Research agenda for 2010
As you may have noticed, I’ve been posting less research/analysis in November and December than during some other periods. In no particular order, reasons have included: Read more
Comments on a fabricated press release quote
My clients at Kickfire put out a press release last week quoting me as saying things I neither said nor believe. The press release is about a “Queen For A Day” kind of contest announced way back in April, in which users were invited to submit stories of their data warehouse problems, with the biggest sob stories winning free Kickfire appliances. The fabricated “quote” reads: Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kickfire, Market share, Sybase | 2 Comments |
Availability nightmares continue
We’re having a lot of outages on our blogs. Downtown Host tells me that huge numbers of MySQL processes are being spawned. I have trouble understanding why, as WP-SuperCache (Edit: Actually, just WP-Cache) is enabled, robots.txt has a crawl delay, and so on.
As of yesterday, we were getting 1 1/2 megabytes/hour of “MySQL database has gone away” errors. After Downtown Host declined to discuss that subject with us, Melissa Bradshaw implemented — at least for this blog — a workaround to change the MySQL wait_delay settings ourselves. Clever idea, and seemed to work for half a day — but now the problems have returned.
Downtown Host isn’t saying much more than “Look at these logs. Your blogs are experiencing a lot of queries and spawning dozens upon dozens of MySQL processes. The main offender is DBMS2.” I don’t know when we’ll get this sorted out. I fly to Europe tomorrow. I have a cough. I’m exhausted. I’m sorry.
| Categories: About this blog, MySQL | 4 Comments |
Please ping me if one of your comments doesn’t appear
I just found two comments that went to Akismet spam wrongly, one because the author (Marcin Zukowski) pinged me, and one because I searched my spam folder on “Netezza” and there it was.
If one of your comments doesn’t go up, please ping me, and also suggest a keyword I could search on to find it.
I’m sorry for any inconvenience!
| Categories: About this blog | Leave a Comment |
Oops, I didn’t have caching turned on
My blogs, especially this one, haven’t been very robust in the face of increasing traffic volume. A few minutes ago DBMS2 was down again, and my hosting company called me out for being a resource hog and asked me to optimize.
It turns out that while I’d installed and activated the WP-Cache plug-in, I’d never actually turned caching on. This is now changed. But that means you may see cached pages instead of live ones, e.g. missing responses to your comments. The cache is currently configured to flush every 10 minutes, but that setting could of course change. I plan to make the same change on all five blogs.
Anyhow, please let me know if you have any problems that seem related to caching. (Also, if anybody has any experience differentiating between WP-Super Cache (the other main option) and WP-Cache, I’d love to hear about it.
Thanks! And thanks also for causing these query volume problems in the first place! 
| Categories: About this blog | 1 Comment |
My current customer list among the analytic DBMS specialists
(This is an updated version of an August, 2008 post.)
One of my favorite pages on the Monash Research website is the list of many current and a few notable past customers. (Another favorite page is the one for testimonials.) For a variety of reasons, I won’t undertake to be more precise about my current customer list than that. But I don’t think it would hurt anything to list the analytic/data warehouse DBMS/appliance specialists in the group. They are:
- Aster Data
- Greenplum
- Infobright
- Kickfire
- Kognitio
- Microsoft
- Netezza (my biggest client this year, probably, because of all the Enzee Universe appearances)
- Sybase
- Teradata
- Vertica
- Attivio, which may or may not be construed as being in the analytic DBMS business
- Clearpace, ditto
All of those are Monash Advantage members.
If you care about all this, you may also be interested in the rest of my standards and disclosures.
| Categories: About this blog, Aster Data, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Infobright, Kickfire, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Netezza, Sybase, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 4 Comments |
There always seems to be a fire drill around MapReduce news
Last August I flew out to see my new clients at Greenplum. They told me they planned to roll out MapReduce in a few weeks, and asked for my help in publicizing it. From their offices I went to dinner with non-clients Aster Data, who told me they’d gotten wind of a Greenplum MapReduce announcement and planned to come out ahead of it. A couple of hours later, Aster signed up as a client. In something of a pickle — but not one of my own making — I knocked heads, and persuaded both vendors to announce MapReduce at the same time, namely the following Monday. Lots of publicity ensued for both vendors, and everybody was reasonably satisfied.
| Categories: About this blog, Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Greenplum, MapReduce, Michael Stonebraker, Vertica Systems | Leave a Comment |
Oracle Exadata article — up at last
I’d been promising Intelligent Enterprise editor Doug Henschen an article on Oracle Exadata for months. It’s finally up. For a variety of reasons, it was a lot more work than one might at first guess. One such reason is that it spawned four related blog posts over the past few days.
As I post this, there are two glitches in the article. One is that em dashes are appearing as quote marks — and as you know, I use a lot of em dashes. The other is that one sentence on in-database data mining seems unclear to me, and I’ve asked for a small edit to make it clearer what I’m talking about. No doubt both will be cleared up soon. Edit: Doug indeed fixed all that within minutes.
This is an edited article. Other than columns, it may be my first such since the Upside Magazine cover story on AOL over a decade ago. But it was edited with a light and skillful touch. Please don’t hold me responsible for every minor subtlety of emphasis or grammatical nuance. But otherwise I stand behind the opinions, for they are indeed mine.
| Categories: About this blog, Data warehouse appliances, Exadata, Oracle | 1 Comment |
I’ll be answering e-mail again soon
I’ll be answering e-mail again soon, from clients, PR folks, and my mother alike. Ditto blog comments and Twitter direct messages. And I’ll close out on the inessential deadlines I missed for TDWI. I’ve been a little busy, as you may be gathering.
Now just put those pitchforks down gently, and back away slowly …
| Categories: About this blog | 1 Comment |
My current customer list among the data warehouse specialists
One of my favorite pages on the Monash Research website is the list of many current and a few notable past customers. (Another favorite page is the one for testimonials.) For a variety of reasons, I won’t undertake to be more precise about my current customer list than that. But I don’t think it would hurt anything to list the data warehouse DBMS/appliance specialists in the group. They are:
- Aster Data
- Calpont
- DATAllegro
- Greenplum
- Infobright
- Netezza
- ParAccel
- Teradata
- Vertica
All of those are Monash Advantage members.
If you care about all this, you may also be interested in the rest of my standards and disclosures.
| Categories: About this blog, Aster Data, Calpont, DATAllegro, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Infobright, Netezza, ParAccel, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 3 Comments |