There has been much speculation in recent months about Oracle's future direction following an acquisition of Sun Microsystems and Founder Larry Ellison's remarks about cloud computing. Chairman Ellison has made widely-reported, disparaging comments about cloud computing.  Because the Sun acquisition recently received European regulators' approval, Sun's goal of offering open cloud services is

As we mark the arrival of a New Year, we often reflect on the events and people that shaped our present condition. Viewing 1999-2009 through the prism of computing, software and databases, we see our present condition is much changed from the end of the 20^th century. This 11-year time slice begins with a period of heightened

Most of us know the denizens of cyberspace include some shady characters but recent news about the bad guys using Amazon's cloud was the latest of a series of noteworthy events for those watching security trends. The ability of criminal rings to deploy botnets and install trojans has become a serious threat. In May 2009, for example, a federal judge ordered the shutdown of Pricewert, LLC

Missing from many discussions about the Internet, enterprise computing, social networks and cloud computing is the benefit for which the 'data bank' and 'data base' were conceived - to facilitate data sharing, consistency and data integrity. As a result, we find ourselves working through data quality issues and unnecessary integration problems made more complex by data silos. Complicating the

Distributed computing divides work among multiple computers and can provide scalability, but it's not a silver bullet. Compute-intensive jobs and those operating on large data sets or databases can exhibit unacceptable execution times. System architects can respond with parallel processing and throwing lots of hardware at the performance problem; this class of application is a prime candidate for

Performance, reliability and security continue to challenge system architects, as they have throughout the era of distributed computing. For systems with a database and network infrastructure, the performance, reliability and security challenges today are substantial. Whether applications are a composite of components, classes, assemblies, libraries, scripts, services or all of the above, an old

The U.S. Congress passed a resolution this week (H. RES. 558) that designates the week of December 7 as "National Computer Science Education Week". The December 7 date is the birthday of Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneer in the field of computing and a force behind the development of the COBOL language.

The text of the resolution includes:

"Whereas Grace Murray Hopper, one of the