There appear to be four responses. Two were numbered, the third is a rambling thought on scalability, and the fourth is a thought on management's discomfort with the truth.

The Cubulus project and Alexandru Toth 's page describe an "OLAP Aggregation Engine". It is very nice to see advanced work done on the dimensional model.

The cited research dates from 1999 (V. Markl, F. Ramsak, R. Bayer, "Improving OLAP Performance by Multidimensional Hierarchical Clustering", Proceedings of the Intl. Database …

In PC World, May 1st, there's one article, "Shrink-Wrapped Software's Days Numbered " by Robert Mullins. This has quotes and numbers. Very nice, and it specifically identifies open source and SaaS as beating out shrink-wrap.

In MSDN, however, see "Building Distributed Applications: Architecture Strategies for Catching the Long Tail ". This makes …

Thanks to everyone who attended. See Designing Web Services with the J2EE(TM) 1.4 Platform : JAX-RPC, SOAP, and XML Technologies for more information. Also, check out Dr. Dobb's SOA, Web Services and XML department.

Here's the Micro$oft PPT file: Web Services 8.ppt

Here's the Open-Office file: Web …

After having written a number of application-specific object-relational mappers, I have been on the prowl for an elegant, enduring solution. I had started to come to grips with Django , and like much of the approach. Django has a tiny infrastructure feature (the settings.py file) which made it unpleasant to …

The Web Mart design pattern identifies three aspects to a piece of web content:

• The Core Concept - the "fact" that we will present.
• The Access Dimensions - objects that identify a concept or support navigation to the concept.
• The Details - objects that provide details in support of a concept.

There are …

There are three reasons, none of them terribly good in isolation.

1. I build business applications, not graphics applications, so the "basic" GTK was precisely what I needed.
2. PyCairo is (to me) a fairly recent innovation, and my GTK knowledge is a few years old.
3. Cairo requires a more complex technology …

Here's the shocking result.

http://www.bbspot.com/News/2006/08/language_quiz.php

And I thought I was just arrogant. Now I see that it's worse than I thought.

Python is a top-shelf toolset for creating sample data to do performance testing.

Let's say that you need to validate a data warehouse design, and you need a million facts that join with thousands of dimension entities across a half-dozen dimensions. You'll be generating data for seven different tables, and …

Mr. Hayes says that "...we’re afraid that programmers simply won’t use the hot new technology and that the money we spend on it will be wasted." He plays up this fear factor, providing lots of programmer-centric reasons: "Either programmers don’t use the tools at all, or they …