Databases in academia

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This article wasted my time. It should have had MICROSOFT ADVERTISEMENT at the begining so I wouldn't have to troll through to discover it for myself. Pathetic.

I will be keen to see how you justify including "because he considers its query and analysis facilities to be unparalleled today" , uncommented on, when you consider the capabilities of say, DB2, Sybase IQ, Terradata or Informix.

That sort of sweeping generalisation only exists in infomercials and The Registers articles obviously.

This sort of article should be in the "junk mail" part of the Register Site.

This author should be flogged...

The author of a previous comment is right. This is an advertisment.

When you see a quote like the following:

"He chose Microsoft SQL Server (although he says any reasonable relational database would have done) to store the data, because he considers its query and analysis facilities to be unparalleled today..."

You can see that this article is pure hype.

The author loses all credibility in his *astonishment* that

"Although computers are widely used in theoretical physics and such research, the tools taken as routine in business are being overlooked in academia – if Mark hadn’t taken a PhD with John Parker and then moved into databases (he’s in the Department of Applied Computing at the University of Dundee) this research would have been based on shuffling index cards in a card index box (or, at best, on something like a spreadsheet)."

Researchers of a myriad of disciplines have been using computers and databases for statistical analysis as well as cataloging data for a number of years.

Nothing new here except for the lowering of standards at the Reg. Especially the RegDeveloper.

But hey, what do I know?

I've been working with databases since the early 80s. ;-)

ditto OLAP?

Thanks, I enjoyed the article, which corroborated a discussion I had last month with a physicist at the ETH in Zurich. It started by my asking whether universities appreciated using the recent batch of free Express databases. Put politely, his institute was well equipped with hard and software, costs no issue, but the academics' use varied in sophistication. (He had at least improved his own somewhat by volunteering to be a IT liason.)

A main point in the article is that wonderful things happen when programmers' skills and users' needs meet and amalgamate. I'd suggest that it takes several years with RDBs for serious users to appreciate what they can do. Worse, in my non-Finance neck of the large company woods, the OLAP abilities of latest DB versions is inaccessible, because current applications have fixed reporting, set up like card files or RDBs. So users can't even imagine what improvements are possible.

Any suggestions on, or good examples of, improving RDB and OLAP use?

Advert - or Prejudice?

I'm a little disappointed in those three comments - it is possible to have different opinions about technologies without anybody being deeply corrupt. As it happens, I've been involved with databases since the late 1970's (some nine years in DBA in govt and in merchant banking) and I've got into trouble for defending DB/2 against IMS in the past - it gives me some perspective when mentioning SQL Server instead of DB/2 gets me into trouble!

FWIW, I think that DB/2 is an excellent database - you'll find that Reg Developer has talked about it fairly recently. Intersystems Cache is another good database - and we've also mentioned that too. Until now, I'd have said that SQL Server just wasn't in the same class - but SQL Server 2005 really does seem to have got some things right at last, especially in the area of its multidimensional BI analysis tools.

I might be wrong about this - I might be wrong about DB/2 and Cache too, but they are all sincerely held beliefs. I'm sorry if Microsoft does something right occasionally, but I can hardly refuse to mention it when it does, on principle! And there are plenty of articles in El Reg and Reg Developer highlighting the things Microsoft does wrong.

Finally, I am most impressed that our correspondents can design a database solution, including choosing an appropriate database, working from a half-page overview article. In my day, I'd have had to spend a little bit more time looking at the detailed user requirements.

But looking at the requirements apparently didn't help here. While the wrong database, SQL Server, was actually chosen, and was even successful in producing the published research, any one of DB/2, Sybase IQ, NCR Teradata , Informix or Cardbox - widely different (and excellent, in their way) databases - should have been chosen and could have done the job without exciting adverse comment.

Is there just a hint of prejudice against Microsoft here? Understandable, if so; some Microsoft products certainly have technical issues, and the company itself hasn't always behaved well, but we can't pretend that none of its products have worthwhile applications for all that.

Business tools in academia

A separate comment on the actual subject of my article. I've also had an email comment suggesting that computers and databases are already in common use in academic research, contradicting my observation. Well, I first learnt computing while engaged in academic research, so I have to agree with that, as far as it goes - although the use of computers wasn't always very professional, in my day, at least.

Perhaps I should have made myself clearer. I was talking about the use of multidimensional cubes and the advanced business analysis tools now available in databases, such as SQL Server and DB/2, sold for business applications. Not simple database reporting.

And I was reporting what I was told by people actually engaged in academic research who, in my opinion, knew what they were talking about.

"Register research isn't always up on the latest in Academic Research" ;-)

I found it interesting that someone else brought up the FileMaker thing. Having worked with a number of academics in the past, in various fields, FMPro is often used as a 'better Excel' for manipulation of data, and is seen more as an 'everyday tool' - i.e. something which they use for more than one task, something which they'll use to knock up something to capture data, and to test hypotheses quickly.

A syllogistic search for database use in Academia which starts off with 'BI is the latest killer feature in database tools' is bound to turn up the conclusion "University research isn't always up on the latest in business IT". Sometimes 'the latest in business IT' isn't of very much use w.r.t. academic use of databases.

For example, one bit of work I was involved with was ended up as part of a PhD submission (back in 1996), that was partly written in FileMaker - in Art & Design Ceramics of all things! It definitely had to be done in a database, but not sure how BI would have applied to it ;-)

BI Killer Feature?

"Sometimes 'the latest in business IT' isn't of very much use w.r.t. academic use of databases."

Fair comment. Of course, I didn't actually google for "BI in academic databases", I talked to an academic who is getting enquiries about BI techniques from other academics <grin>.

And FileMaker is a fine product (far better than Excel used as a database) and, I'm sure, fit for an awful lot of academic work where SQL Server would be overkill.

My point was, that advanced BI may be being neglected, not because it isn't necessary for a particular research project but because some academics aren't aware of what is now available and what it can do. You sound as if this doesn't apply to you, but the general feedback we're getting isn't doing much to change my opinion generally. But it is only an opinion.