September 15, 2008

Infobright’s open source move has a lot of potential

Infobright announced today that it’s going full-bore into open source – specifically in the MySQL ecosystem — with the licensing approach, pricing, distribution strategy, and VC money from Sun that such a move naturally entails. I think this is a great idea, for a number of reasons:

On the downside, since Infobright is the first serious open source analytic DBMS – or maybe the second after MonetDB, but that’s not well promoted – the market is quite unproven. For example, even when open source BI products like Jaspersoft do get enterprise adoption, their use cases aren’t necessarily the ones Infobright would fit with.

Posts today on open source DBMS

Comments

4 Responses to “Infobright’s open source move has a lot of potential”

  1. Infobright update | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on September 15th, 2008 8:06 am

    […] Infobright is open sourcing its analytical DBMS product (which is a really good idea) […]

  2. Infobright goes open source — sound bites | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on September 15th, 2008 8:06 am

    […] when there is industry news, I herewith provide quotable sound bites about Infobright and its move to an open source strategy. Weather permitting, I’ll be on a plane to the Netezza conference this afternoon. And […]

  3. Victoria Eastwood on September 15th, 2008 6:11 pm

    Regarding your question about ACID compliance, we have not seen a requirement for it to date, as customers and prospects use source system integrity enforcement and the ETL process to ensure integrity of the data and prefer this over enforcing integrity on load (which slows the load down and is often unnecessary if strong data quality management is in place). If however our customers or community see it as a requirement, we would certainly consider it as part of our product roadmap. One of the great benefits to us of the open source model is to get very direct feedback on what is needed – and we look forward to that.

    In regard to the “serious limitations” you mention, some features are available with the use of third party products so they don’t get referenced in our product information, such as backup tools, monitoring tools etc. Since they can be easily implemented we don’t see these as limitation. Of course we’ll be adding additional features in both ICE and IEE every quarter or so, so both products will continue to evolve. We are also focused on the data warehousing market place and many features of a traditional database system are simply not used (nor demanded by our customers). We are not trying to provide a solution for the very high end of the market – where companies have 100’s of terabytes and up, and have the millions of dollars and scores of highly technical experts to plan and implement a complex solution. We think for those companies who need a product that can support up to about 30TB of data, don’t have millions to spend or lots of DBAs, Infobright’s solution will be a great fit.

    Cheers -Victoria

  4. Jay Jakosky on September 16th, 2008 4:15 pm

    The marketing for InfoBright talks about sizes from 500GB to 30TB. I think that InfoBright Community Edition will see most of its adoption in small companies with just a few gigabytes. These are companies that report directly against the transactional system and use canned structured reports. InfoBright is one half of a low/no-cost reporting system that allows speed-of-thought interactivity. What emerges is a game changer in every business I’ve consulted to. It’s hard to sell an emergent benefit. QlikView, my preferred tool, relies on on-site proof-of-concepts that invariably amaze customers. I’m eager to have open-source tools to build these systems for a tenth of the cost of QlikView, which is itself a tenth of the cost of its predecessors.

    http://andpointsbeyond.com/2008/09/16/infobright-open-source-column-store-dbms/

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