Databases have always been clunky bits of software. Often, they don’t find what you are looking for. At other times they produce the wrong result.

They are also leaky and easy to hack. Perhaps their worst feature, though, is that they are expensive to purchase and even more so to develop to a business’s needs.

Hope is at hand, however. It seems databases on hard drives are on the way out, to be replaced by “cloud computing.”

Read John Evans’s article, The Great Database Crisis 2008, over at Syntagma. Here’s an excerpt:

So how is it that a Google search produces millions of results in a fraction of a second? We know they have all of the internet on millions of computers in various datacentres around the world. Could it possibly be done with a massive distributed database threaded over countless Dell boxes?

The answer, obviously, is no. But the surprising fact is that they hold the entire internet in RAM memory. That’s what makes the process so lightning fast.

Is a Harvard MBA such a good asset in business these days?

It probably still is, but some doubts are being aired about its involvement in the ongoing credit crunch.

Read more about The Great Harvard Sausage Scandal 2008 over at our parent site, Syntagma.

Who, then, are the people that created this vastly complex set of financial instruments based on the always-temporary phenomenon of rapidly-rising asset prices? And who were their managers who let them do it?

It appears that a large number of them are alumni of the Harvard Business School, even those working in Britain and Europe. President Bush is one of them. British PM Gordon Brown has surrounded himself with such types for more than a decade.

Read the rest of the article.

When searching for something to build a business around, don’t forget your early training.

Maybe you trained in a trade or service before abandoning it for something else. Either you were bored by your employment or you were offered an appealing way out.

However, when it comes to starting your own business you need to be master of your craft. What seems exciting in the mind’s eye, may not be at all feasible when you and you alone have to make it work and earn revenues.

Here’s a good example of that. Over at Syntagma, there’s a piece by John Evans on how Google’s attempts to knock competitor’s advertising off many websites, set his mind pointing back to early training.

I’ve been writing about my interest in the economics of the retail sector for a year without very much happening. Now the long-gestated project is beginning to come to life thanks to our contacts with a number of specialist retail analysts …

The idea goes back to my initial training in information science at the Central Office of Information in London.

Read Syntagma moves into specialist information products here.