There’s been a bit a of brouhaha in the database blogosphere following a comparison that was made between the MapReduce framework and modern relational database management systems.

In this post on the Database Column blog, authors David J. DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker argued, among other things, that MapReduce was "a giant step backward in the programming paradigm for large-scale data instensive applications."

The debate continued with many thoughtful comments added to the original post.

On January 25th, David and Michael responded to many of the comments with another post.

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to get organized, then I recommend David Allen’s Getting Things Done book. 

If you’d like to get a taste of the concepts without opening your wallet, check out this video of David Allen speaking to Google employees.

I’ve been using Windows Live Writer for a few months now.  It is the best Windows-based blog composition application that I’ve used.  It works great with Wordpress and, apparently, also supports other blogging platforms like Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, etc.  Best of all, it is free.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a Toronto start-up called Realosophy.

Their web site provides comprehensive profiles of Toronto neighbourhoods and tips for home buyers.

Each profile is an attractive "mashup" that offers information on housing prices, sales, styles, and taxes as well as performance reports for the local schools.  They also include a directory of nearby entertainment, health, and shopping services that are plotted on a embedded Google Map.

A few weeks ago, the DB2 Monitoring Console was released.  The monitoring console is “a light weight, web based console for DB2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows.  It is also a set of building blocks for rapidly developing your own console or PHP Web-based application.”

It has been released under the Apache License and is hosted at SourceForge.  To learn more, visit: http://sourceforge.net/projects/db2mc