Comments on: Update on Microsoft’s Madison and Fast Track data warehouse products

By: Anthony Howcroft

Anthony Howcroft — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:22:39 +0000

Mark – I manage the Data Warehouse category for Microsoft in EMEA. I’m sorry to hear you had trouble buying one in South Africa. As a global organisation, there is sometimes a lag in roll-out (especially with partners involved), but if you want to contact me I can put you in touch with the appropriate people in South Africa who can help you. Even if you have decided to purchase a differenet solution now, I would be interested to know more about your experiences, to make sure we get the process working smoothly in South Africa.

Incidentally, I can assure you Fast Track is doing very well and we have our first European customers and a healthy pipeline. No doubt there will be some publicity around this at some appropriate point in the future.

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 18:59:21 +0000

Seth,

SQL Server != non-SQL-Server

By: Mark Stacey

Mark Stacey — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 15:05:24 +0000

For all of the FastTrack data warehouse doing so well (apparently), it’s actually a bit of a nightmare trying to buy one here – we’ve been through hoops (once with the Dell FastTrack, once with HP) – even if we had ended up going with a similar spec (we didn’t), it didn’t deliver on the drop box, order one solution promise.

Probably because we’re in South Africa, little known to MS and their hardware partners

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:02:31 +0000

I didn’t care enough to ask for survey details — or who did it — as definitions of “data warehouse” or “data mart” can be pretty questionable in such things.

By: Seth Grimes

Seth Grimes — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 20:54:32 +0000

“…Stuart [Frost] citing a survey saying Microsoft SQL Server has 44% market share in data marts when counting by unit.”

I have found Stuart Frost to be a tricky character. He’s probably counting Access databases and perhaps even Excel workbooks, don’t you think? After all, you can run analytical queries within and against both. How about asking him Curt?

Seth

By: Kevin

Kevin — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 20:48:35 +0000

DataAllegro had only handful of clients. So the customer base is not necessarily the right reason!

By: Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:27:41 +0000

An MPP database running Ingres on Linux always appeared a strange purchase by MS from my perspective.

How that setup can be morphed into SQL Server on Windows was, and still is, the interesting question. If Stuart can’t explain the technical strategy there is still considerable work to do in that respect by the look of it.

Maybe MS were after the customer base and not the technology