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It's been the case for every SQL database in practical use since E. F. Codd first came up with the concept: Records either exist or they don't. When you run a SELECT statement, you're querying the current state of the data. A state is either true or false.

If you pay for web hosting in order to run any kind of web-based application-from your WordPress blog to a nameplate site to a file-sharing service to a social media data archive-you need to back up your web server's data the same way you back up your computer's data. On database-driven web sites, there are two kinds of data you want to preserve and restore in case of disaster: the files that make up your site (the PHP/Perl/Python, JavaScript, CSS files, etc), and the contents of your database. Further, any good backup system should make both a local copy and a remote copy of the backed-up data.

The Shared Learning Collaborative, a Gates Foundation-funded initiative, rebranded itself this week. There's a new name - inBloom, Inc. - but the mission and plans remain the same, the new non-profit insists. That mission is to build an open source, cloud-based education data infrastructure in the hopes of addressing a number of problems schools face: the lack of data interoperability between the various databases and software systems that they utilize and the merits of spending money to update outdated administrative IT (versus, say, buying instructional - or other - tech and/or versus spending money on something altogether non-tech).

Data doesn't invade people's lives. Lack of control over how it's used does. What's really driving so-called big data isn't the volume of information. It turns out big data doesn't have to be all that big. Rather, it's about a reconsideration of the fundamental economics of analyzing data. For decades, there's been a fundamental tension between three attributes of databases. You can have the data fast; you can have it big; or you can have it varied. The catch is, you can't have all three at once. O'Reilly Radar (http://s.tt/1kHKE)

Today's lead story in the Observer is a maddening and excellent investigative piece revealing that for three decades, the UK's biggest construction companies worked with British police and spy-agencies to build illegal dossiers on whistle-blowers who complained about unsafe working conditions and trade-unionists. The victims of these investigations -- thousands of them -- were economically ruined as the firms conspired to keep them from being hired at any job-site, and saw to it that if they were ever hired, they were promptly fired.