Keith Swenson

Imagine a customer has hired you to put together a solution for managing a huge quantity of XML information. The firm's team is using XML because it gives them flexibility in how the data is structured. They like the fact that they do not need to specify a given record structure up front, and they can change the XML structure of records whenever they need to. Still, the question remains, "How do you manage and search for records?" One choice, of course, would be to put the data into a relational database. This approach is not always convenient because you need to decide ahead of time what the schema of the tables will be. Such a database will need to be managed, and any changes in requirements will demand changes in the schema as well as migration of the data. A second option is to put the data into the XML column of a relational database. This will work for moderate... (more)

Down-to-Earth Contracts that Keep the Cloud Aloft

Cloud Computing on Ulitzer In this article, we take a look at the basic interoperability requirements when communicating with the Cloud, and in particular at techniques and standards used to express and enforce wire-level contracts between communicating parties, as these parties are increasingly also contracting parties in a Cloud environment. Many standards already developed for Web services and service-oriented architectures provide to the communicating parties a good understanding and control of the expected quality of service at the most basic level of the interaction. Usin... (more)