Monday, August 5, 2013

Don't let Technophobia kill innovation

What? Me? technophobic? I have the latest iPhone, my office is jam packed with USB gadgets and my car is a Prius, how much more techno friendly can one get?

That is all fine, but looking beyond fun technologies that we play with just for fun, or natural, but cool and useful, evolutions come to most of us easily. But can you honestly say (I can't) that you always look at the promise of a new technology and never have never looked at it not from the point of view of the obvious new advantages, when the technology has developed into something useful, and instead just looked at it and judged this new technology only from it's first, shaky, implementation?

When I was in my early teens (which occurred around the time just after Mayflower had arrived in New England) my family moved into our first own house. My parents were running a restaurant at the time (they ran one or the other all through my childhood) and my mother had seen most of the weirdo Heath Robinson designed (TM) commercial and domestic kitchen appliances, and when we first entered our new home and mum looked in the kitchen and realized there was a dishwasher in there, her first reaction was "Well, I'm never going to use that one". One month later, the dishwasher was working more or less daily, and my mum never did any dished by hand.

Many years later, me, her only son, having spent the better part of his life playing with SQL based relational databases (and looking at some of the code in them, I suspect that Heath Robinson is still around, now as a software engineer), started to look at NoSQL databases, and my reaction was largely that of my mums when she saw the dishwasher "Nah, I'm not going to use anything like that. Eventual consistency? What kind of silly idea is that".

Yes, I was wrong, but I am still convinced that NoSQL databases (yes, I know NoSQL is a bad term, but this is monday morning and I don't have enough energy to think up something better) will not replace SQL based system. What I do think is that we need both.

Just as I think my mum got it wrong twice: Yes, the dishwasher really is a good idea, but some things are better handled without is. The results is that there is an abundant lack of sharp knifes in my mums house (as a dishwasher is a really effective knife-unsharpener). My self, I use a dishwasher, but knifes and beer glasses are still, to this day, washed by hand by yours truly (beer glasses and I don't want any left over enzymes in my beer, as they are used to kill bacteria, including the really tasty bacteria that gives beer it's distinctive taste).

Too many words has so far been used to say this: The world needs both SQL and NoSQL databases working together, serving different purposes and applications. As for Eventual Consistency, I still thing this is bogus, just say what it is, no consistency, and live with it, MongoDB, Cassandra and LevelDB are still very useful technologies, as is MySQL. And in many cases you need ACID properties and atomic transactions and all that, but in many cases this is a gross overkill.

Look at something like Virtualization. In that case, I think I looked at it in the right way, looking at the potential of the new features this brought, and not ignoring, but thinking less about the issues with the first implementations (slow I/O, slow networking, complexity of use, complexity of installation etc) and looking at what it could do in terms of cost reduction, effective systems management etc.

Back them, when I was a big Virtualization supporter, many were opposing me with the obvious issues with databases (which is the field where I work, if this wasn't already obvious) which was that I/O was slow and unreliable. Yes it was, but that can be fixed. This is not a flaw with the technology per se, but with the specific implementation and the limitations of the underlying technology at the time. Not everyone needs the highest of high performance, many can do with less. And some can easily scale out to more machines. All in all, many can benefit from Virtualization, maybe more than you think. These days, I think noone doubts that Virtualization is useful.

This is not to say I am always right, but I am not so technophobic that everything that is not something I already know is something that sucks. Also, we should be careful when comparing things. We often compare based on attributes of existing technologies and tend to forget that new technologies might well have virtues of their own (which we do not use for comparison as we are unfamiliar with these features as they don't exist in the technologies we currently use).

I think one technology that is now in a state of being seen as inferior is Cloud technologies. We look at a cloud by taking something we run on some hard iron in-house and throw it at Amazon and look at the result. Maybe we should build our applications and infrastructure differently to support clouds, and maybe, if we do that, a Cloud might well be both more cost-effective, scalable and performant than the stuff we run at our in-house data center.

So don't let new innovative technologies die just because they lack a 9600 baud modem or a serial port. Or because they are no good for washing beer glasses (even if that is a very important dishwasher feature).

/Karlsson

No comments: