whiff of the smug sense of entitlement which seems to pervade many of our youth - I am lazy, I am not smart, I do not have any goals for my life, I do not care for what rest of the world is doing; yet I deserve a place in the college of "my dreams". Just because "I am being me"

My advice to Suzy- either set her dreams appropriately or else do what rest of the world does, dream big but work hard to achieve those dreams.

Or perhaps, Suzy will have the last laugh as this piece as a college essay might yet open the doors of the college she is interested in, for her. And the irony that many who consider her rant justified will totally balk if the same logic were to be applied for sports related admissions at colleges - I like the game, don't play it well, so what, get me on the team!

Ellison's Oracle vs. Plattner's SAP - Battle of "In-Memory"

The battle between Ellison’s Oracle and Plattner’s SAP seems to be heating up with Plattner having fired a salvo across Ellison’s bow with “HANA” (Hasso Plattner’s New Architecture – neither of these gentlemen can ever be accused of humility/modesty).

Plattner seems to have upped the ante by taking the battle beyond the usual mooning each other at yacht races and billion dollar acquisitions as bolt-on’s for their core platforms to the core of Oracle’s key strength – its underlying data base. SAP claims HANA which allows companies to store data in servers' main memory, instead of using the relational databases that Oracle dominates is significantly faster than Oracle’s Exadata .

The Jury is still out. T-mobile has taken HANA out for a test drive and has been impressed.

Ellison’s response- “Whacko”, adding he wants the name of SAP’s “Pharmacist”.

Read more in this article from the WSJ (01/26): Inside SAP's Skunkworks as It Takes Aim at Oracle

Key question: which way are the database technology winds going to blow – in-memory or relational?

In the BI space an in-memory application like Qliktech’s Qlikview emerged as a serious contender to traditional BI vendors (strengthening Data Discovery vis-a-vis traditional enterprise BI).

If SAP’s HANA pans out, I think the database market will see a new segment emerge for applications focused on “Big Data” (McKinsey’s definition: Datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage and analyze) , with Oracle too strengthening its offerings in that area ( Oracle has bought an in-memory database company called TimesTen ).

It may be a few years before data in-memory database architecture really matures and comes center-stage. Process may be speeded up with a behemoth like SAP putting its financial muscle behind it. The strong demand for tools with ability to manage/ mine “big data” which companies are accumulating as a result of tapping into their customers web-usage, geo-location etc. is another driver.