Variants on SimpleDB
Ralf describes SimpleDB, a project for an open source/desktop equivalent, a .NET version, and so on. Who knew that there was so much need for a database manager that could easily lose your data forever (with simple programming errors) and that is a lead-pipe cinch to repeatedly misplace it for a while (the built-in latency issues)?
To wit: Read more
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud | 1 Comment |
Will Brighthouse become the MySQL data warehouse of choice?
As I’ve previously noted:
- Infobright is about to make more noise about its MySQL-based data warehouse software, Brighthouse.
- Brighthouse has some very interesting technical features.
- A Sun/Infobright partnership would make a lot of sense.
Talking with Infobright today, I was again struck by how close their relationship with MySQL (the company is). Stay tuned.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL | Leave a Comment |
Infobright is gearing up for a press push
There’s another TDWI conference coming up, so it’s time for data warehouse-related press rollouts. Infobright (one of my many clients in this area) will be doing one of them, and ran an early version by me. Customer announcements, vendor partnerships, and so on are still being finalized, but anyhow Infobright has 7 revenue-recognized customers and a bunch more that are sold and in the implementation cycle. There’s a Release 3 of Brighthouse coming up. As one would expect, Release 3’s major claims to fame are the general addition of features (including some which elicit a “You didn’t have that already?” reaction), plus huge performance improvements in some queries (i.e., the biggest bottlenecks in Brighthouse Release 2).
On that level, it’s all standard stuff, as is Infobright’s core pitch — ease, simplicity, low cost, etc., and the benefits of same. But drilling down, there are some rather unique technical claims. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Infobright | 1 Comment |
More Google reliability woes
Google’s reliability issues are ever worse. As I previously pointed out, this is evidence against the notion that MapReduce is a replacement for established DBMS.
| Categories: Google | 2 Comments |
MapReduce for data mining? Maybe for variable-schema analytics.
Rich Skrenta is quite a successful entrepreneur, so it’s likely that he doesn’t really mean the more ridiculous parts of this rant on the MapReduce debate. E.g., he cheerfully disregards the fact that the data warehouse appliance vendors have ALREADY disrupted the market he’s focusing on. Index-light row-based and columnar systems are both super fast at data mining extracts.
But let’s go straight to the one interesting thing he said, Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, MapReduce, Parallelization, SAS Institute | 2 Comments |
Open source DBMS as a business model
Sun’s planned acquisition of MySQL is inspiring a lot of discussion about open source business models. Typical is Michael Arrington’s cheerleading for the idea that you can make a lot of money with open source. More interesting is Gordon Haff’s suggestion that it’s a lot easier to make money with open source when you have other things to actually sell to the same customers (e.g., the rest of Sun’s product line). (A similar view can be found here.)
To analyze this more carefully, it helps to distinguish among three different aspects of open source models:
- Open source product packaging
- Open source product development
- Open source pricing
Here’s what I think about each in the case of database management systems. Read more
| Categories: MySQL, Open source | 5 Comments |
Fixing Twitter in three letters: CEP
There’s a lot of agitation today because Twitter broke under the message volume generated during Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote. I don’t know what that volume was, but I just checked the lower volume of tweets (i.e., updates) going through the “public timeline” (i.e., everything) twice, and both times it was under 200 messages per minute. So, let’s say there’s a much higher volume at peak times, and also hypothesize that Twitter would like to grow a lot, and say that Twitter would like to handle 10-100,000 messages/minute – i.e., 1000+/second — as soon as possible.
That’s easy using CEP (Complex Event Processing). A Twitter update is just a string of 140 or fewer characters. It is associated with three pieces of metadata – author, time, and mode of posting. It should be visible in real time to any of the author’s “followers,” as well as in a single public timeline; perhaps there will be other kinds of Twitter channels in the future. In most cases, these updates are only visible to a user upon page refresh. Almost nNo Twitter user seems to have more than about 7,000 followers, even Robert Scoble or Evan Williams.* The average number of followers, at least among active updaters, is probably in the low hundreds now. So basically, this is all a heckuva lot easier than the tick-monitoring systems Wall Street firms are using today.
*I believe there’s a hard cap of 7,500, but nobody seems to have bumped against it yet.Twitterholic gives a different figure than Twitter does for Scoble. And it correctly shows Dave Troy with a little over 10,000.
Here’s how to implement that. Read more
| Categories: Aleri and Coral8, Memory-centric data management, StreamBase, Streaming and complex event processing (CEP) | 13 Comments |
The blogosphere writes about Sun buying MySQL
More from me soon, but first here is a survey of what other people are saying about Sun’s billion-dollar deal to acquire MySQL:
- Jeremy Cole, evidently a very experienced high-end MySQL user, itemizes some serious problems with MySQL — optimizer, memory management, replication, and so on. (Uh, Jeremy — what part of the product do you like?) He also echoes a theme I’ve seen elsewhere, and to some extent noticed myself; MySQL has had a lot of management issues as a company.
- Jeffrey McManus calls out Sun’s promise to continue to support non-Java programming languages in MySQL. Kaj Arnö of MySQL makes the point emphatically, reciting a list of operating systems and development environments/languages MySQL will continue to support.
- Matt Asay quite reasonably interprets Sun’s move as a bid for overall leadership and development of the open source software platform industry. I would add that Sun CEO Jonathon Schwartz came up through the software side of the business. I would further add that Sun has a dismal track record with closed-source software acquisitions, including Forte’, NetDynamics, and the enterprise side of Netscape.
- Matt also has selected quotes from the press conference, including Sun saying the coopetitionally obvious “Yeah, we’ll continue serious support for PostgreSQL and Oracle too.” Brian Aker also supports the PostgreSQL point.
- Zack Urlocker of MySQL implies that Jonathon Schwartz was very involved in the deal personally. That makes all kinds of sense.
- 451 Group has some interesting links, and don’t miss the short comment thread.
- The official MySQL and Sun company lines are summarized in this Zack Urlocker post on Infoworld (as well as some of the links above) and this post from Jonathon Schwartz of Sun.
| Categories: MySQL, Open source, PostgreSQL | 2 Comments |
Things could get interesting for Infobright
Of the many new specialty data warehouse DBMS and appliances, Infobright’s BrightHouse is the only leading one based on MySQL. I expect Sun and Infobright to have some interesting conversations now. Conversely, I wouldn’t be optimistic about any partnering discussions Infobright might have with, say, HP.
The most directly competitive relationship Sun now has to any future Infobright partnership is with ParAccel.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Open source, ParAccel | 2 Comments |
The other shoe finally drops for Oracle and BEA
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 more
| Categories: HP and Neoview, IBM and DB2, Oracle, Oracle TimesTen, SAP AG | 2 Comments |