Workday, Inc. company overview
My main post on Workday’s technology got really long, so I decided to split out a company backgrounder separately. Here goes.
Workday, Inc. was founded by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, who’d previously worked together at PeopleSoft. It is generally the case that the companies Dave starts: Read more
| Categories: Pricing, Software as a Service (SaaS), Workday | 2 Comments |
Riptano, and Cassandra adoption
Tonight’s Cassandra technology post got plenty long enough on its own, so I’m separating out business and adoption issues here. For starters, known Cassandra users include:
- Facebook, which has said it has 150 or so Cassandra nodes (but see below)
- Twitter, which has said it has 45 or so Cassandra nodes
- Rackspace, which used to be Jonathan Ellis’ employer, and now is backing Cassandra company Riptano
- Digg, which along with Twitter and Rackspace was one of the three major users helping advance the Cassandra project
- OpenX, Simple Geo, Digital Reasoning, who Jonathan cited as production users in March
- Cloudkick, as noted and linked in my other post
- Two customers Riptano named at launch (but I’ve forgotten who they were*)
Fetlife, Meebo, and others seem to at least have a healthy interest in Cassandra, based on their level of involvement in a forthcoming Cassandra Summit. That said, the @Fetlife tweetstream features numerous yelps of pain, and I don’t mean the recreational kind. Read more
| Categories: Cassandra, Facebook, Market share, NoSQL, Open source, Parallelization, Pricing, Riptano, Specific users | 3 Comments |
Cloudera Enterprise and Hadoop evolution
I talked with Cloudera a couple of weeks ago in connection with the impending release of Cloudera Enterprise. I’d say: Read more
XtremeData update
I talked with Geno Valente of XtremeData tonight. Highlights included:
- XtremeData still hasn’t sold any dbX stuff (they’ve had a side business in generic FPGA-based boards paying the bills for years). Well, there may have been some paid POCs (proofs of concept) or something, but real sales haven’t come through yet.
- XtremeData does have three prospects who have said “Yes”, and expects one order to come through this month.
- XtremeData continues to believe it shines when:
- Data models are complex
- In particular, there are complex joins
- In particular, two large tables have to be joined with each other, under circumstances where no product can avoid doing vast data redistribution
- XtremeData insists that all the nice things Bill Inmon – including in webinars — has said about it has not been for pay or other similar business compensation. That’s quite unusual.
- XtremeData is coming out with a new product, codenamed the Personal Data Warehouse (PDW), which:
- Is ready to go into beta test
- Should be launched in a month and a half or so
- Will have a different name when it is launched
Naming aside, Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Benchmarks and POCs, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Kickfire, Market share, Netezza, Pricing, XtremeData | 5 Comments |
Comments on the Gartner 2009/2010 Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant
At intervals of little over a year, Gartner Group publishes a Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant. Gartner’s 2009 data warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant — actually, January 2010 — is now out.* For many reasons, including those I noted in my comments on Gartner’s 2008 Data Warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant, the Gartner quadrant pictures are a bad use of good research. Rather than rehash that this year, I’ll merely call out some points in the surrounding commentary that I find interesting or just plain strange. Read more
Netezza Skimmer
As I previously complained, last week wasn’t a very convenient time for me to have briefings. So when Netezza emailed to say it would release its new entry-level Skimmer appliance this morning, while I asked for and got a Friday afternoon briefing, I kept it quick and basic.
That said, highlights of my Netezza Skimmer briefing included:
- In essence, Netezza Skimmer is 1/3 of Netezza’s previously smallest appliance, for 1/3 the price.
- I.e., Netezza Skimmer has 1 S-blade and 9 disks, vs. 3 S-blades and 24 disks on the Netezza TwinFin 3.
- With 1 disk reserved as a hot spare, that boils down to a 1:1:1 ratio among CPU cores, FPGA cores, and 1-terabyte disks on Netezza skimmer. The same could pretty much be said of Netezza TwinFin, the occasional hot-spare disk notwithstanding.
- Netezza Skimmer costs $125K.
- With 2.8 or so TB of space for user data before compression, that’s right in line with the Netezza price point of slightly <$20K/terabyte of user data.
- That assumes Netezza’s usual 2.25X compression. I forgot to ask when 4X compression was actually being shipped.
- I forgot to ask, but it seems obvious that Netezza Skimmer uses identical or substantially similar components to Netezza TwinFin’s.
- Netezza Skimmer is 7 rack units high.
- In place of the SMP hosts on TwinFin Systems, Netezza Skimmer has a host blade.
- Netezza (specifically Phil Francisco) mentioned that when Kalido uses Netezza Skimmer for its appliance, there will be an additional host computer, but when it uses TwinFin for the same software, the built-in host will suffice. (Even so, I suspect it might be too strong to say that Skimmer’s built-in host computer is underpowered.)
- Netezza also suggested that more appliance OEMs are coming down the pike specifically focused on the affordable Skimmer.
| Categories: Data mart outsourcing, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Pricing | 2 Comments |
Introduction to Gooddata
Around the end of the Cold War, Esther Dyson took it upon herself to go repeatedly to Eastern Europe and do a lot of rah-rah and catalysis, hoping to spark software and other computer entrepreneurs. I don’t know how many people’s lives she significantly affected – I’d guess it’s actually quite a few – but in any case the number is not zero. Roman Stanek, who has built and sold a couple of software business, cites her as a key influence setting him on his path.
Roman’s latest venture is business intelligence firm Gooddata. Gooddata was founded in 2007 and has been soliciting and getting attention for a while, so I was surprised to learn that Gooddata officially launched just a few weeks ago. Anyhow, some less technical highlights of the Gooddata story include: Read more
Oracle lifts the cloud hanging over MySQL storage engine vendors
Oracle has put out a press release promising to play nicely with MySQL if its Sun takeover is approved. The parts in italics below are quotes. My comments are in plain text.
1. Continued Availability of Storage Engine APIs. Oracle shall maintain and periodically enhance MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture to allow users the flexibility to choose from a portfolio of native and third party supplied storage engines.
MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture shall mean MySQL’s current practice of using, publicly-available, documented application programming interfaces to allow storage engine vendors to “plug” into the MySQL database server. Documentation shall be consistent with the documentation currently provided by Sun.
Well, duh.
2. Non-assertion. As copyright holder, Oracle will change Sun’s current policy and shall not assert or threaten to assert against anyone that a third party vendor’s implementations of storage engines must be released under the GPL because they have implemented the application programming interfaces available as part of MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture.
A commercial license will not be required by Oracle from third party storage engine vendors in order to implement the application programming interfaces available as part of MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture.
Oracle shall reproduce this commitment in contractual commitments to storage vendors who at present have a commercial license with Sun.
This is the biggie, lifting a major cloud from the MySQL storage engine business. It sounds like the third of four options I suggested as to how Oracle could legitimately earn antitrust approval of its MySQL takeover. Sure, Infobright, Kickfire, et al. already had what they saw as adequate safeguards or contingency plans vs. Oracle skullduggery. It’s still big even so.
(Quoted out of order.) The geographic scope of these commitments shall be worldwide and these commitments shall continue until the fifth anniversary of the closing of the transaction.
Not a disaster, but with respect to at least point #2 there should be no time limit whatsoever. I’d like to see the EC require that change as a further Oracle concession.
| Categories: MySQL, Open source, Oracle, Pricing | 16 Comments |
Boston Big Data Summit keynote outline
Last month, Bob Zurek asked me to give a talk on “Big Data”, where “big” is anything from a few terabytes on up, then moderate a panel on cloud computing. We agreed that I could talk just from notes, without slides. So, since I have them typed up, I’m posting them below.
Greenplum Single-Node Edition — sometimes free is a real cool price
Greenplum is announcing today that you can run Greenplum software on a single 8-core commodity server, free. First and foremost, that’s a strong statement that Greenplum wants enterprises to pay it for Greenplum’s parallelization/”private cloud” capabilities. Second, it may be an attractive gift to a variety of folks who want to extract insight from terabyte-scale databases of various kinds.
Greenplum Single-Node Edition:
- Is free of charge, although you can buy support.
- Has no restrictions on use, production or otherwise.
- Has no restrictions on database size.
- Is closed-source.
For those who want free, terabyte-scale data warehousing software, Greenplum Single-Node Edition may be quite appealing, considering that the main available alternatives are:
- General-purpose open-source DBMS, such as PostgreSQL and MySQL (lacking analytic DBMS performance and features)
- Infobright Community Edition (the other best choice – Infobright’s commercial sales success indicates the solidity of Infobright’s technology)
- Rough research-project code and other other questionable open source offerings
- Crippleware from other commercial analytic DBMS vendors (e.g., Teradata)
For example, comparing PostgreSQL-based Greenplum with PostgreSQL itself, Greenplum offers:
- The ability to scale out queries across all cores in your box (and no, pgpool is not a serious alternative)
- Storage alternatives such as columnar (I am told that EnterpriseDB recently stopped funding a project for a PostgreSQL columnar option)