September 15, 2010

Aster Data nCluster Version 4.6

The main thing in Aster Data nCluster Version 4.6 is Aster’s version of hybrid row-column store technology. Technical highlights include:

Aster Data is simply taking the number of storage options in nCluster up from 1 to 2 – you now can store a table either in the Aster Data nCluster row store or column store.
In fact, you can store parts of a table in the Aster Data nCluster row store and other parts in the Aster Data nCluster column store. I‘m a bit foggy on the details of that – Aster makes discussions of partitioning more complicated than they need to be — but it definitely sounds pretty flexible. Edit: See comment thread below.
Anything you can do with the Aster Data nCluster row store you can also do with the Aster Data nCluster column store. In particular, that includes all of Aster Data’s analytic functionality.
The same is true vice-versa. There is no columnar-oriented kind of compression in Aster Data nCluster at this time.

So Aster Data has now joined Greenplum/EMC among row-based analytic DBMS vendors with hybrid row-column stores. Oracle will join them some day, and the same probably applies to other row-based vendors as well. Similarly, Aster Data will probably join Oracle some day in having columnar compression. And so this all fits the model:

Aster Data has an impressively competitive analytic relational DBMS, considering the youth and size of the company.
Aster Data is a leader in extending its analytic relational DBMS by integrating in other analytic processing capabilities.

Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression

4 Comments

September 13, 2010

Reconciling medical privacy and elder care

In a previous post, I outlined how Friendship Village of Dublin has mishandled my father’s medical information, to the detriment of his medical care. Expanding on that story, here are some other complications or screw-ups in the same series of medical events. In these other cases, the blame clearly falls more on the information-flow system itself, rather than on some particular medical care provider such as Friendship Village of Dublin, Riverside Methodist Hospital, or the paramedics who transported my father from one to the other.

Categories: Health care, Surveillance and privacy

3 Comments

September 13, 2010

Some of my travails

Two weeks ago tonight, my 86 year old father was taken unresponsive from his home at Friendship Village of Dublin (Ohio) to Riverside Methodist Hospital. He remains unresponsive, and his doctors and the Riverside Hospital nurses are trying to puzzle out how to bring him around. Riverside Hospital does not know what happened at Friendship Village of Dublin the night he wound up collapsing, so naturally I asked Friendship Village for the information, that I may relay it to Riverside Hospital, so that they may help him recover from his “critically stable” condition. Two weeks after the event, they are still refusing it to me.

Categories: About this blog

7 Comments

September 7, 2010

Soundbites about Mark Hurd joining Oracle

I’m on “vacation”, so I don’t know how timely I’ll be in getting back to reporters with quotes on Mark Hurd’s new job at Oracle. I put “vacation” in quotes because my father has been in a coma for over a week back in Ohio; I’m getting stonewalled for information about his and especially about my senile mother’s condition (while there’s a support structure making sure nothing too ridiculous happens, the whole thing has been even harder to block out for a while than if a full set of medical ethics were being used); Linda arrived here with an injury that has largely wrecked the vacation for her (if we had confidence in the local doctors we’d be seeing them for sure, and may yet see them anyway); and the mix of lesser factors is otherwise normal — great place, I took way too much work with me and had clients demanding more, connectivity was deplorable and is still unreliable (this post has been spread out over several hours by yet another connectivity outage), and weather has been a pleasant surprise to date (but clearly I’m benefiting from it a lot less than usual).

My thoughts on Mark Hurd (who I’ve never met) joining Oracle include:

Mark Hurd is one of the least successful leaders in the modern history of the DBMS industry.
- Mark Hurd presided over Teradata while Teradata allowed a bunch of smaller competitors to grow up.
- Mark Hurd was said to be the prime mover behind HP Neoview, which has been an epic failure.
- Mark Hurd was in charge of HP when HP lost the Exadata business to Sun, and it’s not clear that the loss was just because Oracle bought Sun.
Mark Hurd seems to have done poorly running services businesses at HP as well, at least in terms of their reputations.
None of this means that Mark Hurd can’t do a good job on the volume-hardware side of Oracle. Nor does it seem likely that Hurd would get the power to gut Oracle’s R&D the way he is reputed to have gutted HP’s. And by the way, the investment in the HP Neoview fiasco shows that Hurd didn’t COMPLETELY gut R&D at HP either.
The Mark Hurd hire is a signal that Oracle is very serious about hardware/software integration. Notwithstanding any of the foregoing, Hurd can surely talk the hardware/software integration game. And one can reasonably spin Hurd’s HP Neoview failure as a high-desire, low-odds attempt to get into the database software/hardware stack business.
The time to assess whether Oracle will continue with the hardware/software integration emphasis will be when Mark Hurd leaves. Just as Ray Lane’s departure coincided with a reversal of the software/services integration strategy he so successfully championed, Hurd’s eventual departure could signal a backing off from emphasizing a software/hardware stack.
Mark Hurd’s sexual harassment problems sound similar to Al Gore’s:
- He got services of the sort that are often a euphemism (massage in Gore’s case, escort in Hurd’s).
- The provider(s) just wanted to provide the real thing, not the euphemistic part as well.
- Unpleasantness ensued.