Data types
Analysis of data management technology optimized for specific datatypes, such as text, geospatial, object, RDF, or XML. Related subjects include:
- Any subcategory
- Database diversity
More on NoSQL and HVSP (or OLRP)
Since posting last Wednesday morning that I’m looking into NoSQL and HVSP, I’ve had a lot of conversations, including with (among others):
- Dwight Merriman of 10gen (MongoDB)
- Damien Katz of Couchio (CouchDB)
- Matt Pfeil of Riptano (Cassandra)
- Todd Lipcon of Cloudera (HBase committer)
- Tony Falco of Basho (Riak)
- John Busch of Schooner
- Ori Herrnstadt of Akiban
| Categories: Akiban, Basho and Riak, Cache, Cassandra, Cloudera, Clustrix, CouchDB, Facebook, HBase, Hadoop, MySQL, NoSQL, OLTP, Object, Open source, Parallelization, Riptano, Schooner, Theory and architecture, Tokutek, memcached | Leave a Comment |
Workday comments on its database architecture
In my discussion of Workday’s technology, I gave an estimate that Workday’s database, if relationally designed, would require “1000s” of tables. That estimate came from Workday, Inc. CTO Stan Swete, in a thoughtful email that made several points about Workday’s database strategy. Workday kindly gave me permission to quote it below.
Read more
| Categories: Data models and architecture, OLTP, Object, Software as a Service (SaaS), Specific users, Theory and architecture, Workday | 2 Comments |
The Workday architecture — a new kind of OLTP software stack
One of my coolest company visits in some time was to SaaS (Software as a Service) vendor Workday, Inc., earlier this month. Reasons included:
- Workday has forward-thinking ideas about SaaS enterprise applications and the integration of business intelligence into same.
- Workday has highly innovative ideas in how it manages data.
- Companies founded by Dave Duffield tend to feature smart, likeable people who talk to one pleasantly and forthrightly. Workday is no exception; CTO Stan Swete and the other Workday folks present were a delight to talk with.
- I’d invited Merv Adrian to come along with me. He asked great questions, and I could gather myself a bit despite how sleep-deprived I was for the first part of that trip.
Workday kindly allowed me to post this Workday slide deck. Otherwise, I’ve split out a quick Workday, Inc. company overview into a separate post.
The biggie for me was the data and object management part. Specifically: Read more
Big Data is Watching You!
There’s a boom in large-scale analytics. The subjects of this analysis may be categorized as:
- People
- Financial trades
- Electronic networks
- Everything else
The most varied, interesting, and valuable of those four categories is the first one.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Data warehousing, Investment research and trading, Log analysis, MapReduce, RDF and graphs, Specific users, Telecommunications, Web analytics | 3 Comments |
Objectivity Infinite Graph
I chatted Wednesday night with Darren Wood, the Australia-based lead developer of Objectivity’s Infinite Graph database product. Background includes:
- Objectivity is a profitable, decades-old object-oriented DBMS vendor with about 50 employees.
- Like some other object-oriented DBMS of its generation, Objectivity is as much a toolkit for building DBMS as it is a real finished DBMS product. Objectivity sales are typically for custom deals, where Objectivity helps with the programming.
- The way Objectivity works is basically:
- You manage objects in memory, in the format of your choice.
- Objectivity bangs them to disk, across a network.
- Objectivity manages the (distributed) pointers to the objects.
- You can, if you choose, hard code exactly which objects are banged to which node.
- Objectivity’s DML for reading data is very different from Objectivity’s DML for writing data. (I think the latter is more like the program code itself, while the former is more like regular DML.)
- The point of Objectivity is not so much to have fast I/O. Rather, it is to minimize the CPU cost of getting the data that comes across the wire into useful form.
- Darren got the idea of putting a generic graph DBMS front-end on Objectivity while doing a relationship analytics project for an Australian intelligence agency.
- Darren redoubled his efforts to sell the project internally at Objectivity after reading what I wrote about relationship analytics back in 2006 or so.
- There is now a 5 or so person team developing Infinite Graph.
- Infinite Graph is just now going out to beta test.
Infinite Graph is an API or language binding on top of Objectivity that:
- Hides a lot of Objectivity’s complexity.
- Is suitable for graph/relationship analytics.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Liberty and privacy, Object, Objectivity and Infinite Graph, RDF and graphs | 5 Comments |
The most important part of the “social graph” is neither social nor a graph
“Social graph” is a highly misleading term, and so is “social network analysis.” By this I mean:
There’s something akin to “social graphs” and “social network analysis” that is more or less worthy of all the current hype – but graphs and network analysis are only a minor part of the whole story.
In particular, the most important parts of the Facebook “social graph” are neither social nor a graph. Rather, what’s really important is an aggregate Profile of Revealed Preferences, of which person-to-person connections or other things best modeled by a graph play only a small part.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Facebook, Games and virtual worlds, Liberty and privacy, RDF and graphs, Web analytics | 7 Comments |
Various quick notes
As you might imagine, there are a lot of blog posts I’d like to write I never seem to get around to, or things I’d like to comment on that I don’t want to bother ever writing a full post about. In some cases I just tweet a comment or link and leave it at that.
And it’s not going to get any better. Next week = the oft-postponed elder care trip. Then I’m back for a short week. Then I’m off on my quarterly visit to the SF area. Soon thereafter I’ve have a lot to do in connection with Enzee Universe. And at that point another month will have gone by.
Anyhow: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehousing, Exadata, GIS and geospatial, Google, IBM and DB2, Netezza, Oracle, Parallelization, SAP AG, SAS Institute | 3 Comments |
More on Sybase IQ, including Version 15.2
Back in March, Sybase was kind enough to give me permission to post a slide deck about Sybase IQ. Well, I’m finally getting around to doing so. Highlights include but are not limited to:
- Slide 2 has some market success figures and so on. (>3100 copies at >1800 users, >200 sales last year)
- Slides 6-11 give more detail on Sybase’s indexing and data access methods than I put into my recent technical basics of Sybase IQ post.
- Slide 16 reminds us that in-database data mining is quite competitive with what SAS has actually delivered with its DBMS partners, even if it doesn’t have the nice architectural approach of Aster or Netezza. (I.e., Sybase IQ’s more-than-SQL advanced analytics story relies on C++ UDFs — User Defined Functions — running in-process with the DBMS.) In particular, there’s a data mining/predictive analytics library — modeling and scoring both — licensed from a small third party.
- A number of the other later slides also have quite a bit of technical crunch. (More on some of those points below too.)
Sybase IQ may have a bit of a funky architecture (e.g., no MPP), but the age of the product and the substantial revenue it generates have allowed Sybase to put in a bunch of product features that newer vendors haven’t gotten around to yet.
More recently, Sybase volunteered permission for me to preannounce Sybase IQ Version 15.2 by a few days (it’s scheduled to come out this week). Read more
Notes on SciDB and scientific data management
I firmly believe that, as a community, we should look for ways to support scientific data management and related analytics. That’s why, for example, I went to XLDB3 in Lyon, France at my own expense. Eight months ago, I wrote about issues in scientific data management. Here’s some of what has transpired since then.
The main new activity I know of has been in the open source SciDB project. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, GIS and geospatial, Microsoft and SQL*Server, SciDB, Scientific research, Web analytics, eBay | 3 Comments |
Information found in public-facing social networks
Here are some examples illustrating two recent themes of mine, namely:
- Easily-available information reveals all sorts of things about us.
- Graph-based analysis is on the rise.
Pete Warden scraped all of Facebook’s social graph (at least for the United States), and put up a really interesting-looking visualization of same. Facebook’s lawyer’s came down on him, and he quickly agreed to destroy the data he’d scraped, but also published ideas on how other people could duplicate his work.
Warden has since given an interview in which he outlines some of the things researchers hoped to do with this data: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Facebook, Liberty and privacy, RDF and graphs | 1 Comment |