When I was young...

My sister used to subscribe to Reader’s Digest. I was intrigued by the concept of abridged texts. When I studied chemistry there was also Chemical Abstracts, a summary of published papers to allow researchers to separate the wheat from the chaff or at least find the papers needed for that dissertation. In fact I even made the pages of CA courtesy of a small piece I (co)wrote in the Journal of Inorganic and Nuclear Chemistry.

So perhaps that is why the concept of Pythian Group’s Log buffer appeals to me. It is an often eclectic look at the week’s database bloging and not just confined to writings about a single vendor or just a certain field of database endeavor. A lot of the blogs reported are ones I know well – after all the blog writing community is still quite small and good writing still stands out, but occasionally I come across a few gems. Today Craig Mullins takes the editor’s chair and reports on a lot of DB2 writing that is new to me.

One link, reminds me of another (and probably untrue) data mining story from when I did some work around crime analysis.

As part of major drugs investigation the phones records of several suspects where fed in to an analysis program (called I2 for those that know it) and analyzed for links between people. The application graphically displays the relationships between various people and helps build the intelligence case. What was thought to be a single drugs ring turned out to be two separate groups (two circles were plotted) but linked by single phone number. Was this the Mr Big who supplied both gangs? No it was the Feyenoord soccer team’s fan line and two keen Dutch gang-member fans.

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