dbguy - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Unstructured Data (Score 1) 96

by dbguy on Tuesday June 05, 2012 @09:03PM (#40227709) Attached to: NoSQL Document Storage Benefits and Drawbacks

... Holding documents to strict schemas can be ineffective, because documents change over time. Sure, you can just create more and more tables, but that requires administrators and time....

Suppose the(y) add a field to invoices. And it is required on all future invoices. With RDBMS, you need to create a new table with a NOT NULL constraint.

There are good reasons to choose NoSql (I like my paycheck), but that's not one of them.
The major SQL products have supported "add column" for decades. I implemented add column in the '80s. ISTR that oracle, db/2 and sybase also supported it at the time.

New Mars Rover Rolls For the First Time 100

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 30, 2010 @02:56PM from the keep-them-doggies-rollin dept.

wooferhound writes "Like proud parents savoring their baby's very first steps, mission team members gathered in a gallery above a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to watch the Mars Curiosity rover roll for the first time. Engineers and technicians wore bunny suits while guiding Curiosity through its first steps, or more precisely, its first roll on the clean room floor. The rover moved forward and backward about 1 meter (3.3 feet). Mars Science Laboratory (aka Curiosity) is scheduled to launch in fall 2011 and land on the Red Planet in August 2012. Curiosity is the largest rover ever sent to Mars. It will carry 10 instruments that will help search an intriguing region of the Red Planet for two things: environments where life might have existed, and the capacity of those environments to preserve evidence of past life."

Black Hole Emits a 1,000-Light-Year-Wide Gas Bubble 145

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 09, 2010 @05:59PM from the reminds-me-of-a-buddy-of-mine dept.

PhrostyMcByte writes "12 million light-years away, in the outer spiral of galaxy NGC 7793, a bubble of hot gas approximately 1,000 light-years in diameter can be found shooting out of a black hole — one of the most powerful jets of energy ever seen. (Abstract available at Nature.) The bubble has been growing for approximately 200,000 years, and is expanding at around 1,000,000 kilometers per hour."

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