The Database is King

Databases are a pain to manage. Follow this guy, I he's a good guy and has plenty of good ideas. It's a breath of fresh air from most of the chaff I've been reading on the net recently.

I have been working on a database problem for quite some time now, I just never realized it when it came to building a simple stock market analysis program. I pretty much wrote a simple database system to store my data and run queries against it. It came apparent after I started separating my query code from the data to make analyzing data cleaner.

I started reading more and more about new startups coming online on the net, the kind that the guy I like to follow, Paul Graham seems to like to write about. He doesn't post as much as he used to on his website anymore, he seems to have gone underground into different networks, instead of appearing to the net as a whole, but to a more targeted audience of hackers instead. He posts more regularly here instead.

Many of the growing start ups he has been funding recently has been oriented on providing services through a amazon's server network. The more I think about it, it seems to be a hot bed for many new information management systems built specifically for many different niches and I am starting to see a big variation of similar themes.

You don't need a huge server farm anymore and you pay for whatever you need when you need it. The setup is amazingly simple. The database is pretty damn amazing stuff and it had pretty good applications in social online products.

I need to pick up some database skills, for 2 reasons:

1. The company I work for could use a hand in databasing their experimental data and tracking

2. I could spin off my skills to dive into the world of online data management and figure out to monetize my skills.

Jason L Bapteste, an excellent writer with good brains on his head mentions that Excel is the world's more used "Database." I agree with him after seeing how we (as researchers) manage our data, that is plenty of room for improvement here, especially when it comes to querying data. Recent versions of excel has brought in more and more databasing functionality on sort of a "lite" kind of scale, but there is most definitely a demand for it.