Is data warehousing now all about sequential access?
A lot of evidence is pointing to a major paradigm shift in data warehouse RDBMS, along the lines of:
Old way: Assume I/O is random; lower total execution time by improving selectivity and thus lowering the amount of I/O.
New way: Drive the amount of random I/O to near zero, and do as much sequential I/O as necessary to achieve this goal.
Examples include:
- Data warehouse appliances (see especially this discussion of DATallegro’s architecture)
- Columnar systems (see Nathan Myer’s first comment in this discussion of the much-hyped Required Technologies prototype)
- Memory-centric systems, notably SAP’s BI Accelerator
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, DATAllegro, Memory-centric data management, SAP AG, Theory and architecture, TransRelational | 4 Comments |
Mark Logic and the MarkLogic Server
I’ve been interested in the Mark Logic story from the first time CEO Dave Kellogg told me about it. Basically, Mark Logic sells an XML-based DBMS optimized for text search, called MarkLogic Server. For obvious reasons, they don’t want to position it as a DBMS; hence they call it an “XML content server” instead. I posted about their marketing and application focus over on Text Technologies. In this post, I’ll dive a little deeper into the core technology.
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| Categories: MarkLogic, Structured documents | 3 Comments |
Business Objects on EIM, ETL, etc.
I chatted with some Business Objects ETL/EIM (Enterprise Information Management) folks today, in a call that was a direct response to what I heard from and posted about Informatica. The core of the Business Objects story can be summarized (albeit brutally!) like this:
| Categories: Business intelligence, Business Objects, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Theory and architecture | 1 Comment |
Introduction to Greenplum and some compare/contrast
Netezza relies on FPGAs. DATallegro essentially uses standard components, but those include Infiniband cards (and there’s a little FPGA action when they do encryption). Greenplum, however, claims to offer a highly competitive data warehouse solution that’s so software-only you can download it from their web site. That said, their main sales mode seems to also be through appliances, specifically ones branded and sold by Sun, combining Greenplum and open source software on a “Thumper” box. And the whole thing supposedly scales even higher than DATallegro and Netezza, because you can manage over a petabyte if you chain together a dozen of the 100 terabyte racks.
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| Categories: Actian and Ingres, Data warehouse appliances, DATAllegro, Greenplum, Netezza, Open source, PostgreSQL | 4 Comments |
QlikView – a leader in memory-centric BI
QlikTech — the vendor of QlikView — contacted me to tell their memory-centric BI story. A Swedish company with >$23 million in estimated license revenue last year and a 100%ish growth rate, they claim to be the leader in that space, pulling ahead of Applix. But for now, I’ll call them “a” leader, and say that their story sounds like a hybrid between those of Applix (TM1 product) and SAP (BI Accelerator).
| Categories: Business intelligence, Cognos, Memory-centric data management, QlikTech and QlikView, SAP AG | 1 Comment |
ANTs’ memory-centric characteristics to the fore?
An eWeek article suggests that ANTs is repositioning with a strong emphasis on memory-centricity. ANTs’ website, frankly, doesn’t support this theory, giving a more balanced tech overview in line with how they pitched me in a briefing last November. Still, it’s an interesting possibility to watch.
The main focus of the article actually wasn’t ANTs, but rather SAP’s wildest dreams in expanding the scope of its BI Accelerator technology. But the new-to-me part was the positioning of ANTs.
| Categories: ANTs Software, Memory-centric data management, SAP AG | 2 Comments |
Informatica’s SaaS/Outsourcing story
The coolest part of Informatica’s visit today was the new SaaS story. Naturally, they’re starting with Salesforce.com, but they hope to use the technology they’re developing for Salesforce with other SaaS vendors, with Business Process Outsourcers, and with anybody else who needs robust cross-enterprise data integration. I don’t actually think there’s a lot of hard technology there; nonetheless, somebody had to build it. And they apparently have, in two main parts.
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| Categories: EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Informatica | 2 Comments |
Informatica’s general story
Informatica came by today. In general their story is: Data integration is very important; all vendors except Informatica and IBM/Ascential are low end; IBM/Ascential is confused; most BI vendors except Business Objects are likely to follow Hyperion’s lead in partnering with them. Read more
| Categories: EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Informatica | 2 Comments |
Amazon’s version of DBMS2
Last year, I pointed out that Amazon has a highly diversified DBMS strategy. Now Mike Vizard has a great interview with Werner Vogel, Amazon’s CTO, where he unearths a lot more detail. And it turns out that Amazon has been a hardcore adopter of DBMS2, since long before DBMS2 was named.
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| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Database diversity, NoSQL, Specific users, Theory and architecture | Leave a Comment |
Solid’s MySQL engine
Solid Information Technology is making the beta of its MySQL engine available for download midday on Tuesday. So I talked with them today, mercifully unembargoed. Here’s the story.
| Categories: Memory-centric data management, Mid-range, MySQL, OLTP, Open source | 4 Comments |