McObject eXtremeDB — a solidDB alternative
McObject — vendor of memory-centric DBMS eXtremeDB — is a tiny, tiny company, without a development team of the size one would think needed to turn out one or more highly-reliable DBMS. So I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about whether it’s a serious alternative to solidDB for embedded DBMS, e.g. in telecom equipment. However:
- IBM’s acquisition of Solid seems to suggest a focus on DB2 caching rather than the embedded market
- McObject actually has built up something of a customer list, as per the boilerplate on any of its press releases.
And they do seem to have some nice features, including Patricia tries (like solidDB), R-trees (for geospatial), and some kind of hybrid disk-centric/memory-centric operation.
| Categories: GIS and geospatial, In-memory DBMS, McObject, Memory-centric data management, solidDB | 6 Comments |
The week of trivial press releases
TDWI has several conferences per year, including one this week. And so companies active in data warehousing feel they must put out several press releases a year timed for TDWI conferences, whether or not anything newsworthy has actually happened. So far, the only one I’ve gotten of any real substance was Vertica’s (and, in compliance with Murphy’s Law, even that was glitched in its release). Most are yawnworthy product partnerships, adding some useful but me-too feature to somebody’s product line. Worst of all was the announcement that a certain vendor had established an indirect sales channel — after over a decade in the marketplace, when all its other competitors already have one.
Usually I love my work, but there are exceptions …
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing | 1 Comment |
Vertica in the cloud
I may have gotten confused again as to an embargo date, but if so, then this time I had it late rather than early. Anyhow, the TDWI-timed news is that Vertica is now available in the Amazon cloud. Of course, the new Vertica cloud offering is:
- Super-easy to set up
- Pay-as-you-go.
Slightly less obviously:
- Vertica insists its software was designed for grid computing from the ground up, and hence doesn’t need Elastra’s administrative aids for starting, stopping, and/or provisioning instances.
- This is a natural fit for new or existing Vertica customers in data mart outsourcing.
Other coverage:
Related link
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Cloud computing, Data warehousing, Software as a Service (SaaS), Vertica Systems | 1 Comment |
Vertica update
Another TDWI conference approaches. Not coincidentally, I had another Vertica briefing. Primary subjects included some embargoed stuff, plus (at my instigation) outsourced data marts. But I also had the opportunity to follow up on a couple of points from February’s briefing, namely:
Vertica has about 35 paying customers. That doesn’t sound like a lot more than they had a quarter ago, but first quarters can be slow.
Vertica’s list price is $150K/terabyte of user data. That sounds very high versus the competition. On the other hand, if you do the math versus what they told me a few months ago — average initial selling price $250K or less, multi-terabyte sites — it’s obvious that discounting is rampant, so I wouldn’t actually assume that Vertica is a high-priced alternative.
Vertica does stress several reasons for thinking its TCO is competitive. First, with all that compression and performance, they think their hardware costs are very modest. Second, with the self-tuning, they think their DBA costs are modest too. Finally, they charge only for deployed data; the software that stores copies of data for development and test is free.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression, Pricing, Vertica Systems | 10 Comments |
Database blades are not what they used to be
In which we bring you another instantiation of Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics: Bad jargon drives out good.
When Enterprise DB announced a partnership with Truviso for a “blade,” I naturally assumed they were using the term in a more-or-less standard way, and hence believed that it was more than a “Barney” press release.* Silly me. Rather than referring to something closely akin to “datablade,” EnterpriseDB’s “blade” program turns out to just to be a catchall set of partnerships.
*A “Barney” announcement is one whose entire content boils down to “I love you; you love me.”
According to EnterpriseDB CTO Bob Zurek, the main features of the “blade” program include: Read more
| Categories: Data types, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Open source, PostgreSQL | 5 Comments |
Outsourced data marts
Call me slow on the uptake if you like, but it’s finally dawned on me that outsourced data marts are a nontrivial segment of the analytics business. For example:
- I was just briefed by Vertica, and got the impression that data mart outsourcers may be Vertica’s #3 vertical market, after financial services and telecom. Certainly it seems like they are Vertica’s #3 market if you bundle together data mart outsourcers and more conventional OEMs.
- When Netezza started out, a bunch of its early customers were credit data-based analytics outsourcers like Acxiom.
- After nagging DATAllegro for a production reference, I finally got a good one — TEOCO. TEOCO specializes in figuring out whether inter-carrier telcom bills are correct. While there’s certainly a transactional invoice-processing aspect to this, the business seems to hinge mainly around doing calculations to figure out correct charges.
- I was talking with Pervasive about Pervasive Datarush, a beta product that lets you do super-fast analytics on data even if you never load it into a DBMS in the first place. I challenged them for use cases. One user turns out to be an insurance claims rule-checking outsourcer.
- One of Infobright’s references is a French CRM analytics outsourcer, 1024 Degres.
- 1010data has built up a client base of 50-60, including a number of financial and retail blue-chippers, with a soup-to-nuts BI/analysis/columnar database stack.
- I haven’t heard much about Verix in a while, but their niche was combining internal sales figures with external point-of-sale/prescription data to assess retail (especially pharma) microtrends.
To a first approximation, here’s what I think is going on. Read more