Peter Gyenes joins WebMethods

Interesting move; from 1996 Peter Gyenes ran Vmark which became Ardent, then sold it to Informix in 2000 and a year later helped sell the Informix database business to IBM - leaving him to run the ETL rump which was renamed Ascential.

Last year Ascential itself was sold to IBM (see IBM Purchases Ascential Software".

And now finally he has joined the board at WebMethods. Well, he should be able to teach them a trick or two about M&A. WEBM in play perhaps?

The real cost of denormalisation

Perhaps the most common performance problem I used to come across in my Oracle consultancy days was inappropriate, excessive or just plain dumb denormalisation. Any number of inexperienced (or wrongly experienced) developers would proudly show me how they had 'optimised' their database design because joins are expensive, aren't they.

Ironically, this design decision would often be the direct cause of my visit...

Anyway, while browsing the always entertaining Oracle-L mail list yesterday, I tripped over Jared Still's Normalize for Performance paper - given at Hotsos 2006 a few weeks ago. He's explained some of the typical problems (and also ways around some of them with materialised views). I'll enjoy going through the examples next time I've got a couple of free hours...