Grid based banking

John Davies from C24 has been of of the profiles at this convention. I missed the keynote so I wanted to drop in at the banking and grid session to see what the fuzz was all about.
A lot of cases where we deal with applications we don't really need databases as we know them John claims. More than viewing the database as the central repository of all information you can view the grid as the repository of the information.

Typical cost is 1$ per CPU per hour. Interestingly when several of the banks that John is working for has as many as 10K CPUS. Utilizing these effectively is important with respect to ROI.

C24 want to avoid using XML though the wire when transferring information is not to use XML because it is not efficient enough, but use java databinding and efficient object serialization instead. They do this through something they call Integration Objects. The fact that John discourages the use of XML in the grid computing space is that is not efficient enough. This is also an important moment in the SOA space discussions.

How do you do this when you don't have any data stored in a central repository only in a grid where you don't have a query language.
John is referring to a case study where everything is stored and manipulated in a grid space in two different grid spaces, one that receives the feeds and organize them and one replicated feed that is optimized and used solely for querying.

The technology is based upon JavaSpaces and has some quite interesting attributes. One of them being that querying is done in javaspaces based on what kind of interface(s) that are implemented. Then some matching logic. The thing here is that the searching seems to be quite procedurally oriented, like searching for some course grained items and then doing a new query on that subset. I would prefer this to be more declaratively oriented, don't tell the system how to do it tell it what to get!. This is what has been working well with RDBMS'es for the last 15 (maybe even more) years. Maybe it just because I didn't understand the example?

Richard Öberg in the audience asks what are the maingoctchass. One of the gotchas with JavaSpaces and the way that C24 applies the technology is classloading, understanding the nature of the distribution and multithreading issues in grid environments.

What kind of knowledge will you need to implement this technology effectively. Knowledge of grid computing and products technologies that may have been around for a while without having to much momentum is definitely an issue. This might be a major challenge in implementing grid computing effectively.