Where I’m at
It would be an exaggeration to say that my family health issues are “under control.” My father still isn’t fully alert. He also has tubes surgically implanted in his throat and belly, and will not be able to speak during a months-long rehab. (He will HATE that; he’s the kind of guy who always charms or at least entertains his caretakers.) In one of my better pieces of writing, I explained all that in a long note to my partly-senile mother, who seems to be handling it; but of course she remains a concern. Linda’s leg is still broken.
One moral in all this is that it is a VERY good idea for the elderly to live in the same metropolitan area as their children. When I’m with my father, I can rein in his overconfidence about muddling through episodes of weakness. When I’m not, bad things happen.
Still, things are moving forward. A long, slow rehab will be very unpleasant for my parents, but at least there’s good hope we won’t have too many more near-term urgent crises. Communication and coordination among my parents’ support structure is better, even in the case of Friendship Village. And Linda seems sufficiently able to fend for herself that I’ll keep my plans to go to the SF Bay area the week of October 4, albeit being very careful to stock the house with food beforehand.
I’ve kept up client service through all this, cutting relatively few corners, and that won’t change. Read more
| Categories: About this blog | 12 Comments |
Some of my travails
Two weeks ago tonight, my 86 year old father was taken unresponsive from his home at Friendship Village of Dublin (Ohio) to Riverside Methodist Hospital. He remains unresponsive, and his doctors and the Riverside Hospital nurses are trying to puzzle out how to bring him around. Riverside Hospital does not know what happened at Friendship Village of Dublin the night he wound up collapsing, so naturally I asked Friendship Village for the information, that I may relay it to Riverside Hospital, so that they may help him recover from his “critically stable” condition. Two weeks after the event, they are still refusing it to me.
| Categories: About this blog | 6 Comments |
How I’m planning to package user services
On the Monash Research business website right now, you could find multiple pages explaining and extolling our vendor consulting services. We even have posted standard contracts that:
- Are concise.
- Are priced in terms units of work, yet do not require me to meter services at precise hourly or daily rates.
- Have a minimum scope that allows me to feel comfortable I’m spending enough time with a client to do good work.
- Extend over time, mimicking the subscription model of analyst services.*
- Do not contain any concept of “work for hire,” transfer of intellectual property, or “we own your brain.”
- Don’t have any other features that are stunningly inappropriate for our business.
By way of contrast, the user services portion of our site is only a few lines long, and that’s beginning to hurt. Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehousing | 6 Comments |
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 and customer counts, 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!
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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.