Locked down in social networks

While joining an online social network may be easy, deleting your (potentially embarrassing) account from it may -never- be possible.

If you sign-up with Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or almost any other flavor of such “networking” services, you better kiss your privacy goodbye.

From the moment you start posting content, remember that everything you post is now owned by another entity and whatever control you have over your “seemingly private data” is merely a permission that’s temporarily “granted” to you.

While social networks might have had lofty ideals, their current obsession with total ownership of all the content floating within their network coupled with twisted deletion procedures go to paint a much murkier picture of their “service” where, among other things, YOUR personal information is a commodity sold and resold forever, however desperate you may be to have that data permanently deleted.

Nowadays, more and more social networking victims are exiting the scene entirely because they’ve just discovered how these outfits operate. When the smoke clears, members trying to delete their account almost always end up losing a mix of (1) time, (2) money and (3) peace of mind.

Savvy web surfers have steered clear of social networks from the moment they took about 30 minutes of their time to read their “privacy policy” along with equally frightening their “terms of use”. In a nutshell, they own anything you do on their network, wether its usage pattern or actual postings… forever!

If you’re looking to exit any of these mostly useless, junk filled, spam circulating social networks, don’t settle for mere “deactivation” (like in the case of Facebook) because your data is kept fully intact, until you return.

Don’t hesitate to contact consumer defense groups during your account deletion process because even though you can beg the member service clerk all you want (usually without success), you’ll likely need the added muscle to be sure your data is -really- deleted, forever.

Until this privacy protection quagmire is resolved, to the user’s advantage, joining social networks will continue to be very risky business that could cost you dearly.

Tags: social networks, facebook, myspace, bebo, account deletion, privacy, risk

BI’s role in the intelligent enterprise

When in charge of making all the right decisions for their company, more executives than ever before like to consult their business intelligence (or “BI”) reports for added insight regarding the current, past and more importantly, future events.

The use of BI applications and tools among executives has been growing over the past decade and depending on who you ask, roughly 25% of all workers use on flavor or another of BI in the course of their work.

While this might sound encouraging, BI’s use is nowhere near as widespread as the major business intelligence vendors would have you believe.

In fact, the BI tools themselves are partially to blame for the somewhat lackluster adoption level currently observed. Add company cultures that encourage gut-and-feel decision makin to the mix and BI software, whatever the flavor, will have a hard time getting past the security guard’s booth!

To make matters worse, many companies tolerate information hoarding or, alternatively, allow IT department administrators to zealously lock away data that should, by all means, be made available to more employees for —you guessed it— basic to advanced BI applications.

The value proposition for BI might be obvious for the vendors but countless executives still don’t understand the advantages of business intelligence software over standard ERP system reports and, in some case, manual spreadsheets.

Executives and employees alike should take another look at BI tools out there in order to reap value from data to deliver, among other things, best-in-class service, boost revenue and increase operating efficiencies.

The future seems to belong to those who best understand the strategic importance of the proverbial gold mine hidden in their hard drives, waiting to be analyzed and used in creative, new ways, BI-style.

Tags: bi, business intelligence, data, information, spreadsheets, value, revenue

Microsoft’s sudden affection for openness

Techies know full well that the software market is becoming an ecosystem of sorts in which products not built to standards and lacking interoperability will wither… and disappear.

Up to now, Microsoft has been the perfect example of closed source software stuffed with heavily patented processes, even when such processes were so common and blatantly obvious that they shouldn’t have gotten any patent protection to start with.

So in face of the powerful grassroots tsunami in favor of open standards, open source and creative commons-type of property statements, Microsoft has recently decided to take a concrete action towards openness by publishing 30,000 pages documenting Windows protocols that previously were only available under restrictive licenses.

Furthermore, Microsoft said it won’t sue open source developers for noncommercial implementations of those protocols but frankly, it remains to be seen if an open source coder will take the chance to inject Microsoft-based code in their work.

Ongoing European antitrust scrutiny over Microsoft’s push to get its Open XML document format ratified as an international standard might have everything to do with the company’s CEO, Steve Balmer, suddenly vowing for openness.

Microsoft’s move is a step in the right direction because even though some third parties might take from them, codewise, they might also add value to the current codebase.

Since loosely coupled systems will become a basic requirement for business success in the coming years, Microsoft’s decision to play more nicely with all other coders out there appears that much more important for the company’s future.

Tags: microsoft, openness, open source, developers, windows, protocols, open xml

Oracle’s take on building visual queries

Being a big MySQL fan, I’m happy to report the open source database has been an awesome web development companion, especially when coupled with PHP or Perl.

This being said, the corporate world prefers DBAs with strong Oracle skills so if you’re looking to score some of the higher pay grade Oracle-centric jobs, perhaps you should take the Oracle SQL Developer software for a spin.

What you’ll find is a coherently organized set of work panes where you can see your databases’ entire (editable) content accompanied by a query construction zone where even relative database administration novices can work out perfectly coded SQL queries.

For those familiar with the rapid development alternatives, there are little differences between the visual query construction capable Oracle SQL Developer and the Oracle SQL*Plus software.

In fact, their feature lists are quite similar in the sense that both software let query database objects you have access to so you can add, alter and delete data by using data manipulation language (DML), work on database constructs using data definition language (DDL), write and run reports as well as create, edit and compile PL/SQL.

The range of GUI features for building and executing SQL queries visually is what makes Oracle SQL Developer a tool of choice for newbies, right up to experienced DBAs. In all fairness, every likes to work faster while generating generally flawless SQL query code.

You should also note that Oracle SQL Developer provides the SQL worksheet, a code editor window where you can enter and run statements that include SQL*Plus commandes, SQL and PL/SQL code — either single statements or multiple statements scripts.

So if you want to make a lot more money toying around with Oracle databases, probably as an Oracle DBA, your obvious choice is to use Oracle SQL Developer to manage common query tasks.

The easy-to-understand GUI tools will likely make you the new office hero!

Tags: oracle, sql, developer, queries, gui, dba, databases, dml, ddl, pl/sql