Data warehousing

Analysis of issues in data warehousing, with extensive coverage of database management systems and data warehouse appliances that are optimized to query large volumes of data. Related subjects include:

August 28, 2016

Are analytic RDBMS and data warehouse appliances obsolete?

I used to spend most of my time — blogging and consulting alike — on data warehouse appliances and analytic DBMS. Now I’m barely involved with them. The most obvious reason is that there have been drastic changes in industry structure:

Simply reciting all that, however, begs the question of whether one should still care about analytic RDBMS at all.

My answer, in a nutshell, is:

Analytic RDBMS — whether on premises in software, in the form of data warehouse appliances, or in the cloud — are still great for hard-core business intelligence, where “hard-core” can refer to ad-hoc query complexity, reporting/dashboard concurrency, or both. But they aren’t good for much else.

Read more

August 21, 2016

More about Databricks and Spark

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi checked in because he disagreed with part of my recent post about Databricks. Ali’s take on Databricks’ position in the Spark world includes:

Ali also walked me through customer use cases and adoption in wonderful detail. In general:

The story on those sectors, per Ali, is:  Read more

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:

Read more

December 10, 2015

Readings in Database Systems

Mike Stonebraker and Larry Ellison have numerous things in common. If nothing else:

I mention the latter because there’s a new edition of Readings in Database Systems, aka the Red Book, available online, courtesy of Mike, Joe Hellerstein and Peter Bailis. Besides the recommended-reading academic papers themselves, there are 12 survey articles by the editors, and an occasional response where, for example, editors disagree. Whether or not one chooses to tackle the papers themselves — and I in fact have not dived into them — the commentary is of great interest.

But I would not take every word as the gospel truth, especially when academics describe what they see as commercial market realities. In particular, as per my quip in the first paragraph, the data warehouse market has not yet gone to the extremes that Mike suggests,* if indeed it ever will. And while Joe is close to correct when he says that the company Essbase was acquired by Oracle, what actually happened is that Arbor Software, which made Essbase, merged with Hyperion Software, and the latter was eventually indeed bought by the giant of Redwood Shores.**

*When it comes to data warehouse market assessment, Mike seems to often be ahead of the trend.

**Let me interrupt my tweaking of very smart people to confess that my own commentary on the Oracle/Hyperion deal was not, in retrospect, especially prescient.

Mike pretty much opened the discussion with a blistering attack against hierarchical data models such as JSON or XML. To a first approximation, his views might be summarized as:  Read more

November 19, 2015

The questionably named Cloudera Navigator Optimizer

I only have mixed success at getting my clients to reach out to me for messaging advice when they’re introducing something new. Cloudera Navigator Optimizer, which is being announced along with Cloudera 5.5, is one of my failures in that respect; I heard about it for the first time Tuesday afternoon. I hate the name. I hate some of the slides I saw. But I do like one part of the messaging, namely the statement that this is about “refactoring” queries.

All messaging quibbles aside, I think the Cloudera Navigator Optimizer story is actually pretty interesting, and perhaps not just to users of SQL-on-Hadoop technologies such as Hive (which I guess I’d put in that category for simplicity) or Impala. As I understand Cloudera Navigator Optimizer:

Read more

November 19, 2015

CDH 5.5

I talked with Cloudera shortly ahead of today’s announcement of Cloudera 5.5. Much of what we talked about had something or other to do with SQL data management. Highlights include:

While I had Cloudera on the phone, I asked a few questions about Impala adoption, specifically focused on concurrency. There was mention of: Read more

October 26, 2015

Differentiation in data management

In the previous post I broke product differentiation into 6-8 overlapping categories, which may be abbreviated as:

and sometimes also issues in adoption and administration.

Now let’s use this framework to examine two market categories I cover — data management and, in separate post, business intelligence.

Applying this taxonomy to data management:
Read more

August 3, 2015

Data messes

A lot of what I hear and talk about boils down to “data is a mess”. Below is a very partial list of examples.

To a first approximation, one would expect operational data to be rather clean. After all, it drives and/or records business transactions. So if something goes awry, the result can be lost money, disappointed customers, or worse, and those are outcomes to be strenuously avoided. Up to a point, that’s indeed true, at least at businesses large enough to be properly automated. (Unlike, for example — 🙂 — mine.)

Even so, operational data has some canonical problems. First, it could be inaccurate; somebody can just misspell or otherwise botch an entry. Further, there are multiple ways data can be unreachable, typically because it’s:

Inconsistency can take multiple forms, including:  Read more

July 7, 2015

Zoomdata and the Vs

Let’s start with some terminology biases:

So when my clients at Zoomdata told me that they’re in the business of providing “the fastest visual analytics for big data”, I understood their choice, but rolled my eyes anyway. And then I immediately started to check how their strategy actually plays against the “big data” Vs.

It turns out that:

*The HDFS/S3 aspect seems to be a major part of Zoomdata’s current story.

Core aspects of Zoomdata’s technical strategy include:  Read more

June 10, 2015

Hadoop generalities

Occasionally I talk with an astute reporter — there are still a few left 🙂 — and get led toward angles I hadn’t considered before, or at least hadn’t written up. A blog post may then ensue. This is one such post.

There is a group of questions going around that includes:

To a first approximation, my responses are:  Read more

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