August 26th, 2006 Curt Monash
I’ve been interested in the Mark Logic story from the first time CEO Dave Kellogg told me about it. Basically, Mark Logic sells an XML-based DBMS optimized for text search, called MarkLogic Server. For obvious reasons, they don’t want to position it as a DBMS; hence they call it an “XML content server” instead. I posted about their marketing and application focus over on Text Technologies. In this post, I’ll dive a little deeper into the core technology.
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Posted in Hierarchies, networks, graphs, and trees, Mark Logic, Native XML | 1 Comment »
August 17th, 2006 Curt Monash
I chatted with some Business Objects ETL/EIM (Enterprise Information Management) folks today, in a call that was a direct response to what I heard from and posted about Informatica. The core of the Business Objects story can be summarized (albeit brutally!) like this:
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Posted in Business Objects, Business intelligence, Database theory and practice, EII, ETL, and/or EAI | 1 Comment »
August 12th, 2006 Curt Monash
Netezza relies on FPGAs. DATallegro essentially uses standard components, but those include Infiniband cards (and there’s a little FPGA action when they do encryption). Greenplum, however, claims to offer a highly competitive data warehouse solution that’s so software-only you can download it from their web site. That said, their main sales mode seems to also be through appliances, specifically ones branded and sold by Sun, combining Greenplum and open source software on a “Thumper” box. And the whole thing supposedly scales even higher than DATallegro and Netezza, because you can manage over a petabyte if you chain together a dozen of the 100 terabyte racks.
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Posted in DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Greenplum, Ingres, Netezza, Open source RDBMS, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems | 3 Comments »
August 10th, 2006 Curt Monash
QlikTech — the vendor of QlikView — contacted me to tell their memory-centric BI story. A Swedish company with >$23 million in estimated license revenue last year and a 100%ish growth rate, they claim to be the leader in that space, pulling ahead of Applix. But for now, I’ll call them “a” leader, and say that their story sounds like a hybrid between those of Applix (TM1 product) and SAP (BI Accelerator).
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Posted in Business intelligence, Cognos and Applix TM1, Memory-centric data management, QlikTech and QlikView, SAP, BI Accelerator, and MaxDB | 1 Comment »
August 8th, 2006 Curt Monash
Every sufficiently large or agile enterprise needs to follow the DBMS2 approach. The following is from an article on eBay’s version:
“eBay has built a software-based Integration Tier. This contains both a data access layer (DAL) and a services framework. The Integration Tier acts as an abstraction layer for software engineers to work with many disparate back-end data sources through a consistent set of abstractions.”
Posted in EII, ETL, and/or EAI, Specific users, eBay | No Comments »
August 8th, 2006 Curt Monash
An eWeek article suggests that ANTs is repositioning with a strong emphasis on memory-centricity. ANTs’ website, frankly, doesn’t support this theory, giving a more balanced tech overview in line with how they pitched me in a briefing last November. Still, it’s an interesting possibility to watch.
The main focus of the article actually wasn’t ANTs, but rather SAP’s wildest dreams in expanding the scope of its BI Accelerator technology. But the new-to-me part was the positioning of ANTs.
Posted in ANTs Software, Memory-centric data management, Relational database management systems, SAP, BI Accelerator, and MaxDB | 2 Comments »