PatHelland's WebLog

Many kinds of computing are "append-only". By that, I mean that observations about the world are recorded in perpetuity. Derived results from those observations may be calculated on demand (or kept as a running tally) but you can't rewrite history. I...

As I watch the REST versus non-REST discussion, it occurs to me that there are a number of aspects to the debate. While I am not attempting to address all of these aspects, I think that part of the discussion revolves around DATA versus BEHAVIOR. When...

This definitely falls into the category of TMI (Too Much Information) but it seems to be the way of the blogosphere so what the hell... I had been obese basically all my life. I remember being overweight at age 8 and enjoying overeating. I was over...

Bill de hOra and my old friend (from our Amazon days) Mike Dierken commented on my use of SOA versus "distributed systems". There was also an interest in my perspective on the CAP Conjecture . Let me spew forth some thoughts... It may be a bit unusual...

My friend Harry Pierson points out that I am blogging-challenged and didn't include the links to my paper and talk. This talk and paper were given at CIDR (Conference on Innovative Database Research) on Jan 8th, 2007. Thanks, Harry! - Pat

Well, here I am blogging on the bus with my newly installed Windows Live Writer!!! This blog is a text version of a five minute "Gong Show" presentation I did at CIDR (Conference on Innovative Database Research) on Jan 8,2007. All computing can be considered...

Wow! It’s been over two years since I’ve blogged or had much of a public presence and I am VERY glad to return. There is SO much to tell all of you. First of all, I returned to Microsoft on March 5 th after being gone for two years (to the day…...

To all my dear friends, As most of you know, last year was very difficult for me with first my mother passing away in May, and then my wife of 29 years, Michelle, passing away in September. Since Michelle died, I have gone through a myriad of changes...

Just an update on how things are going personally… It’s been more than 3-1/2 months since my wife, Michelle, passed away and things are settling into a new normal. It is very hard to be without her but I am very, very grateful for the wonderful family...

To all of my friends, It has been a very difficult year for me at home and I have been postponing and procrastinating writing this blog entry. Yet, I have had a hard time conceiving of adding to my blog until this is written. First of all, my mother passed...

I always talk about "Long Running Work" and steadfastly avoid "Long Running Transactions"... My preference is to use the word "transaction" to mean an atomic operation that occurs at a single service within a second or so. I mean the ACID ( A tomic C...

Again, always busy... I had only 5 days at home and then I was off again, this time to Atlanta for the Microsoft Global Briefing where all the Microsofties from the field gather once a year. Since this event is in Atlanta and my Aunt Peggy lives...

Howdy, Everyone! I am just back from an 8 day trip to Amsterdam where I gave 6 sessions (and helped with one more). It was an exhausting trip with little sleep and I am happy to say I actually saw a bit of the beautiful city of Amsterdam on Saturday...

Sorry about the long delay in blogging... I was supposed to present at TechEd SanDiego a few weeks ago but my mother passed away on May 19th... We will all miss her, especially my 84 year old father who is quite lonely now... I wanted to tell everyone...

Sorry for the long quiet... family medical stuff... lots of travel... lots of excuses... I'll try to do better... Looks like I got an MSDN front page for an article I wrote that was published in Journal a few weeks ago. I got asked to post the following...

I have had an amazing amount of commentary to get back to people on... At first, I was traveling and then busy with family stuff... then I looked and there were a lot of good (and some very long) discussions that had arisen. I am only part way through...

One of the blog comments I received was: re: More Discussion of SOA is like the Night Sky... 3/26/2004 5:03 PM John Cavnar-Johnson Re: http://blogs.msdn.com/pathelland/archive/2004/03/22/94000.aspx#97068 This was a really cool discussion...

I received some thoughtful commentary from someone named John and I thought I would share his comments and some of my responses with you all. I’m still trying to get used to Blogging and don’t know how to give better attribution to John than...

Well, I’m sitting on a plane from Washington DC to Orlando and it’s Wednesday evening, March 17 th . Had a great weekend! We (Michelle and I) arrived Friday afternoon to see our daughter and grandkids. Saturday was especially fun...

I frequently find that people have a different perspective of computing than I do. When I think about it, I am struck by the independence and separation that different systems (i.e. independent services) have from each other. In many ways, this reminds...

We expect around 20 people to the house for dinner tonight. That's just immediate family. My granddaughter, Adriana, is turning 14 tomorrow and we are going to have the Washington State part of the family over for dinner. The 25 includes only my 3 local...

Some of you may know that I have hundreds of PEZ dispensers in my office and a neon sign that says the PEZ man... My office isn't boring! Anyway, last night my wife, Michelle, and I were at QFC (a local supermarket) and I found the new Easter PEZ dispensers...

I am concerned about how to interpret a “service” and a “system” as differentiated from an application or a hardware node (or Windows “box”). There seems to be no small amount of confusion about the crisp definition...

Howdy! My name is Pat Helland and I’ve been around Microsoft for almost 10 years as an architect. I’ve been working on transaction and application execution stuff for 25 years or so and I guess that makes me an old man… at Microsoft...