If you didn’t know it tech is rampant and wonton in its generation of buzzwords for all sorts of things, or more specifically for sexing up all sorts of things that are more than the sum of their parts. The singularity, Web 2.0, e-this, i-that, social, mobile, the cloud, big data, and the Internet of Everything (Things) to name a few. Sometimes these things overlap. Sometimes they overlap in a so many ways that a Venn diagram starts to need an expert algebraic topologies to explain. Lately, the buzz has been around the cloud, big data, and the internet of things. As a technology professional and in particular a database professional it is important to me to sort through the really cool things.

One of the things we now have an is internet of the light bulb. This is real unlike the hyper text coffee pot protocol which is a 16 year April fool’s joke the IETF created, or the Linux toaster which is a malware vector. Phillips  Hue is a light bulb (system) that represents the culmination of incremental improvements to lighting bringing together a number of preexisting lighting features and adding them to an API. Hue combines, timers, dimmers, color, and circuit switching to provide a system that allows us to further take for granted one of the greatest technical achievements of the last millennium. That of course is the internet of things, at least the command side of it. I wonder if people have it in them to take their beverages according to a queue, or perhaps a locational aware protocol that starts my coffee when I approach the break room during a certain period of time.

Other things there are internets of will have sensors. These will write data somewhere. Lately, it looks like some Hadoop file system will be the standard. I wish I were more abreast of the internals the way a storage engineer would be so I could form a better opinion of why HFL would be a better choice than WAFL for writing streams. I suspect it has to do primarily with Map Reduce (at least public domain Map Reduce) only being implemented on Hadoop and MongoDB (and …). Of course if we need to respond to events in real time we need to put our event triggers upstream from storage.