Data models and architecture

Discussion of issues in data modeling, and whether databases should be consolidated or loosely coupled. Related subjects include:

February 22, 2015

Data models

7-10 years ago, I repeatedly argued the viewpoints:

Since then, however:

So it’s probably best to revisit all that in a somewhat organized way.

Read more

January 19, 2015

Where the innovation is

I hoped to write a reasonable overview of current- to medium-term future IT innovation. Yeah, right. 🙂 But if we abandon any hope that this post could be comprehensive, I can at least say:

1. Back in 2011, I ranted against the term Big Data, but expressed more fondness for the V words — Volume, Velocity, Variety and Variability. That said, when it comes to data management and movement, solutions to the V problems have generally been sketched out.

2. Even so, there’s much room for innovation around data movement and management. I’d start with:

3. As I suggested last year, data transformation is an important area for innovation.  Read more

December 31, 2014

Notes on machine-generated data, year-end 2014

Most IT innovation these days is focused on machine-generated data (sometimes just called “machine data”), rather than human-generated. So as I find myself in the mood for another survey post, I can’t think of any better idea for a unifying theme.

1. There are many kinds of machine-generated data. Important categories include:

That’s far from a complete list, but if you think about those categories you’ll probably capture most of the issues surrounding other kinds of machine-generated data as well.

2. Technology for better information and analysis is also technology for privacy intrusion. Public awareness of privacy issues is focused in a few areas, mainly: Read more

November 30, 2014

Thoughts and notes, Thanksgiving weekend 2014

I’m taking a few weeks defocused from work, as a kind of grandpaternity leave. That said, the venue for my Dances of Infant Calming is a small-but-nice apartment in San Francisco, so a certain amount of thinking about tech industries is inevitable. I even found time last Tuesday to meet or speak with my clients at WibiData, MemSQL, Cloudera, Citus Data, and MongoDB. And thus:

1. I’ve been sloppy in my terminology around “geo-distribution”, in that I don’t always make it easy to distinguish between:

The latter case can be subdivided further depending on whether multiple copies of the data can accept first writes (aka active-active, multi-master, or multi-active), or whether there’s a clear single master for each part of the database.

What made me think of this was a phone call with MongoDB in which I learned that the limit on number of replicas had been raised from 12 to 50, to support the full-replication/latency-reduction use case.

2. Three years ago I posted about agile (predictive) analytics. One of the points was:

… if you change your offers, prices, ad placement, ad text, ad appearance, call center scripts, or anything else, you immediately gain new information that isn’t well-reflected in your previous models.

Subsequently I’ve been hearing more about predictive experimentation such as bandit testing. WibiData, whose views are influenced by a couple of Very Famous Department Store clients (one of which is Macy’s), thinks experimentation is quite important. And it could be argued that experimentation is one of the simplest and most direct ways to increase the value of your data.

3. I’d further say that a number of developments, trends or possibilities I’m seeing are or could be connected. These include agile and experimental predictive analytics in general, as noted in the previous point, along with:  Read more

October 22, 2014

Snowflake Computing

I talked with the Snowflake Computing guys Friday. For starters:

Much of the Snowflake story can be summarized as cloud/elastic/simple/cheap.*

*Excuse me — inexpensive. Companies rarely like their products to be labeled as “cheap”.

In addition to its purely relational functionality, Snowflake accepts poly-structured data. Notes on that start:

I don’t know enough details to judge whether I’d call that an example of schema-on-need.

A key element of Snowflake’s poly-structured data story seems to be lateral views. I’m not too clear on that concept, but I gather: Read more

September 7, 2014

An idealized log management and analysis system — from whom?

I’ve talked with many companies recently that believe they are:

At best, I think such competitive claims are overwrought. Still, it’s a genuinely important subject and opportunity, so let’s consider what a great log management and analysis system might look like.

Much of this discussion could apply to machine-generated data in general. But right now I think more players are doing product management with an explicit conception either of log management or event-series analytics, so for this post I’ll share that focus too.

A short answer might be “Splunk, but with more analytic functionality and more scalable performance, at lower cost, plus numerous coupons for free pizza.” A more constructive and bottoms-up approach might start with:  Read more

June 18, 2014

Using multiple data stores

I’m commonly asked to assess vendor claims of the kind:

So I thought it might be useful to quickly review some of the many ways organizations put multiple data stores to work. As usual, my bottom line is:

Horses for courses

It’s now widely accepted that different data managers are better for different use cases, based on distinctions such as:

Vendors are part of this consensus; already in 2005 I observed

For all practical purposes, there are no DBMS vendors left advocating single-server strategies.

Vendor agreement has become even stronger in the interim, as evidenced by Oracle/MySQL, IBM/Netezza, Oracle’s NoSQL dabblings, and various companies’ Hadoop offerings.

Multiple data stores for a single application

We commonly think of one data manager managing one or more databases, each in support of one or more applications. But the other way around works too; it’s normal for a single application to invoke multiple data stores. Indeed, all but the strictest relational bigots would likely agree:  Read more

May 6, 2014

Notes and comments, May 6, 2014

After visiting California recently, I made a flurry of posts, several of which generated considerable discussion.

Here is a catch-all post to complete the set.  Read more

April 19, 2014

Necessary complexity

When I’m asked to talk to academics, the requested subject is usually a version of “What should we know about what’s happening in the actual market/real world?” I then try to figure out what the scholars could stand to hear that they perhaps don’t already know.

In the current case (Berkeley next Tuesday), I’m using the title “Necessary complexity”. I actually mean three different but related things by that, namely:

  1. No matter how cool an improvement you have in some particular area of technology, it’s not very useful until you add a whole bunch of me-too features and capabilities as well.
  2. Even beyond that, however, the simple(r) stuff has already been built. Most new opportunities are in the creation of complex integrated stacks, in part because …
  3. … users are doing ever more complex things.

While everybody on some level already knows all this, I think it bears calling out even so.

I previously encapsulated the first point in the cardinal rules of DBMS development:

Rule 1: Developing a good DBMS requires 5-7 years and tens of millions of dollars.

That’s if things go extremely well.

Rule 2: You aren’t an exception to Rule 1. 

In particular:

  • Concurrent workloads benchmarked in the lab are poor predictors of concurrent performance in real life.
  • Mixed workload management is harder than you’re assuming it is.
  • Those minor edge cases in which your Version 1 product works poorly aren’t minor after all.

My recent post about MongoDB is just one example of same.

Examples of the second point include but are hardly limited to: Read more

March 23, 2014

Wants vs. needs

In 1981, Gerry Chichester and Vaughan Merlyn did a user-survey-based report about transaction-oriented fourth-generation languages, the leading application development technology of their day. The report included top-ten lists of important features during the buying cycle and after implementation. The items on each list were very similar — but the order of the items was completely different. And so the report highlighted what I regard as an eternal truth of the enterprise software industry:

What users value in the product-buying process is quite different from what they value once a product is (being) put into use.

Here are some thoughts about how that comes into play today.

Wants outrunning needs

1. For decades, BI tools have been sold in large part via demos of snazzy features the CEO would like to have on his desk. First it was pretty colors; then it was maps; now sometimes it’s “real-time” changing displays. Other BI features, however, are likely to be more important in practice.

2. In general, the need for “real-time” BI data freshness is often exaggerated. If you’re a human being doing a job that’s also often automated at high speed — for example network monitoring or stock trading — there’s a good chance you need fully human real-time BI. Otherwise, how much does a 5-15 minute delay hurt? Even if you’re monitoring website sell-through — are your business volumes really high enough that 5 minutes matters much? eBay answered “yes” to that question many years ago, but few of us work for businesses anywhere near eBay’s scale.

Even so, the want for speed keeps growing stronger. 🙂

3. Similarly, some desires for elastic scale-out are excessive. Your website selling koi pond accessories should always run well on a single server. If you diversify your business to the point that that’s not true, you’ll probably rewrite your app by then as well.

4. Some developers want to play with cool new tools. That doesn’t mean those tools are the best choice for the job. In particular, boring old SQL has merits — such as joins! — that shiny NoSQL hasn’t yet replicated.

5. Some developers, on the other hand, want to keep using their old tools, on which they are their employers’ greatest experts. That doesn’t mean those tools are the best choice for the job either.

6. More generally, some enterprises insist on brand labels that add little value but lots of expense. Yes, there are many benefits to vendor consolidation, and you may avoid many headaches if you stick with not-so-cutting-edge technology. But “enterprise-grade” hardware failure rates may not differ enough from “consumer-grade” ones to be worth paying for.

Read more

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