illuminate Solutions
Discussion of illuminate Solutions and it’s data warehouse/analytics product suite (iLuminate, iCorrelate, iAnalyze, etc.). Related subjects include:
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
Gartner’s 2008 data warehouse database management system Magic Quadrant is out
Gartner’s annual Magic Quadrant for data warehouse DBMS is out. Thankfully, vendors don’t seem to be taking it as seriously as usual, so I didn’t immediately hear about. (I finally noticed it in a Greenplum pay-per-click ad.) Links to Gartner MQs tend to come and go, but as of now here are two working links to the 2008 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System MQ. My posts on the 2007 and 2006 MQs have also been updated with working links. Read more
The illuminate guys have a CTO blog
If you want to know more about illuminate’s data warehouse offerings, CTO Joe Foley has a blog. A good starting point might be the post on value-based storage. Two key points seem to be:
The VBS also provides some data access features that can not be duplicated in any other structure. A search can be executed starting with a data value in the pool. By going from the value pool back to the index, it is possible to quickly locate every use of the value wherever is may be used in the logical record structures.
which makes sense, and
This structure also enables our incremental query capability. As the result of a query, the database returns a set of instance identifiers rather than a set of records. This is because there are no records, only pointers and values. With the response being a set of pointers, it is a simple matter to perform the next query step and then get the union or difference between the two sets of pointers for the result of the second query step. This process can be continued indefinitely with the result set shrinking or growing as the new results are merged with the old.
which still sounds like gobbledygook to me. Read more
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iLuminate’s correlation/associative approach to data warehousing
illuminate Solutions (small “i”) is an interesting little company, still rough around the edges. (E.g., the Press Release Archive page at i-lluminate.com says, in its entirety, “We are in the process of loading our historical press releases. Please check back the second week in March!” And I only got that much when I corrected an obvious typo in the URL in the menu bar.) According to CTO Joe Foley, illuminate has 37 or so employees, and 40+ customers, ¾ of whom are in their home country of Spain and ½ the rest of whom are in Latin America. Now they’re entering the US.
illuminate’s basic idea is one I’ve heard before, but mainly from companies with more of a search orientation*, such as Attivio: Take a collection of tables, create a big inverted index on all the values in all columns at once, and do queries on that. This, illuminate claims, obviates all sorts of database design problems and similar hassles you otherwise might have. illuminate’s buzzword for all this is “CDBMS”, where the “C” stands for correlation. The actual CDBMS product is called iLuminate; related business intelligence tools are called iCorrelate and iAnalyze. What iLuminate actually indexes is a token that holds four pieces of information: Instance identifier, table identifier, column identifier, and value. Read more