ExtremeExperts.com

ExtremeExperts.com hosts some interesting technical articles and HOWTOs for Microsoft .NET based technologies.

The Anatomy of a Search Engine

This paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page expalins the baisis of how Google works. It’s a bit technical but very interesting, especially if you can manage to make it to the end

Column-oriented DBMS

This post at Slashdot.org talks about how Column Stores or Column-oriented DBMS are getting more popular, especially in the data warehousing market. A column-oriented DBMS stores its content by column rather than by row. Read more about it here.

ACID

A single logical operation on data is called a transaction. The ACID set of properties guarantee that database transactions are processed reliably:

• Atomicity
• Consistency
• Isolation
• Durability

(Reference: ACID at Wikipedia)

Database, DBMS, SQL

“If wealth is lost, nothing is lost

If health is lost, something is lost,

If character data is lost, everything is lost”

-Anonymous

A great playwright with a Shakespearean name once said, “All the world’s a database, And all the men and women merely records”.

Data[bases] drive[s] the world. They are the sum of human knowledge, and all around the world many an overworked DBA (DataBase Administrator) spend endless, sleepless nights just keeping these things running. There is currently talk going on of Transforming the Web into a database.
Here is the sum of my database knowledge.

References:

• Database at Wikipedia
• Beginner SQL Tutorial - Quick Reference

Resources:

• Fundamentals of Database Systems (4th Edition), By Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe (Addison Wesley, 2003)

XQuery

XQuery is a query language semantically similar to SQL, designed to query collections of XML data. From W3C: “The mission of the XML Query project is to provide flexible query facilities to extract data from real and virtual documents on the World Wide Web, therefore finally providing the needed interaction between the Web world and the database world. Ultimately, collections of XML files will be accessed like databases”.

Of all the possibilities that XQuery potentially offers, one of the most interesting would be its use in solving the Web’s “offline problem” and giving users seamless access to their data with or without an Internet connection.

Resources:

• XQuery at Wikipedia
• W3C XQuery
• Tutorial at w3schools.com
• FLOWR (FOR, LET, WHERE, ORDER BY, RETURN) at Wikipedia

XQuery is a superset of XPath, which is an expression language for addressing parts of an XML document and possibly computing values based on its content.

XPath Resources:

• XPath at Wikipedia
• Tutorial at w3schools.com
• Tutorial with many examples
• Tiny XPath - Implementation in C++