Analytic technologies
Discussion of technologies related to information query and analysis. Related subjects include:
- Business intelligence
- Data warehousing
- (in Text Technologies) Text mining
- (in The Monash Report) Data mining
- (in The Monash Report) General issues in analytic technology
Some interesting links
In no particular order: Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Fun stuff, Hadoop, Humor, In-memory DBMS, MapReduce, Memory-centric data management, Open source, Oracle, SAP AG | 2 Comments |
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 |
Infobright’s Release 3.4
Infobright called a couple weeks ago to discuss, among other subjects, its subsequently-released Infobright Release 3.4. I made no effort to distinguish between community/open source and professional/chargeable editions, but leaving that aside, it seems fair to characterize Infobright 3.4 as having two overlapping primary themes:
- Performance and bottleneck cleanup.
- “Omigod, you mean you didn’t have that feature before?” cleanup.
That said, the traditional release for cleaning up the last huge gaps in an analytic DBMS product seems have become 4.0; recent examples include Aster Data, Vertica and Greenplum. Infobright seems on track to be another example of that rule.
Ack. Now that I’ve said that, other vendors are going to be tempted to accelerate their numbering so as to reach the 4.0 mark sooner …
A lot of Infobright performance enhancements are in the vein “We used to rely on generic MySQL for that, but now we do it ourselves, and it works a lot better.” Examples include: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Workload management | 6 Comments |
Lots of Aster Data analytic packages
A number of vendors had announcements last week, notably:
- Netezza (user conference)
- Aster Data (to steal some of Netezza’s thunder)
- Infobright (so far as I can tell, just because it was time for a product release, and also to get ahead of the summer doldrums)
- Northscale (ditto)
Time to play some catchup.
I’ll start with Aster Data, which added to the list of analytic packages it previously announced, and kindly gave me permission to post a partial slide deck from the briefing on same. Highlights of Aster’s analytic packages story include: Read more
Netezza’s version of EnterpriseDB-based Oracle compatibility
EnterpriseDB has some deplorable business practices (my stories of being screwed by EnterpriseDB have been met by “Well, you’re hardly the only one”). But a couple of more successful DBMS vendors have happily partnered with EnterpriseDB even so, to help pick off Oracle users. IBM’s approach was in the vein of an EnterpriseDB–infused version of SQL handling within DB2.* Netezza just announced an EnterpriseDB-based Netezza Migrator that is rather different.
*The comment threads are the most informative parts of those posts.
I’m a little unclear as to the Netezza Migrator details, not least because Netezza folks don’t seem to care too much about Netezza Migrator themselves. That said, the core ideas of Netezza Migrator are: Read more