Technology Categories edit 
So this has taken far too long, and some proper updates to this site are long overdue, but let’s summarise what I’ve been looking at for the last three weeks. And yes, I said they’d be new content last week, but in the end the stuff I had (which was old from when I was planning the site) just wasn’t up to scratch, so it’s been binned rather than published.
So the big update has been some (minor) structural changes. Firstly, the technology, technology category and technology vendor index pages are now part of the open source content repository for this site, meaning that they’re editable just like any of the technology, vendor or category pages. And secondly, the technology category pages now have a meta description under the header, with the summary of the technology category now moved into the body of the content.
And with the new index pages has come a completely redesigned technology category index page, with all the technology categories now organised into sections (categories!), with a bit more description and structure. And as part of doing this I’ve taken the opportunity to review the technology categories we have and make some tweaks and adjustments - I’m still not entirely happy, but I’ve spent far too much time thinking about it, and it’s time to move on.
But I have made some updates to the technology categories as follows:
- I’ve moved/copied a bunch of commercial and open source Hadoop based technologies from the query engines page to the analytical databases page. I’ve debated for far to long what the different between these categories are, but I think I’ve got to somewhere I’m comfortable with, and hopefully the technology category descriptions now reflect this.
- I’ve added RecordService and the Hive Metastore to the Data Storage Services section of the data storage formats page. I’m thinking about splitting this section out into it’s own category at some point, as the storage of structured data that can then be exploited by multiple tools is an area that requires more consideration.
- I’ve moved the analytical graph databases from the graph analytics page into the analytical databases page, leaving the graph analytics page to focus on graph analytics run over external data. I’ve also broken out the graph databases that also support analytics into their own section.
- The in memory databases page is no longer included on the index page, as all the information is now replicated to other pages with the exception of some operational relational database stuff. Once this has a new home, we’ll drop this category.