April 10th, 2008 Curt Monash
As previously announced, I did a webcast this afternoon, discussing database diversity. The title of the talk was taken directly from a post – What leading DBMS vendors don’t want you to realize — that argued mid-range DBMS are suitable for a broad variety of tasks. The overriding theme was a Clayton Christensen-style “disruption” narrative.
The sponsor was EnterpriseDB, which is fitting. While not the biggest DBMS industry disrupter in terms of revenue or visible impact (MySQL and Netezza say “Hi”), the Postgres family in general and EnterpriseDB in particular epitomize the disruption threat like nobody else, because of how broadly they substitute for market-leading database managers.
As I promised on the call, below is a post with links to further research backing up the points made. They’re numbered to match some of the presentation slides, which you can find at this link.
3. Much of the discussion of database diversity comes from a series of posts I coordinated with Mike Stonebraker.
4. At various times, starting on Slide 4, I made reference to datatype extensibility, a key feature of Oracle and DB2 – and a key advantage of Postgres over MySQL.
10. Capping off the database diversity discussion, Slide 10 mirrors this 11-point version of a data management software taxonomy.
13-14. I’ve posted many times about data warehousing DBMS and related technologies, including this overview of major analytic DBMS products, another recent overview of data warehouse specialty technologies, and an attempt to distinguish between data warehouse appliance myths and realities. Of particular interest for further research may be our sections on data warehouse appliances and columnar DBMS.
15. I do most of my posting about text search over on Text Technologies, specifically in the search category. Vendors I specifically mentioned as blending search with other kinds of data retrieval were Mark Logic and Attivio.
16. There’s a section here on native XML database management.
17. We also have a section on managing RDF and other graphical data models.
18. Ditto complex event/stream processing.
19. The only embeddable DBMS I’ve written much about recently is solidDB. And frankly, even in that case I’ve focused more on mid-tier caching uses, the now-canceled MySQL relationship, or general technology than I did specifically on embedded uses.
22-24. Back in February, 2007 I made what is probably still my clearest post explaining why I think market-leading DBMS vendors are in the process of getting disrupted.
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Posted in EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range DBMS, MySQL, Open source RDBMS, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems | No Comments »
April 5th, 2008 Curt Monash
There now are four hardware vendors that each offer or seem about to announce two different tiers of data warehouse appliances: Sun, HP, EMC, and Teradata. Specifically:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Dataupia, Greenplum, HP and Neoview, IBM and DB2, Infobright and Brighthouse, Kognitio and WX2, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Netezza, Oracle, ParAccel, Relational database management systems, Sybase, Teradata | 4 Comments »
March 14th, 2008 Curt Monash
An interesting part of my conversation with Dataupia’s CTO John O’Brien came when we talked about data warehousing in general. On the one hand, he endorsed the view that using Oracle probably isn’t a good idea for data warehouses larger than 10 terabytes, with SQL Server’s limit being well below that. On the other hand, he said he’d helped build 50-60 terabyte warehouses in Oracle years ago.
The point is that to build warehouses that big in Oracle or other traditional DBMS, you have to pull out a large bag of tricks. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Oracle, Relational database management systems | 16 Comments »
January 28th, 2008 Curt Monash
Question of the day #2
Who is actually using native XML?
Mark Logic is having a fine time using its native XML engine for custom publishing. One outfit I know of is using a native XML for something like web analytics, but is driving me crazy by never coming through on permission to divulge details. There’s a bit of native XML use out there supporting the insurance industry’s ACORD standard.
And after that I quickly run out of examples of native XML use. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data types, IBM and DB2, Mark Logic, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Native XML, Oracle | 1 Comment »
January 28th, 2008 Curt Monash
I have quite the excess of “flu-like symptoms,” and nothing substantive I’m writing today is coming to fruition. So instead of forcing the issue, I’m going to put a few questions out for discussion.
Question of the day #1
Is anybody indexing the actual contents of still images, video, or sound files?
Obviously, there are applications that serve huge numbers of videos, pictures, and/or songs — YouTube, Flickr, iTunes, and so on. But generally, these media are just handled as files or BLOBs, while all the database indexing is on alphanumeric metadata such as title, tags, uploader, date, download stats, comments, and so on.
The technology certainly exists to be more sophisticated. Consider, for example, Oracle’s Still Image datatype, which in typical Oracle fashion implements the relevant parts of SQL/MM and goes yet further. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data types, Oracle | 1 Comment »
January 24th, 2008 Curt Monash
I may argue for the use of open source and other mid-range database management systems, but a lot of industry sentiment remains on the other side. Vendors of high-end RDBMS naturally advocate enterprise-wide single-vendor adoption. Many CIOs and industry analysts, overwhelmed by product proliferation, think that’s a neat idea as well.
And in fairness, they’re not entirely wrong. Here are 14 reasons for using high-end relational database management systems, even on applications for which mid-range DBMS would suffice. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Microsoft and SQL*Server, Mid-range DBMS, MySQL, OLTP database management, Open source RDBMS, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems | 17 Comments »
January 22nd, 2008 Curt Monash
For very high-end applications, the list of viable database management systems is short. Scalability can be a problem. (The rankings of most scalable alternatives differ in the OLTP and data warehouse realms.) Extreme levels of security can be had from only a few DBMS. (Oracle would have you believe there’s only one choice.) And if you truly need 99.99% uptime, there only are a few DBMS you even should consider.
But for most applications at any enterprise – and for all applications at most enterprises – super high-end DBMS aren’t required. There are relatively few applications that wouldn’t run perfectly well on PostgreSQL or EnterpriseDB today. Ingres and Progress OpenEdge aren’t far behind (they’re a little lacking in datatype support). Ditto Intersystems Cache’, although the nonrelational architecture will be off-putting to many. And to varying degrees, you can also do fine with MySQL, Pervasive PSQL, MaxDB, or a variety of other products – or for that matter with the cheap or free crippled versions of Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and Informix.
What’s more, these mid-range database management systems can have significant advantages over their high-end brethren. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, IBM and DB2, Ingres, Intersystems and Cache', Microsoft and SQL*Server, Mid-range DBMS, MySQL, Open source RDBMS, Oracle, Pervasive Software, PostgreSQL, Progress, Apama, and DataDirect, Relational database management systems, SAP, BI Accelerator, and MaxDB | 14 Comments »
January 16th, 2008 Curt Monash
As previously noted, I’ve been writing about an Oracle/BEA merger since 2002. So like many observers, I find I have little more to say on the subject. Let’s go straight to the bullet points: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in HP and Neoview, IBM and DB2, Oracle, Oracle TimesTen, SAP, BI Accelerator, and MaxDB | 1 Comment »
January 14th, 2008 Curt Monash
I’m getting a flood of press releases today, because many of the companies I write about were selected to Intelligent Enterprise’s list of 12 most influential vendors plus 36 more to watch in the areas Intelligent Enterprise covers (which seems to be pretty much the analytics-related parts of what I write about here and on Text Technologies). It looks like a pretty reasonable list, although I think they forced the issue in some of the small analytics vendors they selected, and of course anybody can quibble with some of the omissions.
Among the companies they cited, you can find topical categories here for IBM (and Cognos), Informatica, Microsoft, Netezza, Oracle, SAP/Business Objects (both), SAS, and Teradata; QlikTech; Cast Iron, Coral8, DATAllegro, HP, ParAccel, and StreamBase; and Software AG. On Text Technologies you’ll find categories for some of the same vendors, plus Attensity, Clarabridge, and Google. There also are categories for some of these vendors on the Monash Report.
Posted in Business Objects, Cast Iron Systems, Coral8, DATAllegro, HP and Neoview, IBM and DB2, Informatica, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Netezza, Oracle, ParAccel, QlikTech and QlikView, SAP, BI Accelerator, and MaxDB, SAS Institute, Software AG and ADABAS, StreamBase, Teradata | No Comments »
December 29th, 2007 Curt Monash
I’ve been a DBMS analyst since before there were cost-based optimizers or, for that matter, a whole lot of relational DBMS. And in the 20 years that optimizers have been around, I’ve never fully understood why they’re so simple-minded. Even so, I think they’re pretty cool, as per the fanboyish discussion in this 2004 Computerworld column.
So I’m delighted to see that the Oracle folks have started a hardcore blog on optimizer details. If you want to get a sense of how smart a leading DBMS is or isn’t, I encourage you to check it out.
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Posted in OLTP database management, Oracle, Relational database management systems | 1 Comment »
December 14th, 2007 Curt Monash
There are at least 16 different vendors offering appliances and/or software that do database management primarily for analytic purposes.* That’s a lot to keep up with,. So I’ve thrown together a little overview of the analytic data management landscape, liberally salted with links to information about specific vendors, products, or technical issues. In some ways, this is a companion piece to my prior post about data warehouse appliance myths and realities.
*And that’s just the tabular/alphanumeric guys. Add in text search and you run the total a lot higher.
Numerous data warehouse specialists offer traditional row-based relational DBMS architectures, but optimize them for analytic workloads. These include Teradata, Netezza, DATAllegro, Greenplum, Dataupia, and SAS. All of those except SAS are wholly or primarily vendors of MPP/shared-nothing data warehouse appliances. EDIT: See the comment thread for a correction re Kognitio.
Numerous data warehouse specialists offer column-based relational DBMS architectures. These include Sybase (with the Sybase IQ product, originally from Expressway), Vertica, ParAccel, Infobright, Kognitio (formerly White Cross), and Sand. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Cognos and Applix TM1, DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Dataupia, Greenplum, IBM and DB2, Kognitio and WX2, Netezza, Oracle, ParAccel, Relational database management systems, SAS Institute, Sybase, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 10 Comments »
December 5th, 2007 Curt Monash
Quite a bit of DBMS plug-compatibility is being claimed these days. Lewis Cunningham’s post on a few new EnterpriseDB features illustrates just how picky compatibility features can get. One can run Oracle code but not get around to handling comments properly? Sheesh.
Posted in EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Oracle, Portability, transparency, and plug-compatibility, Relational database management systems | No Comments »
October 29th, 2007 Curt Monash
Please do not rely on the parts of this post that draw a distinction between in-memory and disk-based operation. See our February 18, 2008 post about ParAccel instead. It turns out that communication with ParAccel was yet worse than I had realized.
Officially launched today at the TDWI conference, ParAccel is out to compete with Netezza. Right out of the chute, ParAccel may have surpassed Netezza in at least one area: pointlessly annoying secrecy. (In other regards I love them dearly, but that paranoia can be a real pain.) As best I can remember, here are some things about ParAccel that I both am allowed to say and find interesting:
- ParAccel offers a columnar, MPP data warehouse DBMS, called the ParAccel Analytic Database.
- ParAccel’s product runs in two main modes. “Maverick” is normal, stand-alone mode. “Amigo” mode amounts to a plug-compatible accelerator for Oracle or Microsoft SQL*Server. Early sales and marketing were concentrated on SQL*Server Amigo mode.
- ParAccel’s product also runs in another pair of modes – in-memory and disk-based. Early sales and marketing were concentrated on in-memory mode. Hybrid memory-centric processing sounds like something for a future release.
- Sun has a reseller partnership with ParAccel, focused on in-memory mode.
- Sun and ParAccel published record-shattering 100 gigabyte, 300 gigabyte, and 1 terabyte TPC-H benchmarks today, based on in-memory mode. (If you’d like to throw 13 terabytes of disk at 1 terabyte of user data, running simple and repetitive queries, that benchmark might be a useful guide to your own experience. But hey – that’s a big improvement on the prior champion, who used 40 terabytes of disk. To ParAccel’s credit, they’re not pretending that this is a bigger deal than it is.)
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Columnar architectures, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Oracle, ParAccel, Portability, transparency, and plug-compatibility, Relational database management systems | No Comments »
October 26th, 2007 Curt Monash
October 15: We know what BEA is — now it is just a matter of negotiating the price
October 25: We’ve already established what you are, now we’re just working out a price
The news in the latter is that BEA has admitted it.
Note: Of course, the original joke is so old as to be variously attributed to all of George Bernard Shaw (most credibly), Winston Churchill, and Oscar Wilde.
Technorati Tags: Oracle, BEA
Posted in Humor, Oracle | No Comments »
October 19th, 2007 Curt Monash
I was at the Business Objects conference this week, and as usual went to very few sessions. But one I did stroll into was on “Managing Rapid Growth With the Right BI Strategy.” This was by Reliance Telecommunications, an outfit in India that is adding telecom subscribers very quickly, and consequently banging 100-150 gigs of data per day into a 35 terabyte warehouse.
The beginning of the talk astonished me, as the presenter seemed to be saying they were doing all this on Oracle. Hah. Oracle is what they moved away from; instead, they got Greenplum. I couldn’t get details; indeed, as a BI guy he was far enough away from DBMS to misspeak and say that Greenplum was brought in by ‘HP’, before quickly correcting himself when prompted. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Business Objects, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Oracle, Specific users | No Comments »
October 19th, 2007 Curt Monash
It’s early autumn, the leaves are turning in New England, and Gartner has issued another Magic Quadrant for data warehouse DBMS. The big winners vs. last year are Greenplum and, secondarily, Sybase. Teradata continues to lead. Oracle has also leapfrogged IBM, and there are various other minor adjustments as well, among repeat mentionees Netezza, DATAllegro, Sand, Kognitio, and MySQL. HP isn’t on the radar yet; ditto Vertica. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, HP and Neoview, IBM and DB2, Kognitio and WX2, MySQL, Netezza, Oracle, Relational database management systems, Sybase, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 6 Comments »
October 15th, 2007 Curt Monash
After the long Oracle/Peoplesoft drama, I don’t see any likely way the Oracle bid for BEA will end with anything other than a rather rapid acquisition of BEA, probably by Oracle.
But for now it’s not a done deal, as BEA is quite reasonably still haggling about price.
Posted in Oracle | No Comments »
October 12th, 2007 Curt Monash
Jeff Nolan has a great post on the Oracle/BEA deal. Yeah, he still has some of his old SAP good/Oracle evil reflexes, but he can be forgiven those and the tinfoilhattishness associated with them. His analysis of sellers’ and buyers’ deal habits is revealing and sound. Ditto the start of his remarks on Oracle product delays and internal politics, and SAP/Oracle competition. Even better, nothing in his analysis seems to disagree with mine. 
What Oracle now needs to do is make Oracle Application Server be a seamless “upgrade” from Weblogic. Then they can integrate in whatever kitchen-sink stuff they want from Oracle data caching (already there), app and/or dev tool run times, TimesTen, Tangosol, and so on, creating an app server stack that’s a worthy counterpart to the Oracle database in how it meets high-end OLTP needs. Meanwhile, Weblogic should remain as a not-bloated app-server-for-the-rest-of-us. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Oracle, SAP, BI Accelerator, and MaxDB | No Comments »
October 12th, 2007 Curt Monash
I’ve been arguing for a while that Oracle and Microsoft are screwed in high-end data warehousing. The reason is that they’re stuck with SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) architectures, while Teradata, Netezza, DATAllegro, and many others enjoy the benefits of MPP (Massively Parallel Processing). Thus, Teradata and DATAllegro boast installations in the hundreds of terabytes each, while Oracle and Microsoft users usually have to perform unnatural acts of hard-coded partitioning even to reach the 10 terabyte level.
That said, there are at least three ways Oracle and/or Microsoft could get out of this technical box:
1. They could buy or just partner with MPP vendors such as Dataupia, who offer plug-compatibility with their respective main DBMS.
2. They could buy whoever they want, plug-compatibility be damned. Presumably, they’d quickly add a light-weight data federation front-end to give the appearance of integration, then merge the products more closely over time.
3. They could develop or buy technology like DATAllegro’s, which essentially federates instances of an ordinary SMP DBMS across nodes of an MPP grid (Greenplum does something similar). I imagine that, for example, ripping Ingres out of DATAllegro and slotting in Oracle instead would be a pretty straightforward exercise; even without dramatic change to any of the optimizations, the resulting port would be something that ran pretty quickly on Day 1.
Bottom line: Oracle and Microsoft are hemorrhaging at the data warehouse high end now. But there are ways they could stanch the bleeding.
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Dataupia, Greenplum, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Oracle, Portability, transparency, and plug-compatibility, Relational database management systems, Teradata | 1 Comment »
October 12th, 2007 Curt Monash
Back in December, 2002, I wrote up the rationale for an Oracle acquisition of BEA. The deal finally seems like it may be happening. Oddly, when I proposed it then, I was accused by Oracle’s analyst relations department of being “unprofessional” for having the temerity to suggest it. And while the specific individual who threw that tantrum is long gone, I haven’t talked all that much with Oracle’s core server groups since … but I digress.
Actually, the logic of an Oracle/BEA deal now isn’t much different from what it was way back then. One exception is that in the intervening half-decade Oracle has acquired a formidable amount of experience in integrating large and/or technically overlapping acquisitions. Technically, however, the story remains pretty much the same. Oracle’s app server and BEA Weblogic do pretty similar things, more or less compliant to standards, only with different add-on functionality. And BEA’s most important add-ons are in an area — integration with outside applications — where Oracle has long needed to improve. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in EII, ETL, and/or EAI, Oracle | 3 Comments »
October 9th, 2007 Curt Monash
At the Teradata show today, I talked with Mike Weber of Scorecard Systems Inc. Scorecard’s business is vertical BI for telecommunications companies to analyze call data. They support Teradata (obviously), Oracle, and Microsoft SQL*Server, with Netezza coming soon. But not DB2.
Mike says that, in ten years in this business, he’s never seen DB2. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehousing, IBM and DB2, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Oracle, Teradata | No Comments »
October 5th, 2007 Curt Monash
I’ve been talking a lot to text mining vendors this week, as per a series of posts over on Text Technologies. Specifically, I’ve focused on the two with exhaustive extraction strategies, namely Attensity and Clarabridge. (Exhaustive extraction is Attensity’s term for separating the linguistic-analysis part of text mining from the DBMS-based BI/analytics part.)
So I asked each of Attensity and Clarabridge the side question as to which data warehouse software or appliances they were seeing. The answers were almost identical — Oracle, Microsoft SQL*Server, Teradata, and Netezza. One also mentioned MySQL and 2 HP prospects — but the HP sites were running NonStop SQL, not NeoView. Amazingly, there were no mentions of DB2. There also weren’t any mentions of the smaller specialist startups, such as DATAllegro, Greenplum, or Vertica.
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Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, HP and Neoview, IBM and DB2, Microsoft and SQL*Server, MySQL, Oracle, Relational database management systems, Teradata | 7 Comments »
September 28th, 2007 Curt Monash
Actually, I’m kidding with the post title; I doubt that Oracle’s new deal with DATAllegro partners Dell and EMC has much to do with DATAllegro at all. Rather, I think it’s an example of a trend I’m also sensing* from other major hardware vendors — doing deals with multiple data warehouse software suppliers to cover different hardware size ranges. This just happens to be the first one to be announced.
*How’s that for a nice, vague euphemism?
DATAllegro is targeted at warehouses sized, at a minimum, in the tens of terabytes of user data. Oracle’s technology works well enough up into at least the multi-terabyte range — unless you’re looking to get the best possible price and/or performance on your system — but then things start getting dicey. So there isn’t a lot of overlap between the two Dell/EMC offerings. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Oracle, Relational database management systems | 1 Comment »
September 25th, 2007 Curt Monash
I’ve written extensively in the past about the differences between Oracle and SAP’s technical paradigms. (In a nutshell, Oracle is first and foremost about data, while SAP is about business process.) Last week, the respective companies’ CEOs outlined very different business strategies as well. Specifically, SAP’s Henning Kagermann called SAP’s new ByDemand SaaS offering “most important announcement I’ve made in my career,” while Oracle’s Larry Ellison outlined a continued high-end strategy as follows (excerpted from Oracle’s September 20 conference call transcript):
Our strategy for growth is to find a way to add more value to the same customers we already serve, which are the large end of the mid-market and large companies. What we’re doing here is moving beyond ERP to industry specific software. So in the telecommunications industry that would be billing systems and network provisioning systems and network inventory systems; core applications to run their business, to run telco. Core applications to run a bank. Core applications to run a retail chain of stores. Core applications to run a utility. That’s our focus, and that allows us to leverage the existing relationships that we have because we already sell databases to these companies, we sell middleware to these companies. We sell ERP and CRM to these companies, and now we want to sell this industry-specific software.
Now, when a CEO says that something is a company’s “most important announcement ever,” it’s time to check your hyperbole meter. (E.g., I recall Larry saying that about, of all things, a release of Oracle’s application development tools.) Still, there are at least three strong reasons to take last week’s statements more or less seriously: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Oracle, SAP, BI Accelerator, and MaxDB | 1 Comment »
September 24th, 2007 Curt Monash
On Oracle’s quarterly conference call September 20, Larry Ellison said:
There are some interesting niche players. Sybase gets smaller every year. Teradata, a database machine and now there’s some new database machine players, Neteeza, and let me say that Oracle is a very innovative company and I think you’ll see us with a response to some of these niche players some time at the end of this year or next year.
How important this is depends hugely, of course, on just what form Oracle’s response takes.
Oracle already does a great job of accelerating complex queries within the severe limitations of its SMP/shared-everything architecture. If it just does more of the same, perhaps adding in some hardware optimizations and vendor relationships, it will be a big ho-hum. At best, such moves will improve Oracle’s price/performance somewhat and garner some favorable publicity, and postpone the serious bleeding for a while as Oracle tries to find a better way of dealing with the specialist threat.
Much more significant would be a new engine, whether developed inhouse or acquired. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Oracle, Relational database management systems | No Comments »