Columnar database management

Analysis of products and issues in column-oriented database management systems. Related subjects include:

June 16, 2017

Generally available Kudu

I talked with Cloudera about Kudu in early May. Besides giving me a lot of information about Kudu, Cloudera also helped confirm some trends I’m seeing elsewhere, including:

Now let’s talk about Kudu itself. As I discussed at length in September 2015, Kudu is:

Kudu’s adoption and roll-out story starts: Read more

April 17, 2017

Interana

Interana has an interesting story, in technology and business model alike. For starters:

And to be clear — if we leave aside any questions of marketing-name sizzle, this really is business intelligence. The closest Interana comes to helping with predictive modeling is giving its ad-hoc users inspiration as to where they should focus their modeling attention.

Interana also has an interesting twist in its business model, which I hope can be used successfully by other enterprise software startups as well. Read more

December 18, 2016

Introduction to Crate.io and CrateDB

Crate.io and CrateDB basics include:

In essence, CrateDB is an open source and less mature alternative to MemSQL. The opportunity for MemSQL and CrateDB alike exists in part because analytic RDBMS vendors didn’t close it off.

CrateDB’s not-just-relational story starts:

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

September 28, 2015

Cloudera Kudu deep dive

This is part of a three-post series on Kudu, a new data storage system from Cloudera.

Let’s talk in more detail about how Kudu stores data.

Read more

September 28, 2015

Introduction to Cloudera Kudu

This is part of a three-post series on Kudu, a new data storage system from Cloudera.

Cloudera is introducing a new open source project, Kudu,* which from Cloudera’s standpoint is meant to eventually become the single best underpinning for analytics on the Hadoop stack. I’ve spent multiple hours discussing Kudu with Cloudera, mainly with Todd Lipcon. Any errors are of course entirely mine.

*Like the impala, the kudu is a kind of antelope. I knew that, because I enjoy word games. What I didn’t know — and which is germane to the naming choice — is that the kudu has stripes. 🙂

For starters:

Read more

June 8, 2015

Teradata will support Presto

At the highest level:

Now let’s make that all a little more precise.

Regarding Presto (and I got most of this from Teradata)::

Daniel Abadi said that Presto satisfies what he sees as some core architectural requirements for a modern parallel analytic RDBMS project:  Read more

May 20, 2015

MemSQL 4.0

I talked with my clients at MemSQL about the release of MemSQL 4.0. Let’s start with the reminders:

The main new aspects of MemSQL 4.0 are:

There’s also a new free MemSQL “Community Edition”. MemSQL hopes you’ll experiment with this but not use it in production. And MemSQL pricing is now wholly based on RAM usage, so the column store is quasi-free from a licensing standpoint is as well.

Read more

July 23, 2014

Teradata bought Hadapt and Revelytix

My client Teradata bought my (former) clients Revelytix and Hadapt.* Obviously, I’m in confidentiality up to my eyeballs. That said — Teradata truly doesn’t know what it’s going to do with those acquisitions yet. Indeed, the acquisitions are too new for Teradata to have fully reviewed the code and so on, let alone made strategic decisions informed by that review. So while this is just a guess, I conjecture Teradata won’t say anything concrete until at least September, although I do expect some kind of stated direction in time for its October user conference.

*I love my business, but it does have one distressing aspect, namely the combination of subscription pricing and customer churn. When your customers transform really quickly, or even go out of existence, so sometimes does their reliance on you.

I’ve written extensively about Hadapt, but to review:

As for what Teradata should do with Hadapt: Read more

July 14, 2014

21st Century DBMS success and failure

As part of my series on the keys to and likelihood of success, I outlined some examples from the DBMS industry. The list turned out too long for a single post, so I split it up by millennia. The part on 20th Century DBMS success and failure went up Friday; in this one I’ll cover more recent events, organized in line with the original overview post. Categories addressed will include analytic RDBMS (including data warehouse appliances), NoSQL/non-SQL short-request DBMS, MySQL, PostgreSQL, NewSQL and Hadoop.

DBMS rarely have trouble with the criterion “Is there an identifiable buying process?” If an enterprise is doing application development projects, a DBMS is generally chosen for each one. And so the organization will generally have a process in place for buying DBMS, or accepting them for free. Central IT, departments, and — at least in the case of free open source stuff — developers all commonly have the capacity for DBMS acquisition.

In particular, at many enterprises either departments have the ability to buy their own analytic technology, or else IT will willingly buy and administer things for a single department. This dynamic fueled much of the early rise of analytic RDBMS.

Buyer inertia is a greater concern.

A particularly complex version of this dynamic has played out in the market for analytic RDBMS/appliances.

Otherwise I’d say:  Read more

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