One thing Mama taught me

Who is Mama ?

Mama is the center forward of the women's handball team of Orissa. Orissa team was participating in the recently concluded National Women National Games. I had the privildege of watching her play in a match against Kerala girls. Even though, Kerela emerged the winner by a whisker (14-12), the crowd was cheering for the  Orissa girls and especially Mama for the valiant fight that they put in.

Her father is a poor fisherman in a small village near Cuttack. She was spotted early in her fifth class by the local school teacher and her name was proposed to the district level SAI authority. She devoted more time for her games without hampering her studies. Slowly, she rose from the district level ranks to play for Orissa. With proper coaching, her skills can be accentuated to push her to the national levels. Now she is in her eighth standard and is supporting her family from the stipend that she gets by playing.

Learnings from Mama

I strongly believe that Sports has a great parallels to the way we lead our  life. We can learn a lot from watching a sports person. Often, we resort to studying the greats to imbibe their good qualities. We talk of how Sachin was very fastidious, Dravid , more disciplined and Laxman more gifted.

And here i am writing this piece on  a lesser known emerging player and that too on a sport that has hardly any following in India. One thing which i took from watching her play was her ability to put team above than individual.

There were many instances where i could see her modifying her game to suit the convenience of other team mates. Handball is a fast game. She sometimes had to reduce her running speed so that other team mates can catch up and work in tandem. Even though couple of chances which were created by her hard work were squandered by her other team mates, she was took it sportingly.

What impressed me  was that when one of her team mate was injured and required a pain reliever spray during the half time, she ran to the near by market to purchase one. She herself volunteered for the same in absence of the any support staff for the team as she knew she could run faster.

This is a picture which i took of the entire team after the match. I am not identifying who Mama was. For me, each team member was special , they played against all adversaries with a smile and unfettered determination.

Odisha Women Handball Team

Wishing them all the successes and glory for future !!!!

Post on SCN

Posted the second blog on SCN.
http://scn.sap.com/community/hana-in-memory/blog/2012/11/01/busting-two-myths-on-in-memory-management

There has been surge in the demand of system computing ability as more people have access to the applications with advent of smart phones and tablets. Data needs to be both real time and fast. In Memory Data management is one approach where we achieve the aforesaid objectives. But, the general question which everyone asks about In Memory is whether it is just a technology fad and whether it has been any applicability to the modern day Enterprises.

1. In Memory Data Management is just a technology fad

Fact: It is the need of the hour

Data is growing exponentially. With more automation, more structured data is being captured in our organizations. Also, with the widespread adoption of social media, views ,expressions and opinions are getting captured in Face book status messages, twitter tweets, Instagram’s pictures etc. which are categorized as unstructured data. The explosion of data can be summarized with the fact that the humans have doubled the amount of data that they produced in the last century in the last decade.

Nimble Organization analyzes information at faster speed to stay ahead of their competitors. For Example, Smart organizations are capturing their success of their product releases by analyzing the tweets and messages of its products real time and even making necessay course corrections. To make smart and faster analysis of the dataset so large and complex (which have been named Big Data for their sheer volume), having a faster system performance has become a basic hygiene factor of any system.

Disk Scan speed has only become faster by 10 times over the last 30 odd years. Compared to the data growth, it is not adequate and will add to more scan time. There is a requirement to remove the redundancy involved in scanning and moving the data from disk to CPU for processing. In Memory Data Management removes two time consuming processes to make the processing faster – Scanning the data from Disk and moving it to the main memory (DRAM). As the CPU have direct access to DRAM, the processing power is enhanced exponentially resulting in desired output.

2. In Memory Data Management Concepts are not applicable in Enterprises

Fact: In Memory Data Management concepts have evolved over the years to serve enterprises

Typical Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) stores the data in convient way so that Data can be easily writted on it but scanning these records is time consuming. Also, RDBMS cannot be compressed easily, a basic requirement, to load more data in DRAM. Using Columnar Database makes scan faster and enables more compression but with additional drawback of write back to Database overhead. Due to extensive encoding used for compression, it is expensive to insert, update and delete records in columnar database.

Enterprises end up using both the databases - RDBMS system to write to the database (OLTP Systems) and Columnar DB to scan the DB for analytics (OLAP systems). Data movement across the database apart not only adds overhead to the system but also makes data dated.

In Memory Data Management has evolved to cater to the Enterprise Needs. For Example, HANA, the In Memory Data Management Platform, has the columnar feature but performs only insert operations and avoids the time consuming update and delete operations. It segregates the data into passive data (data which have infrequent use) and active data ( regular/ recent data) for storage and operation optimization. Similarly, small modifications are done in the In Memory Data base to make it optimal for enterprise usage.

In Memory Data Management is the answers to today’s enterprise growing data computing demands. If optimized well, as seen in HANA, it can be deliver amazing results which can analyze a F1 race to de-codifying the genome project. Also falling memory prices and more processing power make In Memory data the most suitable technology to invest for future. Would love to listen to your comments on this article. Please put in your comments.