July 19, 2016

Notes from a long trip, July 19, 2016

For starters:

A running list of recent posts is:

Subjects I’d like to add to that list include:

I’ll edit these lists as appropriate when further posts go up. Last update: August 23, 2016.

Let’s cover some other subjects right here.

1. While Kafka is widely agreed to be the universal delivery mechanism for streams, the landscape for companion technologies is confused.

And of course Flink is hoping to blow everybody else in the space away.

*But that kind of thing is not necessarily a death knell. Cassandra inventor Facebook soon replaced Cassandra with HBase, yet Cassandra is doing just fine.

As for the “lambda architecture” — that has always felt like a kludge, and various outfits are trying to obsolete it in various ways. As just one example, Cloudera described that to me during my visit as one of the main points of Kudu.

2. The idea that NoSQL does away with DBAs (DataBase Administrators) is common. It also turns out to be wrong. DBAs basically do two things.

I had a moment of clarity on this point while visiting my clients at DataStax, and discussing their goal — shared by numerous companies — of being properly appreciated for the management tools they provide. In the room with me were CEO Billy Bosworth and chief evangelist Patrick McFadin — both of whom are former DBAs themselves.

3. I visited ClearStory, and Sharmila Mulligan showed me her actual sales database, as well as telling me some things about funding. The details are all confidential, but ClearStory is clearly doing better than rumor might suggest.

4. Platfora insisted on meeting circumstances in which it was inconvenient for me to take notes. So I have no details to share. But they sounded happy.

Edit: On July 22, it was announced that Workday is acquiring Platfora. Now I understand why Platfora gave me a bit of a runaround.

5. Pneubotics — with a cool new video on its home page — has found its first excellent product/market fit. Traditional heavy metallic robots are great at painting and related tasks when they can remain stationary, or move on rigid metal rails. Neither of those options works well, however, for large curved or irregular surfaces as might be found in the aerospace industry. Customer success for the leading soft robot company has ensued.

This all seems pretty close to the inspection/maintenance/repair area that I previously suggested could be a good soft robotics fit.

Comments

7 Responses to “Notes from a long trip, July 19, 2016”

  1. Notes on vendor lock-in | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on July 19th, 2016 9:35 pm

    […] management of even NoSQL DBMS is a big issue, and help in that area has high cash value for […]

  2. David Gruzman on July 21st, 2016 3:14 am

    In DBA world we had two kinds of DBA – “production DBA” who’s role is obvious and development DBA who’s role was to make sure that software developers are using database efficiently.
    In case of NoSQL second role became very important. NoSQL databases are much less tolerant to misuse than RDBNS where a lot can be done to improve things after SQL’s where hard coded into the application.
    In my opinion NoSQL DBA should have deep understanding of the internals and to help developers to decide how their goals can be met with given NoSQL.
    Above will greatly affect production side of the story. If NoSQL was used in exactly right way – it will perform well in production. Opposite is much more true – if NoSQL was bend to do things not natural for it – it will be real challenge to make it happy in production.

  3. Ninja on July 29th, 2016 3:42 pm

    I do remember back in da dayz Larry Ellison talking about Oracle 10G as self managed database that does NOT require a DBA or something like that

  4. Curt Monash on July 31st, 2016 7:18 am

    One can push a button on Oracle, do a quick install, and never administer it.

    Perhaps a small app or two might even run under those circumstances. 🙂

  5. Terminology: Data scientists vs. data engineers | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on July 31st, 2016 10:10 am

    […] learned some newish terms on my recent trip. They’re meant to solve the problem that “data scientists” used to be folks with […]

  6. Notes on DataStax and Cassandra | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on August 7th, 2016 9:19 pm

    […] visited DataStax on my recent trip. That was a tipping point leading to my recent discussions of NoSQL DBAs and misplaced fear of vendor lock-in. But of course I also learned some things about DataStax and […]

  7. DBAs of the future | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on November 23rd, 2016 7:02 am

    […] a July visit to DataStax, I […]

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