Merv Adrian on SAND Technology
Merv Adrian blogged about SAND Technology, casting significant doubt on SAND’s business prospects. At this point, I can’t say I disagree. On the other hand, SAND does have public, audited financial statements showing it generating more revenue than a lot of other analytic DBMS or archiving vendors probably make. Columnar DBMS vendors doing better than SAND are Sybase, Vertica, maybe Infobright — and who else?
| Categories: Archiving and information preservation, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, SAND Technology | 1 Comment |
Daniel Abadi on Kickfire and related subjects
Daniel Abadi has a new blog, whose first post centers around Kickfire. The money quote is (emphasis mine):
In order for me to get excited about Kickfire, I have to ignore Mike Stonebraker’s voice in my head telling me that DBMS hardware companies have been launched many times in the past are ALWAYS fail (the main reasoning is that Moore’s law allows for commodity hardware to catch up in performance, eventually making the proprietary hardware overpriced and irrelevant). But given that Moore’s law is transforming into increased parallelism rather than increased raw speed, maybe hardware DBMS companies can succeed now where they have failed in the past
Good point.
More generally, Abadi speculates about the market for MySQL-compatible data warehousing. My responses include:
- OF COURSE there are many MySQL users who need to move to a serious analytic DBMS.
- What’s less clear is whether there’s any big advantage to those users in remaining MySQL-compatible when they do move. I’m not sure what MySQL-specific syntax or optimizations they’d have that would be difficult to port to a non-MySQL system.
- It’s nice to see Abadi speaking well of Infobright and its technology.
- To say that Infobright went open source because it was “desperate” is overstated. That said, I don’t think Infobright was on track to prosper without going open source.
- While open source and MySQL go together, an appliance like Kickfire loses many (not all) of the benefits of open source.
- Calpont has indeed never disclosed a customer win. Any year now … (Just kidding, Vogel!)
- In general, seeing Abadi be so favorable toward Vertica competitors adds credibiity to the recent Hadoop vs. DBMS paper.
Anyhow, as previously noted, I’m a big Daniel Abadi fan. I look forward to seeing what else he posts in his blog, and am optimistic he’ll live up to or exceed its stated goals.
| Categories: Calpont, Columnar database management, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DBMS product categories, Infobright, Kickfire, MySQL, Open source, Theory and architecture | 2 Comments |
Greenplum update — Release 3.3 and so on
I visited Greenplum in early April, and talked with them again last night. As I noted in a separate post, there are a couple of subjects I won’t write about today. But that still leaves me free to cover a number of other points about Greenplum, including: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Database compression, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Greenplum, MapReduce, Market share and customer counts, Parallelization, PostgreSQL, Pricing | 11 Comments |
Greenplum will be announcing some stuff
Greenplum is having a webinar Monday to announce “The Next Big Leap in Data Warehousing” (capitalization theirs). The idea they’ll be talking about is a genuinely good one. And off the top of my head I can only think of a few vendors who implemented it before Greenplum, and even fewer who emphasize it explicitly. So if you like webinars, you might want to listen in. I plan to blog about the general concept soon after the 12:01 am Monday embargo lifts. (Uh, guys, it is Monday rather than Tuesday, right?) Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Greenplum, Specific users | 1 Comment |
What statistics texts and other analytics books should we recommend to people?
On a message board I frequent, two different guys have asked for recommendations for statistics textbooks, in a kind of general knowledge vein. One phrases it as:
I’m looking for a general purpose statistics textbook for reference purposes.
giving his background as
I took Calculus-level Statistics in college. (i.e. 2 semesters of Calc was a prerequisite; this was the stats class that stat majors took.)
He was a computer science major and is now a professional programmer. (And if somebody can use a tournament-chess-smart programmer with outstandingly clear communication skills in the Buffalo area, I’m pretty sure he’d be glad to know about the opportunity. But I digress …)
The other is a law student with a more general need, which he phrases as
I want to use them for work to help identify trends; do multiple regressions; put values on things that aren’t easy to quantify, etc.
Economics I already know most of the basics from my undergrad studies, but I need more advanced economic theory and such.
He’s interested in what I’d call “pop” analytics books as well as hardcore stuff; e.g., the one book he’s identified already is “Competing with Analytics.” I’m thinking some good vendor white papers might be just as useful for him as that class of books. But he obviously also wants to learn the hardcore stuff as well.
I haven’t attended or taught a college course since 1981, and I tend to find the business books on analytics too simple for my tastes, so I’m not the right guy to answer from his own experience.
Does anybody have any helpful thoughts? Thanks!
| Categories: Analytic technologies | 11 Comments |