Re: Big Data analytics with Hadoop

From: Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 02:31:48 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <pan.2012.07.18.02.31.47_at_gmail.com>



On Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:11:03 -0700, joel garry wrote:

> It's based on math. Accounting is based on avoiding manual errors and
> catching malicious employees.

Yes, it is based on the naive set theory, but it was invented with having banking transactions in mind.

>
>
>
> Your first number 3 (lol) and some of the others don't account for cost
> accounting, cash flow analysis, time value of money, the arbitrary
> nature of general ledger accounts and plenty of other fairly normal
> accounting procedures. A big chunk of accounting is to deal with the
> second number 3, finding the damn mistakes, including rounding errors.

I am no accountant, but the accountants that I have come in contact with have told me that they love the tabular form in databases.

>
> Back when Joe Celko was doing his sql puzzles, I thought that was a
> pretty good empirical proof at how badly sql maps to business problems.
> And now, look at all the modern features of Oracle that have been added
> because businesses demand them. Are they relational? Or are some of
> them not relational, and some pushing some pretty limber feats of
> contortion into the the sql engine?

Strictly speaking, what is the definition of "relational"? It's based on the naive set theory. It allows you to select a subset and do nasty stuff with it. It allows you to do joins and Cartesian products. It allows operations like minus, intersect and union. Strictly speaking, I wouldn't call UTL_MAIL or DBMS_XDB relational, but who cares?

>
> Business people bet all the time on all sorts of things, technological
> and otherwise. The fails are in the newspaper every day. I think most
> of us can come up with many tech examples, as fails are interesting.

Fails and Kardashians are interesting, I do agree with that.

> Yet we are frustrated because we know how to do it right.

I am a techie. I am not sure that I would be capable of managing a company or that I would even want to. I don't know how to do it right. I can only give advice about a very narrow spectrum of the IT technology. Quite frankly, that worries me. If Oracle goes the way of the dodo, my entire career will go down the drain. Fortunately, Larry looks fit and buff and will hopefully live forever.

-- 
http://mgogala.byethost5.com
Received on Tue Jul 17 2012 - 21:31:48 CDT

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