Infobright update
In connection with the announcements that:
- Infobright is open sourcing its analytical DBMS product (which is a really good idea)
- Infobright raised a $10 million VC round, with Sun as a new investor
I got my first real Infobright update since January. Highlights included: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Open source | 2 Comments |
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: Read more
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Open source | 4 Comments |
Infobright goes open source — sound bites
As has recently become my custom 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 I’ve only slept about 10 hours since Thursday. So I hope these suffice, although if they don’t and you email me I’ll try to respond by some time Tuesday morning.
- For almost anybody in the MySQL world who needs high-performance analytics, Infobright is the first good solution.
- Infobright’s product strengths and use cases are a great match for open source.
- Most leading analytic DBMS have open source roots, but they generally haven’t been open sourced themselves. Infobright immediately becomes one of the premier open source analytic database offerings. The only serious open source rival that’s coming to mind is MonetDB.
- Storage engines are MySQL’s achilles heel. Each good MySQL storage engine is precious.
- Infobright has enough production references to show that it can get the job done for many data mart uses. It won’t meet everybody’s needs, but it’s well worth an experimental download.
- If you want to build a little data mart and run it yourself, most good products are too complicated or expensive. But in the right use cases, Infobright pretty much runs itself, and there’s no arguing with the Community Edition price (free).
- So Infobright is a great fit for the individual downloader – i.e., for the stereotypical open source user.
- Netezza, DATAllegro, Vertica, ParAccel, Greenplum, and Aster Data are all based in one way or another on PostgreSQL (even though Vertica includes no PostgreSQL code). DATAllegro was based on Ingres. Infobright and Kickfire are based on MySQL.
- If Infobright doesn’t get the job done, try downloading Vertica, which – while closed source – is also free for download and development.
- The “rough set” part of Infobright’s story is a lot of mumbo-jumbo, but the “knowledge grid” part is more real.
- When you compare Infobright to Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum, or even Vertica, it’s kind of a toy. But when you compare it to generic MySQL, it’s more like rocket science.
- Infobright was too little, too late in the mainstream analytic DBMS market. They had to do something different. Kudos to them for recognizing that.
- The Infobright product has some serious limitations. If you want a market that’s willing to adopt a DBMS with serious limitations, the MySQL world is the place for you.
Posts today on open source DBMS
- Infobright’s smart move to open source
- General Infobright update
- Infobright sound bites
- The many faces of open source DBMS
| Categories: Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Open source | 3 Comments |
Introduction to Jaspersoft – the actual business
There were so many numbers in my introductory call with Jaspersoft that I’ve split them out in a separate post. With that out of the way, here’s what’s really going on, per Nick Halsey.
The Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite is BI technology designed to be integrated with operational apps. Thus, Jaspersoft says that operational BI is the core of its business. In particular: Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence, Jaspersoft, Open source | 3 Comments |
Jaspersoft numbers
I chatted Friday with marketing VP Nick Halsey of Jaspersoft, which is probably the most successful open source business intelligence company. (That’s based just anecdotally, on mentions. I’d put Pentaho #2, with Talend commonly getting mentioned along with the two BI vendors for its ETL.) I’ll go straight to the numbers, per Nick, before talking in a separate post about what Jaspersoft actually sells.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Jaspersoft, Market share and customer counts, Open source, Pricing | 7 Comments |
An urban legend instantiated!
An oft-repeated story of an early BI or data mining success is the discovery that men who go to convenience stores at night tend to buy both beer and diapers, and hence it is a good idea to juxtapose those two product categories in the aisles. Sadly, that seems to just be an urban legend. Even so:
Even better — the guy in the picture is Microsoft’s data mining development lead. 🙂
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence | Leave a Comment |
How will SSDs get incorporated into data warehousing?
SSDs (Solid-State Drives) have gotten a lot of recent attention as an eventual replacement for spinning disk. I haven’t researched expected timelines in detail, but George Crump offered a plausible scenario recently in a highly visible Information Week blog post. After the great recent (and still ongoing!) discussion in the SAN vs. DAS comment thread, I’d like to throw some questions out for discussion, including:
- Just how much faster than disk will SSDs be than disk for random reads?
- Will SSDs be faster or slow than disk for sequential reads, and by how much?
- What will the speed comparison be on SSDs between sequential and random reads?
- How many times will it be possible to write to an SSD? Will this be a problem?
- Will DBMS — which today invariably assume that storage is homogeneous — need to take account of storage heterogeneity?
- What are the implications of SSDs for database and DBMS architecture?
I commented on some of these issues a year ago. Now it’s your turn. 🙂
| Categories: Data warehousing, Solid-state memory, Storage | 5 Comments |
Top DBMS on Linux
I was looking up George Crump’s blogs in connection with his recent post on SSDs, and I stumbled upon one that outlines at great length what features Linux backup systems should have. I won’t claim to have read it word for word, but what did catch my eye were a couple of comments on DBMS market share, which boiled down to:
- Oracle
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
| Categories: IBM and DB2, Market share and customer counts, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL | Leave a Comment |
Some Netezza customer metrics
From the conference call based on Netezza’s July, 2008 Q1, as of the end of Q1:
- There are now 191 Netezza customers.
- 18 of those were new.
- 78% of Netezza’s business was in North America and 22% was international.
- Netezza operates in 10 countries.
- “The top 4 vertical markets represented approximately 75% of our business, with those markets being telcos, retail, financial services, and the analytic service provider segment. “
- One analytic service provider was greater than 10% of revenue for the quarter, and is expected to keep buying a lot in subsequent quarters. Also, one analytic service provider standardized on Netezza. I’m guessing that’s the same customer.
- “We ended the quarter with 45 [quota] carrying teams made up of a sales rep and a systems engineer and our plan is to continue to hire direct sales teams at the pace of 3 to 5 per quarter every quarter. These direct reps accounted for 85% of the business while the indirect activity was 15% this quarter.”
| Categories: Application areas, Data mart outsourcing, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Market share and customer counts, Netezza, Telecommunications | 1 Comment |
Teradata’s major vertical markets in 2007
From a May, 2008 earnings conference call transcript:
- telecommunication, media and entertainment industry is 28%;
- financial services is 24%;
- retail is 19% of our revenues last year;
- manufacturing 9%;
- government 7%;
- travel and transportation 6%;
- and healthcare 5%.