Monthly Archives: April 2015

Trend of Technology

Today’s NoSQL Database Technologies

In the cloud computing and Big Data world, we often use 3Vs (Volume, Velocity, Variety) to measure a data technology’s effectiveness. Traditional relational databases often fail at the fast scaling with large amount of unstructured data in either storage, processing or query performance, when data volumes are no longer measured in megabytes(MB) or gigabytes(GB), but in terabytes(TB) or petabytes(PB). For example, the challenges to analyze large influx of social media data or real-time streaming data. Under such scenarios, various NoSQL databases coupled with cloud-enabled processing technologies (e.g. Hadoop ecosystem) come into today’s arena.

Compared with Relational databases, especially in dealing with unstructured data, NoSQL database technologies in general are less expensive, more scalable and often with better query performance. Typically these technologies allow data to be stored in more native formats and does not need to enforce schema in advance.

Today’s NoSQL database products can be roughly divided into the following categories:

– Document DB: Data are stored in a “document” structure which consists of many different key-value pairs. Document itself is an object container. MongoDB is one of the leading Document DBs on the market. MongoDB data are stored in BSON (Binary JSON) format. Microsoft is now offering a fully managed XML-JSON-based DocumentDB service on Azure. The document concepts are the same.

– Graph DB: Data are stored in a network structure which can be easily represented by visual graphs, such as social connections. Neo4J and HyperGraphDB are examples of Graph DB offerings. The data in a Graph DB are stored as Nodes and Labels. It allows faster queries on relationships between nodes. For example, to answer a question on the potential relationship between two seemingly non-related Twitter IDs. The query needs not to perform expensive joins. In building a graph from raw data, most of the relationships in the data model need to be pre-defined by JSON files. Dynamic relationship crawling APIs can still be challenges for Graph DB.

– Simple Key-value DB: Every single item in the database is a key-value pair. Redis is one of such examples. Additional functionalities can be added to the pair such as specifying a type for the value, as “string” or “Integer”, etc.. Google acquired Firebase in 2014 as a real-time database for developers. It’s in fact a JSON-based Key-String DB. JSON can be returned through RESTFUL client-side code. The sample usages of Firebase are real-time chat rooms, control notifications, etc.

– Wide-column stores: Examples are Cassandra and HBase. These open-source data models are optimized for data stores across multiple clusters and fast query performance over large datasets. They are widely used today for analyzing Big Data. HBase is also available in Mcrosoft Azure HDInsight service offering.

Because many of these NoSQL data structures are based on JSON or BSON, developers can write object-oriented code against the data objects, which in turn can be easily integrated into other application logics.

On Leadership and Management

The Concept and Practice of Self-Management in Modern Management

Fractal Coastline
Fractal Coastline
The discovery of fractals and Chaos Theory in mathematics was profound. All of a sudden, seemingly unruly and complex layouts can many times be explained by a simple and elegant equation, be it the pattern of tree leaves, a landscape of coastline erosion, or the turbulence in a hurricane. Following the simplest and least-resistance paths, nature creates the unthinkable. That’s nature’s mechanism of selection and scale out.

The laws of nature can often mysteriously find their ways into complex social arenas. The unsolvable paradoxes in today’s corporate and business environments (For example, see TriStragegist’s earlier blog on Challenges to Today’s IT Managers) indicated that some fundamental changes are needed in leadership and management space of modern businesses. From surveying 43 global CEOs and 400+ young employees, the Wolff Olins Report of 2015, drew some similar conclusions. As the report noticed, “Employees are now more confident, more mobile, more demanding, more idealistic in some cases, and less willing to be company people. Employees, more than ever, are individualists.” Leaders, in response, need become “more the shaper, the connector, the questioner.” “What is clear, as leaders forge their own new models, is that the old ways no longer work. CEOs can’t fall back on best practice. They have to be original. Leadership, more than ever, needs creativity. And achieving the impossible needs the most radical kind of creativity.”

TriStrategist thinks that one of such creative solutions to a modern corporation’s management dilemma has already existed in many forms. That’s the concept of “Self-Management”, which allows employees as individualists to manage their own work and ideas, and collectively a corporation still runs its organic, dynamic and healthy growth. Creative ideas and smart practices can quickly replicate themselves in such a setting, comparable to the way fractals can grow from something simple into complex yet elegant self-growth patterns.

The mere concept of self-management could scare many managers, but the trend may be inevitably coming. With the progress of current age of modern technologies, repetitive tasks are gradually eliminated by automation, and complex endeavors increasingly need a collaborative team of diverse talents from different areas, who are more the creative individualists than the rule-followers.

Will the concept of self-management lead to the disintegration and chaos of a corporation? That may depend on the future definition of a corporation and its condition setting. Future competent leaders are more than ever in demand, but their functions will be more to create the conditions for the healthy growth of a group of self-managed individuals to jointly accomplish complex tasks or common goals, and maintain the cohesiveness of the group in the process.

For self-management to work, a corporation first needs to be super-flat so that ideas from the individuals and small teams can organically grow. To achieve high goals and complex tasks that require large collections of skillful individuals, an organization needs to have the right processes and tools in place so that team collaborations and communications are smooth, intuitive and without barriers. The organization also needs meaningful data-driven measurement mechanisms. As Peter Drucker mentioned, “What measured improves.” Each self-managed individual will understand clearly what success means to him/her and to others. With these, a corporation of collective self-managed employees can function as a cohesive yet dynamic organization.

Such a concept in fact has already been seen in practice. Google is a great example. From their founders who prefer contrary thinking and doing, Google’s management practices have demonstrated many creative and daring ideas for future organizations. A few notable ones are flat organization, smaller teams, data-driven decision-making, talent hiring, impact-focused grouping, and ample freedom for employees to manage their ideas and time. A 2014 book on How Google Works, written by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former executive Jonathan Rosenberg, provided us a glimpse of Google inside. They in fact illustrated how the basic home-grown concept of self-management worked in Google. Conditions and restrictions of today’s society certainly have limited the effects of some of these ideas and the increasing size of the organization has added more complications, but Google’s unusual success and trend-setting records in many cutting-edge technologies and business models nonetheless demonstrated the power of these modern management concepts.

As the modern society comprises more the individualists, the concept of self-management may likely be the only way for any organization to grow and scale out effectively.

Random Thoughts

Solitude in Technology Age

The world is definitely different now. Your smartphone never leaves you, even as an alarm clock for your morning. You are now wearing smart watch and of course watching smart TV every day. Friends from Asia nowadays all pop up on WeChat. Your college, high-school, middle-school classmates all over the world, whom you haven’t heard of (most likely have forgotten) for decades, all started to send you invites to join the group chats or friends’ lists. Your remote siblings, relatives, even your 70 or 80-year-old parents who barely can maneuver a computer mouse, now happily send you a voice message any time or write messages in local languages with their fingers. …

It is indeed an intriguing time. As if our past, present and future are starting to merge and get all entwined in this technology age. You are very occupied, so occupied that can rarely find any moment of solitude. Modern technologies seem to empower us but at the same time diminish us.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), a Canadian thinker, philosopher and communication theorist, once said “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us. ”

With so much happening around us every day and in such speed, we become oblivious of where we are or who we are. We can know so much about everything else, but so little of ourselves. In this age, everyone gets connected but quickly forgotten. We have no identity other than an icon or avatar on our smartphones, tablets or TV console. And everyone seems to be the same.

McLuhan also noticed, “For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.” It will become more challenging for us to remember that within the limited span of our lifetime, limited minutes in every day, we need seriously dedicate some time and energy to pursue what values most to us. We may be busy with many contemporary pursuits, conformed to many social norms, but there are also things in the world that are simply timeless or make one a unique self – which may only need a little solitude to take notice.