Postgres has the same type of ability MySQL has to read in files, yet much nicer syntax. LOAD DATA INFILE from MySQL is just COPY in postgres. I decided to try having it read from a named pipe today, and it worked out nicely.
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The more I hear about digital national health records, the more I worry about them with regards to security. Various interpretations of the new legislation in the 2009 Stimulus bill could mean anything from implementing something like SAFEHealth, a decentralized system, to something like Google Health, which would centralize medical records. I expect that a decentralized system will not be what the government will choose. Proper usage of a decentralized system would be fine, but removes a lot of the utility promised by proponents of electronic health records, such as the possibility of access to updated health records from anywhere. I’d like to start off with an alarming quote I found in this interview with Karen Bell, director of the Office of Health IT Adoption at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:
TR: What about the public-health benefits? Systems that house large quantities of patient data could enable new types of research studies.
KB: Absolutely, that’s something I get really excited about. It will totally break open our knowledge base. For example, I have been diagnosed with low-pressure glaucoma, which is fairly unusual. No one knows what causes it. I would love to be able to search the system for anyone with this form of glaucoma and start to look for similarities.
I went to 5 sessions today, and I was pleasantly surprised by most of them.
CouchDB is a distributed non-relational database written in Erlang. It is unique in that its main query interface is simply HTTP REST, and for every UPDATE, it simply creates a new version of the row. Additionally, you can request the entire history of a row very simply.
An open-source implementation of Google’s bigtable. Hypertable uses novel methods such as Bloom filters to significantly decrease query times, as well as smart messaging to distribute a database across many nodes. It is also non-relational.
A group of CS professors hailing from Africa have gotten together to create a community that fosters creativity and innovation from people in Africa. People in first-world countries can participate by acting as mentors, or directly contribute to the projects involved. Chisimba is an open-source MVC framework for rapid application development. I am very interested in contributing to this project.
I thought going in that this would be somehow in the same ballpark as Hypertable and CouchDB, but I was disappointed. Basically, they are using compression and some fairly neat indexing to speed up traditional database queries. The main problem is that they only have a Java API, which completely turned me off after 30 minutes. Before that, it seemed like they were getting some pretty promising results. If they add some more APIs in the future, this may be another one to take a look at.
An awesome talk by Paul Fenwick from Australia, generally detailing failures in computer science and engineering going back into the 20th century and even back to Roman times. This was a wonderful presentation – he’s a really good speaker – and it poked a lot of fun at New Zealand.
All in all, I must say that this OSCON is much better than last year’s at least according to what I was looking for in the sessions. The exhibit hall is also very good this year – I’m pretty loaded down with swag at the moment.
I know someone who would have gotten a kick out of Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…Made Easy! had they been here. He needs to come next year (you know who you are..)
Tonight, I also attended FOSCON 4: Cooking with Ruby. This was a spectacular event hosted by Cubespace. I have to say that the live coding competition was a great spectacle, and held everyone’s attention for hours. It was an epic battle between Symfony, Rails, Smalltalk/Seaside, and Drupal. The rankings ended up being the following:
The presentations were good as well for the most part (notes here). AND THEY HAD BEER! I had some of the best keg beer imaginable – I thought it would be crap like you usually get out of a keg, but this was real quality Northwestern hopped pale ale. My cup says Bridgeport Ales, so I’ll have to investigate. If anyone knows the exact beer that was available in the left-side keg tonight, I’d appreciate a comment. I also met some cool people, some of which are all into XMPP and ejabberd. I may have to check all of that out now…
