Another dubious “end of computer history” argument
In a typically snarky Register article, Chris Mellor raises a caution about the use of future many-cored chips in IT. In essence, he says that today’s apps run in a relatively small number of threads each, and modifying them to run in many threads is too difficult. Hence, most of the IT use for many-cored chips will be via hypervisors that assign apps to cores as makes sense.
Mellor has a point, but he’s overstating it. Read more
| Categories: Parallelization, Theory and architecture | 3 Comments |
The Teradata Accelerate program
An article in Intelligent Enterprise clued me in that Teradata has announced the Teradata Accelerate program. A little poking around revealed a press release in which — lo and behold — I am quoted,* to wit:
“The Teradata Accelerate program is a great idea. There’s no safer choice than Teradata technology plus Teradata consulting, bundled in a fixed-cost offering,” said Curt Monash, president of Monash Research. “The Teradata Purpose Built Platform Family members are optimized for a broad range of business intelligence and analytic uses.”
| Categories: Data warehousing, Pricing, Teradata | Leave a Comment |
High-end MySQL use
To a large extent, MySQL lives in two different alternate universes from most other DBMS. One is for low-end, simple database applications. For example, of all the DBMS I write about, MySQL is the one I actually use in my own business — because MySQL sits underneath WordPress, and WordPress is what runs my blogs. My largest database (the one for DBMS2) contains 12 megabytes of data in 11 tables, none of which has yet reached 5000 rows in size. Read more
| Categories: Google, MySQL, OLTP, Open source, Parallelization | 1 Comment |
Interpreting the results of data warehouse proofs-of-concept (POCs)
When enterprises buy new brands of analytic DBMS, they almost always run proofs-of-concept (POCs) in the form of private benchmarks. The results are generally confidential, but that doesn’t keep a few stats from occasionally leaking out. As I noted recently, those leaks are problematic on multiple levels. For one thing, even if the results are to be taken as accurate and basically not-misleading, the way vendors describe them leaves a lot to be desired.
Here’s a concrete example to illustrate the point. One of my vendor clients sent over the stats from a recent POC, in which its data warehousing product was compared against a name-brand incumbent. 16 reports were run. The new product beat the old 16 out of 16 times. The lowest margin was a 1.8X speed-up, while the best was a whopping 335.5X.
My client helpfully took the “simple average” — i.e. the mean – of the 16 factors, and described this as an average 62X drubbing. But is that really fair? Read more
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Buying processes, Data warehousing | 7 Comments |
MySQL Query Analyzer
Given how the product’s rollout has been handled, it seems necessary to comment on MySQL’s recently released MySQL Query Analyzer without actually having much information on the subject. Mark Callaghan offers a good take — he’s generally very favorable, but notes that MySQL has some limitations that Query Analyzer has trouble getting around.
| Categories: MySQL | 2 Comments |
Silly website tricks
Vertica’s marketing is usually good-to-outstanding, but they made a funny misstep this time. If you go to the Vertica home page, you’ll see seasonal art suggesting that their product is a turkey and/or that it’s terrified it’s about to get the ax.
Live by the pun, die by the pun.
| Categories: Humor, Vertica Systems | 6 Comments |
Graphjam: I can haz BI
Charts and graphs, from the folks who brought you a whole lot of cute kitten photos:
| Categories: Business intelligence, Fun stuff, Humor | Leave a Comment |
When people don’t want accurate predictions made about them
In a recent article on governmental anti-terrorism data mining efforts — and the privacy risks associated with same — The Economist wrote (emphasis mine):
Abdul Bakier, a former official in Jordan’s General Intelligence Department, says that tips to foil data-mining systems are discussed at length on some extremist online forums. Tricks such as calling phone-sex hotlines can help make a profile less suspicious. “The new generation of al-Qaeda is practising all that,” he says.
Well, duh. Terrorists and fraudsters don’t want to be detected. Algorithms that rely on positive evidence of bad intent may work anyway. But if you rely on evidence that shows people are not bad actors, that’s likely to work about as well as Bayesian spam detectors.* Read more
High-performance analytics
For the past few months, I’ve collected a lot of data points to the effect that high-performance analytics – i.e., beyond straightforward query — is becoming increasingly important. And I’ve written about some of them at length. For example:
- MapReduce – controversial or in some cases even disappointing though it may be – has a lot of use cases.
- It’s early days, but Netezza and Teradata (and others) are beefing up their geospatial analytic capabilities.
- Memory-centric analytics is in the spotlight.
Ack. I can’t decide whether “analytics” should be a singular or plural noun. Thoughts?
Another area that’s come up which I haven‘t blogged about so much is data mining in the database. Data mining accounts for a large part of data warehouse use. The traditional way to do data mining is to extract data from the database and dump it into SAS. But there are problems with this scenario, including: Read more
| Categories: Aster Data, Data warehousing, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Greenplum, MapReduce, Netezza, Oracle, Parallelization, SAS Institute, Teradata | 6 Comments |
Beyond query
I sometimes describe database management systems as “big SQL interpreters,” because that’s the core of what they do. But it’s not all they do, which is why I describe them as “electronic file clerks” too. File clerks don’t just store and fetch data; they also put a lot of work into neatening, culling, and generally managing the health of their information hoards.
Already 15 years ago, online backup was as big a competitive differentiator in the database wars as any particular SQL execution feature. Security became important in some market segments. Reliability and availability have been important from the getgo. And manageability has been crucial ever since Microsoft lapped Oracle in that regard, back when SQL Server had little else to recommend it except price.*
*Before Oracle10g, the SQL Server vs. Oracle manageability gap was big.
Now data warehousing is demanding the same kinds of infrastructure richness.* Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Oracle | 1 Comment |