New insights into the GPL vs. MySQL storage engine debates
Around the time of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and hence MySQL, there was a lot of discussion as to whether MySQL’s GPL license could inhibit MySQL storage engine vendors from selling their products without MySQL code (e.g., with MySQL-fork front-ends). I argued No. Most people, however, seemed to think “Yes, and even if the matter isn’t clear, the threat of nasty lawyers creates enough FUD to be a practical market problem for the storage engine vendors.” Based on those concerns, I eventually took the position that Oracle should be inhibited for antitrust reasons from invoking its real or alleged GPL rights to mess with the MySQL storage engine vendors. Oracle’s agreement with the EU alleviated that concern, except that there was an annoying time limit on the alleviation.
Now a related can of worms has been opened in a related technology area — WordPress and WordPress themes. Since many bloggers use WordPress, this has gotten a lot of attention, and some interesting new insights have emerged. Read more
| Categories: MySQL, Open source, Oracle | 10 Comments |
Sybase SQL Anywhere
After Powersoft acquired Watcom and its famed Fortran compiler, marketing VP Tom Herring told me that the hidden jewel of the acquisition might well be a little DBMS, Watcom SQL. To put it mildly, Tom was right. Watcom SQL became SQL Anywhere; Powersoft was acquired by Sybase; Powersoft’s and Sybase’s main products both fell on hard times; Sybase built a whole mobile technology division around SQL Anywhere; and the whole thing just got sold for billions of dollars to SAP. Chris Kleisath recently briefed me on SQL Anywhere Version 12 (released to manufacturing this month), which seemed like a fine opportunity to catch up on prior developments as well.
The first two things to understand about SQL Anywhere is that there actually are three products:
- Sybase SQL Anywhere, a mid-range relational DBMS.
- Sybase UltraLite, a DBMS for mobile devices.
- Sybase MobiLink, a replication/sync tool.
and also that there are three main deployment/use cases:
- Generic desktop or server computers. This was the original market for SQL Anywhere.
- Laptop/handheld computers. This was the original growth market for SQL Anywhere. In particular, Siebel Systems’ first growth spurt was selling sales force automation software on laptop computers with SQL Anywhere underneath.
- Specialized devices. Earlier this decade, Sybase thought SQL Anywhere’s big growth market was on specialized devices. (I recall a video featuring some kind of automated pill dispensing machine for hospitals.)
| Categories: Mid-range, Progress, Apama, and DataDirect, Specific users, Sybase | Leave a Comment |
What matters in mobile business intelligence
Michael Fitzgerald of Computerworld offers an article to the effect that mobile business intelligence is hot. He cites just about every vendor except Microstrategy as seeing or indeed pushing this trend — and that probably just means Microstrategy didn’t return his call quickly enough, as they’re betting heavily on the mobile BI trend themselves.
In essence, mobile BI seems to be about small, portable dashboards. Now, I’ve been critical of dashboard technology for years, because of myriad ways in which it fails to live up to the potential of decision support. Some (not all) of those criticisms are being addressed by more recent dashboard technology developments. But with one exception, those criticisms are of little direct relevance to the mobile case.
What’s going on in mobile BI is not so much general decision support as it is quick information retrieval and navigation. Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence | 4 Comments |
Breakthrough: Exadata now has as many reference accounts as Aster Data!
According to Bob Evans of Information Week, there now are 15 disclosed Exadata reference accounts. Coincidentally, there are exactly 15 logos on Aster Data’s customer page. So on its own, that’s not a particularly impressive piece of information.
But other highlights of his column include:
- Some of those accounts are rather big-name. However, I’m not at all sure whether they’re actual production references.
- Andy Mendelsohn characterizes the sweet spot of Exadata’s market as “virtual private cloud.” That matches what Juan Loaiza told me six months ago.
- Oracle claims numerous competitive wins for Exadata. Let me hasten to note that one vendor’s “competitive win” is another vendor’s “our salesman read the deal as an unfavorable one and chose not to compete,” or even sometimes “Huh? We never heard about that deal.” That said, what I’m hearing is that Exadata is indeed a much stronger competitor than it used to be.
- Oracle claims a near $1 billion sales run rate for Exadata. No doubt, a large majority of those are hardware upgrades for existing Oracle database customers, often from non-Sun/Oracle hardware. Even so, some of those are surely deals that would have migrated away from Oracle in the pre-Exadata past.
| Categories: Aster Data, Data warehousing, Exadata, Market share and customer counts, Oracle | 1 Comment |
How I’m planning to package user services
On the Monash Research business website right now, you could find multiple pages explaining and extolling our vendor consulting services. We even have posted standard contracts that:
- Are concise.
- Are priced in terms units of work, yet do not require me to meter services at precise hourly or daily rates.
- Have a minimum scope that allows me to feel comfortable I’m spending enough time with a client to do good work.
- Extend over time, mimicking the subscription model of analyst services.*
- Do not contain any concept of “work for hire,” transfer of intellectual property, or “we own your brain.”
- Don’t have any other features that are stunningly inappropriate for our business.
By way of contrast, the user services portion of our site is only a few lines long, and that’s beginning to hurt. Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehousing | 6 Comments |
More on Greenplum and EMC
I talked with Ben Werther of Greenplum for about 40 minutes, which was my first post-merger Greenplum/EMC briefing. “Historical” highlights include:
- Ben says Greenplum wasn’t being shopped, by which he means Greenplum was out raising more capital and the fund-raising was going well. Note: Half or so of Greenplum’s deals were subscription-priced, so it had weaker cash flow than it would have if it were doing equally well selling perpetual licenses.
- However, joint engineering was also going well with, e.g., Greenplum CTO Luke Lonergan spending time at EMC facilities in Cork, Ireland. And one thing led to another …
- Greenplum has ~ 140 customers, vs. ~65 five quarters ago, 100+ at year-end, and an acquisition rate of 12-15/quarter last fall.
- A typical “small” paying customer for Greenplum starts with 10-20 TB of data.
- Greenplum Chorus isn’t generally available yet, with rollout energy being focused on Greenplum 4.0. Note: As important as it is for overall industry direction, Greenplum Chorus is a product which won’t be a terribly big deal in Release 1 anyway.
Highlights looking forward include: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, EMC, Greenplum, Market share and customer counts | 7 Comments |
Will a data warehouse DBMS consolidation happen?
Naturally, people are wondering whether the Greenplum/EMC deal will trigger further consolidation in the analytic DBMS industry. Here is a lightly edited version of an IM chat I just had on the subject.
CurtMonash: I think consolidation is inevitable, and this deal is just a piece of it. That’s more like a “Yes” than a “No”, but I think “trigger” is overstated.
CurtMonash: Participants with good reasons for surviving include Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Sybase, Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum, Vertica, Aster, and more. That’s too many to all remain as independent companies. (Edit: Infobright becomes a full member of that list if its Release 4 goes well.)
CurtMonash: Some will buy each other. HP needs to buy somebody at some point. Dell and Cisco are the ones who might feel a bit pushed to make acquisitions if their competitors’ stacks are too successful.
CurtMonash: I think successful vendors will feel embarrassed if they can’t beat the price DATAllegro got. 😉
CurtMonash: I also think ParAccel, Kickfire, and Calpont would be worth more acquired than independent.
CurtMonash: I don’t think the EMC/ParAccel deal was significant enough for ParAccel to have much to lose. 😉 (Edit: But everything is relative.)
CurtMonash: Kickfire laid off its salespeople. It needs to be bought soon.
| Categories: Data warehousing | Leave a Comment |
Why analytic DBMS increasingly need to be storage-aware
In my quick reactions to the EMC/Greenplum announcement, I opined
I think that even software-only analytic DBMS vendors should design their systems in an increasingly storage-aware manner
promising to explain what I meant later on. So here goes. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Solid-state memory, Storage, Theory and architecture | 6 Comments |
The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay
I often write of Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole, an engineering approach that ensues when parts of a system are out of balance. Well, the flip side of that is the One-Hoss Shay, as in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ marvelous poem. (Here’s a version with Howard Pyle illustrations.) Read more
| Categories: Humor, Theory and architecture | 1 Comment |
EMC is buying Greenplum
EMC is buying Greenplum. Most of the press release is a general recapitulation of Greenplum’s marketing messages, the main exceptions being (emphasis mine):
The acquisition of Greenplum will be an all-cash transaction and is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2010, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. The acquisition is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP and non-GAAP EPS for the full 2010 fiscal year. Upon close, Bill Cook will lead the new data computing product division and report to Pat Gelsinger. EMC will continue to offer Greenplum’s full product portfolio to customers and plans to deliver new EMC Proven reference architectures as well as an integrated hardware and software offering designed to improve performance and drive down implementation costs.
Greenplum is one of my biggest vendor clients, and EMC is just becoming one, but of course neither side gave me a heads-up before the deal happened, nor have I yet been briefed subsequently. With those disclaimers out of the way, some of my early thoughts include:
- I wish my clients would never buy each other, but it’s inevitable.
- I don’t think anybody evaluating Greenplum should be much influenced by this deal one way or the other. (Whether they will be is of course a different matter.)
- EMC tends to run its bigger software acquisitions in a fairly hands-off manner. There’s no particular FUD (Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt) reason why this deal should stop anybody from buying Greenplum software.
- I also don’t think adding a rich parent adds much of a reason to buy from Greenplum. But if you’re the type who’s nervous about smaller vendors — well, Greenplum now isn’t so small.
- Greenplum Chorus could, in principle, work with non-Greenplum DBMS. That possibility suddenly looks a lot more realistic.
- The list of analytic DBMS vendors with an appliance orientation is pretty impressive, including:
- Oracle, with Exadata
- Microsoft, partially
- Teradata
- Netezza
- Now EMC/Greenplum, at least partially
- Weaker players such as:
- The ailing Kickfire, which a client (not Kickfire itself) tells me is being shopped around
- The reeling HP Neoview
- XtremeData, but I’m still waiting to hear of XtremeData’s first real sale
- Greenplum is something of a specialist in large databases. EMC has to love that.
- Greenplum’s weakness is concurrency.
- Greenplum’s “polymorphic storage” is a good fit for a storage vendor with appliance-y ideas.
- And finally — I think that even software-only analytic DBMS vendors should design their systems in an increasingly storage-aware manner, and have been advising my vendor clients of same. I’ll blog that line of reasoning separately when I get a chance, and edit in a link here after I do.
Related links (edit)
- Here’s the promised post as to why analytic DBMS need to be ever more storage-aware.
- Dave Kellogg crunched the EMC/Greenplum numbers, coming up with an estimated valuation range of $3-400 million, the high end of which is rumored to be correct.
- Merv Adrian suggests the big EMC/Greenplum loser is ParAccel, a viewpoint which presumably presupposes that the EMC/ParAccel partnership was significant in the first place.
- I talked with Ben Werther and posted more about Greenplum and EMC.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, EMC, Greenplum, Storage | 13 Comments |