EDITOR'S BUFFER

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The Age of Distraction

Mobile, remote, and interconnected, users and vendors seek new levels of focus

Sunlight hit flat against the wire-mesh window, reducing to silhouettes the human figures milling in and out of the restroom. I was inside Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, near Gate C17, and it was almost time for the final boarding of United Airlines' 6:30 flight to San Francisco. On a high throne having his shoes shined sat Modern Man with a cellular phone pinned to his ear. "I told him we'd do the deal," he said, gesturing within an inch of the shoeshiner's brow. "Jerry, you gotta go back and tell him. I want you to call Ed right now. What? Can you hear me? No, I don't know where he is. You find him."

Moments later, facing the porcelain, another man's phone chirped out of his side coat pocket. "Hello?" he asked routinely, answering the phone with one hand. I took a quick glance at his face. There was a pause. "I'm listening," he said into the receiver. "Wait," he said, shifting his posture slightly. "OK, now I can hear you better."

Could this be Ed? I didn't wait around to find out. It's entirely possible that Ed was within shouting distance of the wheeler-dealer getting his shoes shined. But it really made no difference: As a high-tech professional, I tried to take pride in this obvious advance. I guess we could call this feat "location transparency." Thankfully, it was not a teleconference.

Across the nation, people are giving and getting cellular calls at an alarming rate, and in every conceivable place. Mundane activities-riding elevators, waiting to buy donuts, passing the waters-have been reinvented as superb opportunities to talk on the phone. It is new, and it can be startling. And I had no idea.

After spending several months mostly hunkered down in the office meeting deadlines, I spent May traveling the database industry circuit: DB/Expo, Database and Client/Server World, The Data Warehouse Institute, and various meetings in between. In the high-tech arena, one constantly fears losing touch with what's the latest and greatest, and I knew I was ready for some fresh input. Not to sound like George Bush on checkstand scanners, but after a few weeks on the road, my greatest observation is that cellular conversations have become ubiquitous beyond my imagination.

Cellular phones are having a big effect on human interaction. First of all, everyone's on the phone, including the hot dog vendors in midtown Manhattan. There appears to be no etiquette about when or where to engage in a cellular conversation. At Microsoft's Scalability Day in New York on May 20, even the mighty Bill Gates had to compete for attention with an audience alive with chirping phones and voices. At the trade-show conferences I attended, technical sessions also endure a distracting cacophony. Cellular phones are very small; it's tough to tell when someone right next to you is actually speaking on the phone and not to you. The line between being on the phone and off can appear razor-thin. I came home with the realization that I must push my brain into warp-speed evolution in order to understand the delicate vocal nuances that distinguish on-phone from off-phone communication. After all: This is only the beginning.

The pace of mobile communications is accelerating worldwide. Cellular phones have become incredibly cheap and available. Someday they may even be disposable, like cameras. If not already, users will soon demand remote, mobile access to Web sites and corporate data resources-perhaps via Larry Ellison's $500 network computers. Michael Saylor, founder of MicroStrategy, predicts that we will have a "query tone" to enable access to networked data services around the globe. In the future, where will mobile knowledgeworkers want to receive their data? Perhaps we dare not think. However, we do know that remote users probably won't be able to pay full attention to their data-driven information; as they multitask other activities, it will be up to the information system to make sure the data comes with the right context and integrity.

As we head into the 21st century, humans are pushing the barriers of not only remote, interactive communications, but also the ability to diversify their attention spans. Ages ago, someone walking down the street mumbling and gesturing into a little plastic device might be considered an alien from outer space. Not today.

With the "cellular" hot button off my chest, I'll try to offer a few capsule observations from my rounds at the trade shows and elsewhere:

The War is Over;It's Oracle and Everyone Else.With Informix going through an extremely difficult period and Sybase still recovering and refocusing, the common wisdom is that Oracle has essentially won the database wars. Several key hardware, storage, and third-party software vendors I spoke with believe this and are beginning to focus most of their energy on the Oracle platform. Are the database wars truly over? More likely, we have reached the end of one phase and are about to begin another. The playing field has clearly changed-due as much to the rise of Microsoft's Windows NT as to Oracle's success. The market is reconstituting itself, and all the competitors are desperately trying to adjust.

Oracle does seem to believe it is now alone at the top, with IBM and Microsoft the only rivals worthy of any consternation. It has just introduced Oracle8, which features a full-blown object/relational strategy and many important performance enhancements-all of which we will cover in later issues of this magazine. At DB/Expo's "Politically Incorrect Forum" (held in San Francisco May 14, cosponsored by Vision Software), Ken Jacobs, vice president of product strategy with Oracle's Server Technology Division, said ominously during the debate that Oracle was ready to "consolidate its position" in the market. A few weeks later, Oracle announced that it will distribute free versions of its database software for trial use, with an obvious intent to soak up market share quickly ( News Browser ).

Oracle did not exhibit at DB/Expo; with the International Oracle Users Group held just a few weeks before and the company's own Oracle Open World coming in the fall, it evidently didn't need to. Microsoft also bowed out. While the absence of the two giants made the show floor a little quieter, it also enabled IBM, Computer Associates, Tandem Computers, and a range of interesting smaller vendors to enjoy the spotlight. CA was talking up OpenIngres 2.0, its first big release of the product. OpenIngres can now support much larger tables (up to one terabyte, CA claims), finer space management, and tighter integration with Solaris and Hewlett-Packard Unix systems for asynchronous multithreading. Tandem made a big splash with its NonStop SQL for NT announcement, which I discussed last month; IBM trumpeted DB2 Universal Server.

Some of the most interesting products on the floor were new data modeling and database application design tools for object/relational development. Two in particular were Formida Software's Universal Development Environment and InfoModelers Inc.'s InfoModeler 3.0 (formerly part of Asymmetrix). Ironically, these products (and others in development from Computer Systems Advisors and Logic Works) were aimed at the Informix DataBlade platform first, and then at Oracle and DB2. But with Informix wounded and Oracle not present, IBM enjoyed most of the object/relational database attention.

The Warehouse Meets the Web. This is the topic of the lead article in our Data Warehouse Special Edition this month; it was also the focus of some of the most interesting new products I saw for data marts and warehouses. Virtual Integration Technology (VIT, at www. vit.com), a recent startup headed by Subhash Chowdary, formerly the chief architect for Apple Computer's Enterprise Systems Division, garnered attention for deliveryManager. VIT addresses enterprise information delivery based on a metadata information catalog and allows users to "order" information just as they would a physical product. VIT says that users can also "publish" data mining results, for example, back to the data warehouse for others to use.

Infoscape Inc., headquartered in San Francisco (www. infoscape.com), introduced Fresco 1.0, a Java-based product for the development of "visually rich, highly interactive" business applications, the company claims. It is one of the first products I've seen to embrace Java and network computing for data mart and warehouse applications. Gentia, formerly called Planning Sciences Inc., is also developing a Java version of its Gentia business intelligence tool (www.gentia.com).

Look Out for Statistical Data Mining. The recent hubbub about data mining has mostly centered on tools that use neural networks, genetic algorithms, and decision trees. Users and vendors of statistical data analysis products such as those from SAS Institute have been a little miffed that statistical data discovery has received comparatively little attention-giving the impression that these methods have been superceded by the AI-based tools. This is changing. SAS is finally waking up; another interesting vendor to watch is MathSoft, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts (www.mathsoft.com). MathSoft's statistical data mining products are based on S, a highly regarded language developed at Lucent Technologies specifically for data visualization and exploration. The advantage MathSoft claims with statistical data mining is that the mathematical models are totally transparent; unlike the "black box" approach of the other data mining methods, there are no secrets to how the product deduced its information.

This and more we will ponder as we head for the beaches this summer. Don't forget to put your cellular phone on Send All Calls; a perfect tan requires concentration.