Pervasive Summit PSQL v10
Pervasive Software has a long history – 25 years, in fact, as they’re emphasizing in some current marketing. Ownership and company name have changed a few times, as the company went from being an independent startup to being owned by Novell to being independent again. The original product, and still the cash cow, was a linked-list DBMS called Btrieve, eventually renamed Pervasive PSQL as it gained more and more relational functionality.
Pervasive Summit PSQL v10 has just been rolled out, and I wrote a nice little white paper to commemorate the event, describing some of the main advances over v9, primarily for the benefit of current Pervasive PSQL developers. In one major advance, Pervasive made the SQL functionality much stronger. In particular, you now can have a regular SQL data dictionary, so that the database can be used for other purposes – BI, additional apps, whatever. Apparently, that wasn’t possible before, although it had been possible in yet earlier releases. Pervasive also added view-based security permissions, which is obviously a Very Good Thing.
There also are some big performance boosts. Read more
Some pushback from DATAllegro against the columnar argument
I was chatting with Stuart Frost this evening (DATAllegro’s CEO). As usual, I grilled him about customer counts; as usual, he was evasive, but expressed general ebullience about the pace of business; also as usual, he was charming and helpful on other subjects.
In particular, we talked about the Vertica story, and he offered some interesting pushback. Part was blindingly obvious — Vertica’s not in the marketplace yet, when they are the product won’t be mature, and so on. Part was the also obvious “we can do most of that ourselves” line of argument, some of which I’ve summarized in a comment here. But he made two other interesting points as well. Read more
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Theory and architecture, Vertica Systems | 1 Comment |
The core of the Vertica story still seems to be compression
Back in March, I suggested that compression was a central and compelling aspect of Vertica’s story. Well, in their new blog, the Vertica guys now strongly reinforce that impression.
I recommend those two Database Column posts (by Sam Madden) highly. I’ve rarely seen such a clear, detailed presentation of a company’s technical argument. My own thoughts on the subject boil down to:
- In principle, all the technology (and hence all the technological advantages) they’re talking about could be turned into features of one of the indexing options of a row-oriented RDBMS. But in practice, there’s no indication that this will happen any time soon.
- Release 1 of the Vertica product will surely have many rough edges.
- Some startups are surprisingly ignorant of the issue involved in building a successful, industrial-strength DBMS. But a company that has both Mike Stonebraker and Jerry Held seriously involved has a big advantage. They may make other kinds of errors, but they won’t make many ignorant ones.
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression, Michael Stonebraker, Theory and architecture, Vertica Systems | 5 Comments |
Three bold assertions by Mike Stonebraker
In the first “meat” — i.e., other than housekeeping — post on the new Database Column blog, Mike Stonebraker makes three core claims:
1. Different DBMS should be used for different purposes. I am in violent agreement with that point, which is indeed a major theme of this blog.
2. Vertica’s software is 50X faster than anything non-columnar and 10X faster than anything columnar. Now, some of these stats surely come from the syndrome of comparing the future release of your product, as tuned by world’s greatest experts on it who also hope to get rich on their stock options in your company, vs. some well-established production release of your competitors’ products, tuned to an unknown level of excellence,* with the whole thing running test queries that you, in your impartial wisdom, deem representative of user needs. Or something like that … Read more
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database diversity, Michael Stonebraker, OLTP, Theory and architecture, TransRelational | 3 Comments |
The Vertica guys have their own blog now
I’ve written a considerable amount about Vertica and/or the opinions of Mike Stonebraker. Now the Vertica guys have their own blog, which they pledge will not just be a rehash of Vertica marketing pitches — notwithstanding the Vertica-related wordplay in the blog’s name.*
*Those guys are good at wordplay.
| Categories: Columnar database management, Humor, Vertica Systems | 1 Comment |
Applix – Three huge opportunities Cognos will probably ignore
If I weren’t on a snorkeling vacation,* this might be a good time to write about why I once called Cognos “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” how Ron Zambonini used that label to help him gain the company’s top spot, why he’s such a big fan of mine, why I got my highest ever per-minute speaking fee to attend a Cognos sales kickoff event, why I went for a midnight touristing stroll in downtown Ottawa in zero degree Fahrenheit weather, or how I managed, while attending the aforementioned Cognos sales kickoff, to get snowed in for three days in, of all places, Dallas, Texas. But the wrasses and jacks await, so I’ll get straight to the point.
*Albeit fairly snorkel-free so far, thanks to Hurricane Felix. 🙁
As I discussed at considerable length in a white paper, Applix’s core technology is fully-featured, memory-centric MOLAP. This is certainly cool technology, and I think it is actually unique. That it’s historically been positioned as the engine for a mid-range set of performance management tools is a travesty, a shame, the result of a prior merger – and also the quite understandable consequence of RAM limitations. However, RAM is ever cheaper and Applix’s technology is now 64-bit, so the RAM barriers have been relaxed. Cognos can take Applix’s TM1 engine high-end if it wants to. And boy, should Cognos ever want to. Indeed, there are three different great ways Cognos could package and position TM1:
- As a no-data-warehouse-design quick-start analytics engine analogous to QlikView (the fastest-growing and most important newish BI suite, open source perhaps excepted);
- As the most sophisticated and versatile planning tool this side of SAP’s APO (and while APO’s sophistication is not in dispute, its versatility is questionable anyway);
- As the processing hub for dashboards-done-right.