RDF and graphs

Analysis of data management technology optimized for RDF-formatted and/or graph data.

April 4, 2012

IBM DB2 10

Shortly before Tuesday’s launch of DB2 10, IBM’s Conor O’Mahony checked in for a relatively non-technical briefing.* More precisely, this is about DB2 for “distributed” systems, aka LUW (Linux/Unix/Windows); some of the features have already been in the mainframe version of DB2 for a while. IBM is graciously permitting me to post the associated DB2 10 announcement slide deck.

*I hope any errors in interpretation are minor.

Major aspects of DB2 10 include new or improved capabilities in the areas of:

Of course, there are various other enhancements too, including to security (fine-grained access control), Oracle compatibility, and DB2 pureScale. Everything except the pureScale part is also reflected in IBM InfoSphere Warehouse, which is a near-superset of DB2.*

*Also, the data ingest part isn’t in base DB2.

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September 8, 2011

Aster Data business trends

Last month, I reviewed with the Aster Data folks which markets they were targeting and selling into, subsequent to acquisition by their new orange overlords. The answers aren’t what they used to be. Aster no longer focuses much on what it used to call frontline (i.e., low-latency, operational) applications; those are of course a key strength for Teradata. Rather, Aster focuses on investigative analytics — they’ve long endorsed my use of the term — and on the batch run/scoring kinds of applications that inform operational systems.

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June 20, 2011

Vertica as an analytic platform

Vertica 5.0 is coming out today, and delivering the down payment on Vertica’s analytic platform strategy. In Vertica lingo, there’s now a Vertica SDK (Software Development Kit), featuring Vertica UDT(F)s* (User-Defined Transform Functions). Vertica UDT syntax basics start:  Read more

June 19, 2011

Investigative analytics and derived data: Enzee Universe 2011 talk

I’ll be speaking Monday, June 20 at IBM Netezza’s Enzee Universe conference. Thus, as is my custom:

The talk concept started out as “advanced analytics” (as opposed to fast query, a subject amply covered in the rest of any Netezza event), as a lunch break in what is otherwise a detailed “best practices” session. So I suggested we constrain the subject by focusing on a specific application area — customer acquisition and retention, something of importance to almost any enterprise, and which exploits most areas of analytic technology. Then I actually prepared the slides — and guess what? The mix of subjects will be skewed somewhat more toward generalities than I first intended, specifically in the areas of investigative analytics and derived data. And, as always when I speak, I’ll try to raise consciousness about the issues of liberty and privacy, our options as a society for addressing them, and the crucial role we play as an industry in helping policymakers deal with these technologically-intense subjects.

Slide 3 refers back to a post I made last December, saying there are six useful things you can do with analytic technology:

Slide 4 observes that investigative analytics:

Slide 5 gives my simplest overview of investigative analytics technology to date:  Read more

April 5, 2011

Whither MarkLogic?

My clients at MarkLogic have a new CEO, Ken Bado, even though former CEO Dave Kellogg was quite successful. If you cut through all the happy talk and side issues, the reason for the change is surely that the board wants to see MarkLogic grow faster, and specifically to move beyond its traditional niches of publishing (especially technical publishing) and national intelligence.

So what other markets could MarkLogic pursue? Before Ken even started work, I sent over some thoughts. They included (but were not limited to):  Read more

March 24, 2011

Analytic performance — the persistent need for speed

Analytic DBMS and other analytic platform technologies are much faster than they used to be, both in absolute and price/performance terms. So the question naturally arises, “When is the performance enough?” My answer, to a first approximation, is “Never.” Obviously, your budget limits what you can spend on analytics, and anyhow the benefit of incremental expenditure at some point can grow quite small. But if analytic processing capabilities were infinite and free, we’d do a lot more with analytics than anybody would consider today.

I have two lines of argument supporting this view. One is application-oriented. Machine-generated data will keep growing rapidly. So using that data requires ever more processing resources as well. Analytic growth, rah-rah-rah; company valuation, sis-boom-bah. Application areas include but are not at all limited to marketing, law enforcement, investing, logistics, resource extraction, health care, and science.

The other approach is to point out some computational areas where vastly more analytic processing resources could be used than are available today. Consider, if you will, statistical modeling, graph analytics, optimization, and stochastic planning.  Read more

March 4, 2011

Teradata, Aster Data, and Teradata/Aster

Teradata is acquiring Aster Data. Naturally, the deal is being presented with a Treaty of Tordesillas kind of positioning — Teradata does X, Aster Data does Y, and everybody looks forward to having X and Y in the same product portfolio. That said, my initial positioning and product strategy thoughts on the Teradata/Aster combination go something like this.  Read more

January 3, 2011

The six useful things you can do with analytic technology

I seem to be in the mode of sharing some of my frameworks for thinking about analytic technology. Here’s another one.

Ultimately, there are six useful things you can do with analytic technology:

Technology vendors often cite similar taxonomies, claiming to have all the categories (as they conceive them) nicely represented, in slickly integrated fashion. They exaggerate. Most of these categories are in rapid flux, and the rest should be. Analytic technology still has a long way to go.

In more detail:  Read more

August 11, 2010

Big Data is Watching You!

There’s a boom in large-scale analytics. The subjects of this analysis may be categorized as:

The most varied, interesting, and valuable of those four categories is the first one.

Read more

June 19, 2010

Objectivity Infinite Graph

I chatted Wednesday night with Darren Wood, the Australia-based lead developer of Objectivity’s Infinite Graph database product. Background includes:

Infinite Graph is an API or language binding on top of Objectivity that:

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