At the recent IBM Information on Demand conference, there was a presentation talking about how systems could be built and data mined to build this highly personalized, intelligent system that can help you in everyday life. The example used was a notification sent to your cell phone. It was an alert based on knowing three things:
- Where you were driving - presumably the system somehow knows you're heading home or to a particular place where there's a fire nearby or on the way.
- Conditions ahead of you, in this case traffic issues.
- Your health history, in this case allergies to smoke
Maybe this is just a bad example, but the intention was to show that IBM's systems could mine massive amounts of data that's shared out somehow to build new products. Like an alert that you should take another route to not have delays or be affected by the smoke.
While I can certainly the benefit in a "digital butler" of sorts, I may be too much of a cynic to really embrace this fantastic opportunity.
That's because I see too much of a downside to it. The availability of my health history and tracking my whereabouts are two things I'd just as soon not have available on a web service, web site, or web anything. Even on my own Cray-24 in the basement here at the ranch performing all the processing brings to mind the massive amount of worry and stress I'd carry around worrying about my data being copied or released.
And I'm a relatively open person out on the web. I disclose quite a bit about myself here in the editorials.
These great, wonderful new ideas for processing massive amounts of data and finding useful ways to use it are amazing to me. And I can definitely see the benefits to end users if the systems work well. And if they can be tuned to meet your particular needs.
But data security is incredibly important. It gets more and more important every day as more data is collected on each of us. And many of these "cool ideas" don't take that into account.
I'd like to see some general service, like maybe a broadcast alert system that contained general information. At coordinates x.y.z, there's a fire. Let the smaller systems in our phones or cars then ping us with the alert if it's relevant. My car might be configured to let me ear alerts for traffic anywhere between work and home, within 10 miles of me, or something else. But there's no need for any type of large, consolidated data system helping me out.
Understand that we don't need a company process and intelligently sift the data. Give us an SDK and let use build the intelligence into the systems ourselves.
Steve Jones
Podcast: The Voice of the DBA
Today's podcast has a guess introduction, sop check it out. All the shows are at sqlservercentral.podshow.com.
As always, feedback for the show is appreciated. Let me (or the boss) know if you like the show and send in comments, suggestions, or ideas to make things better.
The music for today's podcast by Robin Stine, award winning blues/jazz vocalist. You can hear more of her music at www.robinstine.com.
