Aleri update
My skeptical remarks on the Aleri/Coral8 merger generated some pushback. Today I actually got around to talking with John Morell, who was marketing chief at Coral8 and has remained with the combined company. First, some quick metrics:
- The combined Aleri has around 100 employees, 60-40 from Aleri vs. Coral8.
- The combined Aleri has around 80 customers. All of Aleri’s, with one sort-of exception at Banks.com, were in financial services. A large minority of Coral8’s were in financial services too.
- However, half of Aleri’s marketing spend going forward is budgeted outside the financial services markets. Not unreasonably, John presents this as a proof point Aleri is serious about selling to other markets.
- Aleri had 12-14 people in the UK pre-merger. Coral8 had none in Europe.
- Coral8 had 15 OEMs pre-merger, some actually generating revenue. Aleri had substantially none.
- Coral8 had been closing a “couple” of customers/quarter in online commerce. But recently, that rate ramped up to a “few.”
- Aleri’s engine is used to handle “many” hundreds of thousands of messages per second. Coral8’s highest-throughput user processes 100-150,000 messages/second.
John is sticking by the company line that there will be an integrated Aleri/Coral8 engine in around 12 months, with all the performance optimization of Aleri and flexibility of Coral8, that compiles and runs code from any of the development tools either Aleri or Coral8 now has. While this is a lot faster than, say, the Informix/Illustra or Oracle/IRI Express integrations, John insists that integrating CEP engines is a lot easier. We’ll see.
I focused most of the conversation on Aleri’s forthcoming efforts outside the financial services market. John sees these as being focused around Coral8’s old “Continuous (Business) Intelligence” message, enhanced by Aleri’s Live OLAP. Aleri Live OLAP is an in-memory OLAP engine, real-time/event-driven, fed by CEP. Queries can be submitted via ODBO/MDX today. XMLA is coming. John reports that quite a few Coral8 customers are interested in Live OLAP, and positions the capability as one Coral8 would have had to develop had the company remained independent. Read more
Kickfire update
I talked recently with my clients at Kickfire, especially newish CEO Bruce Armstrong. I also visited the Kickfire blog, which among other virtues features a fairly clear overview of Kickfire technology. (I did my own Kickfire overview in October.) Highlights of the current Kickfire story include:
- Kickfire is initially focused on three heavily overlapping markets — network event analysis, the general Web 2.0/clickstream/online marketing analytics area, and MySQL/LAMP data warehousing.
- Kickfire has blogged about a few sales to unnamed customers in those markets.
- I think network management is a market that’s potentially friendly to five-figure-cost appliances. After all, networking equipment is generally sold in appliance form. Kickfire doesn’t dispute this analysis.
- Kickfire’s sales so far are to run databases in the sub-terabyte range, although both Kickfire and its customers intend to run bigger databases soon. (Kickfire describes the range as 300 GB – 1 TB.) Not coincidentally, Kickfire believes that MySQL doesn’t scale very well past 100 GB without a lot of partitioning effort (in the case of data warehouses) or sharding (in the case of OLTP).
- When Bruce became CEO, he let go some sales, marketing, and/or business development folks. He likes to call this a restructuring of Kickfire rather than a reduction-in-force, but anyhow — that’s what happened. There are now about 50 employees, and Kickfire still has most of the $20 million it raised last August in the bank. Edit: The company clarifies that it actually wound up with more sales and marketing people than before.
- Kickfire has thankfully deemphasized various marketing themes I found annoying, such as ascribing great weight to TPC-H benchmarks or explaining why John von Neumann originally made bad choices in his principles of computer design.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kickfire, MySQL, Open source, Web analytics | 1 Comment |
SAS in its own cloud
The Register has a fairly detailed article about SAS expanding its cloud/SaaS offerings. I disagree with one part, namely:
SAS may not have a choice but to build its own cloud. Given the sensitive nature of the data its customers analyze, moving that data out to a public cloud such as the Amazon EC2 and S3 combo is just not going to happen.
And even if rugged security could make customers comfortable with that idea, moving large data sets into clouds (as Sun Microsystems discovered with the Sun Grid) is problematic. Even if you can parallelize the uploads of large data sets, it takes time.
But if you run the applications locally in the SAS cloud, then doing further analysis on that data is no big deal. It’s all on the same SAN anyway, locked down locally just as you would do in your own data center.
I fail to see why SAS’s campus would be better than leading hosting companies’ data centers for either of data privacy/security or data upload speed. Rather, I think major reasons for SAS building its own data center for cloud computing probably focus on: Read more
| Categories: SAS Institute, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 15 Comments |
Why should anybody worry about Oracle’s tweaks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?
Internet News offers an overview of how Oracle’s own version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux does or doesn’t different from generic RHEL. The defining example appears to be an alternate file system that Oracle finds useful, but Red Hat doesn’t want to bother offering. (Oracle says it donates all extensions back to the community, putting the onus on the community whether or not to use them in Linux versions other than Oracle’s.) The question is:
Does this count as an Oracle fork of (Red Hat Enterprise) Linux or doesn’t it?
My answer is:
Who cares? Read more
| Categories: Open source, Oracle | 1 Comment |
Oracle introduces a half-rack version of Exadata
Oracle has introduced what amounts to a half-rack Exadata machine. My thoughts on this basically boil down to “makes sense” and “no big deal.” Specifically:
- The new Baby Exadata still holds 10 terabytes or more.
- Most specialty analytic DBMS purchases are still for databases of 10 terabytes or smaller.
- Large enterprise data warehouse projects are often being deferred or cut back due to the economic crunch, but smaller projects with credible, quick ROIs are doing fine.
- Exadata is evidently being sold overwhelmingly to Oracle loyalists. Other analytic DBMS vendors aren’t telling me of serious Exadata competition yet. If the market for Exadata is primarily “happy Oracle data warehouse users”, that’s mainly folks who have <5-10 terabytes of user data today.
- Oracle Exadata beta tests were done on a kind of half-rack configuration anyway.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle | Leave a Comment |
More on Greenplum, Fox/MySpace, and load speeds
Eric Lai offers more facts, figures, explanation, and competitive insight than I did on Greenplum’s loading of the Fox/MySpace database, including that Greenplum is being loaded with data at the 4 TB/hour rate only for half an hour at a time.
Also, Eric cites the Greenplum Fox Interactive Media database as being only 200 TB in size. Surely there is some confusion somewhere, since Greenplum described it as being 400 TB back in August.
| Categories: Fox and MySpace, Greenplum | 1 Comment |
Notes from the Oracle conference call
Chris Karnacus reports two tidbits from the Oracle conference call:
- Oracle 11g R2 will feature an easier to administer RAC.
- Oracle insists Exadata’s sales pipeline is outstanding. It didn’t comment on actual Exadata sales, however.
Seeking Alpha, as usual, has a full transcript, some typos aside. There were plenty of comments on other sales, just not Exadata ones. On the other hand, Oracle execs did repeat several times how wonderful they think Exadata is.
One question about the transcript — it sort of reads like there was a big text-oriented deal at Bank of America, but there’s clearly a typo in the reference. Does anybody who actually listened to the call know for sure whether that’s what was said? (Edit: Answered in the comments below.)
| Categories: Exadata, Oracle, Specific users | 2 Comments |
Greenplum claims very fast load speeds, and Fox still throws away most of its MySpace data
Data warehouse load speeds are a contentious issue. Vertica contrived a benchmark with a 5 1/2 terabyte/hour load rate. Oracle has gotten dinged for very low load speeds, which then are hotly debated. I was told recently of a Greenplum partner’s salesman steering a prospect who needed rapid load speeds away from Greenplum, which seemed odd to me.
Now Greenplum has come out swinging, claiming “consistent” load speeds of 4 terabytes/hour at its Fox Interactive Media account, and armed with a customer quote saying just that. Note however that load speeds tend to be proportional to the number of disks, and there are a LOT of disks at that installation.
One way to think about load speeds is — how long would it take to load the entire database? It seems as if the Fox database could be loaded, perhaps not in one week, but certainly in less than two. Flipping that around, the Fox site only has enough capacity to hold less than 2 weeks of detailed data. (This is not uncommon in network event kinds of databases.) And a corollary of that is — worldwide storage sales are still constrained by cost, not by absolute limits on the amounts of data enterprises would like to store.
| Categories: Data warehousing, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Fox and MySpace, Greenplum, Theory and architecture, Web analytics | 3 Comments |
Database implications if IBM acquires Sun
Reported or rumored merger discussions between IBM and Sun are generating huge amounts of discussion today (some links below). Here are some quick thoughts around the subject of how the IBM/Sun deal — if it happens — might affect the database management system industry. Read more
Pervasive DataRush today
In my first post-fire briefing, I had a long-scheduled dinner with the Pervasive DataRush folks. Much of DataRush’s positioning, feature evolution, and so on remain To Be Determined. Most existing customers and applications remain To Be Disclosed. What’s more, DataRush is a technology to accelerate applications that
- Need to be parallelized
- Should run on SMP rather than shared-nothing hardware
and Pervasive hasn’t done a great job of explaining where #2 applies.
That said, there’s at least one use case for which DataRush should clearly be considered today. Suppose you have a messy ETL/data transformation task that requires custom code. Then I see three main choices:
- Write the code within the confines of an off-the-shelf ETL tool.
- Write the code to run on an analytic DBMS platform, ideally an MPP/shared-nothing one.
- Use something like DataRush (and I’m not familiar with any good alternatives to DataRush).
In some cases, DataRush may be best possibility.