Google Fusion Tables
Google has announced an experimental cloud-based data management system called Fusion Tables. A press article and Slashdot thread ensued, based on some bizarre-sounding analyst quotes that I will not attempt to parse.
What Fusion Tables really seems to be is a spreadsheet without the formulae. That is, it’s a place to dump data in a grid of cells, comment on it, version it, and do elementary data manipulation. This could, I guess, be useful as an alternative to traditional RDBMS — assuming, of course, that you want to have a row-by-row debate about 100 megs of data.
Seriously, while Google Fusion Tables bears some vague resemblance to what I’m thinking about for the future of both business intelligence and data marts, it sounds as if it has a long way to go before it’s something most enterprises should spend time looking at.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Google, Theory and architecture | 1 Comment |
MMO games are still screwed up in their database technology
Two years ago I wrote about the database technology of Guild Wars. Not coincidentally, Guild Wars was the MMO RPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) I then played. I had the chance to interview Guild Wars’ lead developers. While much else they had to say was impressive, Guild Wars’ database architecture was — er, it was rather mind-boggling.
Since then, Linda and I have taken to playing Lord of the Rings Online, commonly known as LOTRO, developed by Turbine, Inc.. I haven’t had the chance to interview any Turbine folks, despite repeated requests. But from afar, it would seem that Turbine’s technology choices leave quite a bit to be desired, in enterprise-like IT areas such as authentication, database management, and storage.
LOTRO and other Turbine games commonly are down, for scheduled maintenance or in some cases otherwise. There is scheduled multi-hour downtime to start many weeks. There are fairly frequent server restarts in addition to that. Lag and congestion are frequent. And so on and so forth. By way of contrast, Guild Wars very rarely goes down, and other technical difficulties are less common as well. Reliability is a key design goal for Guild Wars’ developers, and in my opinion they’ve achieved it.
Some of the reasons for Turbine’s difficulties seem related to the stresses of MMOs — e.g., they’re probably due to the problems caused by having many fictional characters moving through the same fictional space at once, with graphical detail much richer than Guild Wars’. But a couple of head-scratchers make me really wonder about how Turbine manages data. Read more
| Categories: Fun stuff, Games and virtual worlds, Specific users | 18 Comments |
Two lessons from Dataupia’s troubles
I’ve been beating my head against the wall trying to convince startups of two well-established truisms:
- Experience consistently shows that the demand for transparency/emulation features isn’t as great as entrepreneurs hope.
- If a startup’s competitors sell directly to enterprises, an indirect sales strategy rarely succeeds.
Maybe one or the other will learn from Dataupia’s example.
Dataupia’s troubles are now confirmed
Todd Fin pointed me yesterday to an article by Wade Roush that confirmed in detail layoffs and other troubles at Dataupia. The article quotes Dataupia marketing VP Samantha Stone as saying Dataupia is down to 23 employees, and that some of the layoffs were in engineering. This is consistent with what I’d been hearing for a while, namely that other analytic DBMS vendors were seeing a flood of Dataupia resumes, especially technical ones.
The article goes on to discuss difficulties Dataupia has had in raising another round of financing. During Dataupia’s very long CEO search — which I kept hearing about from people who’d been approached for the job — it was obvious money wouldn’t come in until a CEO was found. But it seems that even with a new CEO, existing investors are reluctant to re-up without a new investor as well, and that new investment is slow in happening.
On the plus side, the article quotes Samantha as saying founder Foster Hinshaw is recovering well from his heart surgery.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Dataupia, Emulation, transparency, portability | 3 Comments |
Netezza Q1 earning call transcript
I finally read the Netezza Q1 earnings call transcript, put out by Seeking Alpha. Highlights included:
- Netezza got 14 new-name accounts and 21 follow-on deals. Average sale in both groups was right around $1 million.
- The economy is tough, deals are slipping, and nobody knows for sure what will happen.
- Netezza’s main head-to-head competitors are Oracle and Teradata. Netezza claims good but not perfect win rates against each, but concedes that those vendors (especially Oracle) of course get other deals Netezza never sees.
- Netezza characterizes Teradata as offering its multiple product lines, trying to upsell many customers from cheaper to more expensive product lines, and being selectively aggressive about pricing. None of this is surprising to me.
- 80% of Netezza’s Q1 revenue, and perhaps even a higher fraction of new-name accounts, was in four vertical markets: “Digital media,” telecom, government, and financial services.
- Some time over the next few months, Netezza will give at least some more clarity about future products.
One tip for the Netezza folks, by the way, from this former stock analyst — you should never use the word “certainly” about a deal you haven’t closed yet. “Almost surely” could be OK, but “certainly” — well, it certainly was not the thing to say.
Aster Data sticks by its SQL/MapReduce guns
Aster Data continues to think that MapReduce, integrated with SQL, is an important technology. For example:
- Aster announced today that it’s providing .NET support for SQL/MapReduce. Perhaps not coincidentally, Aster’s biggest customer is MySpace, which is apparently a big Microsoft shop. (And MySpace parent Fox Interactive Media is a SQL/MapReduce fan, albeit running on Greenplum.)
- Aster generally puts more emphasis on MapReduce than SQL/MapReduce rival Greenplum. That’s a non-trivial comparison, because Greenplum is making progress in SQL/MapReduce itself.
- When talking with Aster folks, I can’t get them to shut up hear a lot about SQL/MapReduce.
I was a big fan of SQL/MapReduce when it was first announced last August. Notwithstanding persuasive examples favoring pure DBMS or pure MapReduce over DBMS/MapReduce integration, I continue to think the SQL/MapReduce idea has great potential. But I do wish more successful production examples would become visible …
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Data warehousing, Fox and MySpace, Greenplum, MapReduce, Parallelization | 4 Comments |
Per-terabyte pricing
Software-only DBMS vendors sometimes price per terabyte of user data. Vertica’s list price is $100K/TB. Greenplum’s list price is $70K/TB. In practice, both offer substantial discounts, especially at higher volumes. In both cases, this means raw data, uncompressed, without counting indexes or temp space.
Client experience teaches me that this definition is easy to forget, so let me reemphasize the key point:
Per-terabyte pricing is based on a calculated figure. Per-terabyte pricing is not based on the current disk space used by your database when managed by the DBMS you are replacing.
There’s at least one important difference in how Vertica and Greenplum calculate database size. No matter how many times you copy the data, Vertica only charges you for it once.* But if you spin out data marts and recopy data into it — as Greenplum rightly encourages you to do — Greenplum wants to be paid for each copy. Similarly, Vertica charges only for deployment, and not for test or development; I didn’t remember to ask what Greenplum’s policies are in those regards. (Edit: Greenplum says in a comment below that it doesn’t charge for test or development data either.)
*That policy is a great fit with Vertica’s performance recommendation that you should store columns in different sort orders, perhaps an average of two copies per column.
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Pricing, Vertica Systems | 7 Comments |
Greenplum blogs about some customers
I’ve written some about Greenplum’s customers at eBay and Fox Interactive Media. But as I recently grumped, I’m not in the mood right now to write much about other Greenplum customers. Fortunately, Greenplum has filled the gap itself. Marketing chief Paul Salazar just blogged about a number of other big Greenplum customers. And last month Paul blogged in considerable detail about what he characterizes as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) conversion — Oracle replacement — at a large pharmaceutical company.
| Categories: Application areas, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Oracle | Leave a Comment |
The future of data marts
Greenplum is announcing today a long-term vision, under the name Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC). Key observations around the concept — mixing mine and Greenplum’s together — include:
- Data marts aren’t just for performance (or price/performance). They also exist to give individual analysts or small teams control of their analytic destiny.
- Thus, it would be really cool if business users could have their own analytic “sandboxes” — virtual or physical analytic databases that they can manipulate without breaking anything else.
- In any case, business users want to analyze data when they want to analyze it. It is often unwise to ask business users to postpone analysis until after an enterprise data model can be extended to fully incorporate the new data they want to look at.
- Whether or not you agree with that, it’s an empirical fact that enterprises have many legacy data marts (or even, especially due to M&A, multiple legacy data warehouses). Similarly, it’s an empirical fact that many business users have the clout to order up new data marts as well.
- Consolidating data marts onto one common technological platform has important benefits.
In essence, Greenplum is pitching the story:
- Thesis: Enterprise Data Warehouses (EDWs)
- Antithesis: Data Warehouse Appliances
- Synthesis: Greenplum’s Enterprise Data Cloud vision
When put that starkly, it’s overstated, not least because
Specialized Analytic DBMS != Data Warehouse Appliance
But basically it makes sense, for two main reasons:
- Analysis is performed on all sorts of novel data, from sources far beyond an enterprise’s core transactions. This data neither has to fit nor particularly benefits from being tightly fitted into the core enterprise data model. Requiring it to do so is just an unnecessary and painful bureaucratic delay.
- On the other hand, consolidation can be a good idea even when systems don’t particularly interoperate. Data marts, which commonly do in part interoperate with central data stores, have all the more reason to be consolidated onto a central technology platform/stack.
More on Fox Interactive Media’s use of Greenplum
Greenplum’s most important reference is probably its energetic advocate Fox Interactive Media, even ahead of much larger user Greenplum user eBay, and notwithstanding Aster Data’s large presence in Fox subsidiary MySpace. I just ran across a “review” of Greenplum by FIM’s Brian Dolan, neatly summarizing his views about Greenplum’s strengths, weaknesses, and uses inside Fox. Highlights include: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Fox and MySpace, Greenplum, Web analytics | 2 Comments |