One vendor’s trash is another’s treasure
A few months ago, CEO Mayank Bawa of Aster Data commented to me on his surprise at how “profound” the relationship was between design choices in one aspect of a data warehouse DBMS and choices in other parts. The word choice in that was all Mayank, but the underlying thought is one I’ve long shared, and that I’m certain architects of many analytic DBMS share as well.
For that matter, the observation is no doubt true in many other product categories as well. But in the analytic database management arena, where there are literally 10-20+ competitors with different, non-stupid approaches, it seems most particularly valid. Here are some examples of what I mean. Read more
| Categories: Aster Data, Data warehousing, Exadata, Kognitio, Oracle, Theory and architecture, Vertica Systems | 22 Comments |
Oracle says they do onsite Exadata POCs after all
When I first asked Oracle about Netezza’s claim that Oracle doesn’t do onsite Exadata POCs, they blew off the question. Then I showed Oracle an article draft saying they don’t do onsite Exadata proofs-of-concept. At that point, Oracle denied Netezza’s claim, and told me there indeed have been onsite Exadata POCs. Oracle has not yet been able to provide me with any actual examples of same, but perhaps that will change soon. In the mean time, I continue with the assumption that Oracle is, at best, reluctant to do Exadata POCs at customer sites.
I do understand multiple reasons for vendors to prefer POCs be done on their own sites, both innocent (cost) and nefarious (excessive degrees of control). Read more
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Buying processes, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle | 10 Comments |
More Oracle notes
When I went to Oracle in October, the main purpose of the visit was to discuss Exadata. And so my initial post based on the visit was focused accordingly. But there were a number of other interesting points I’ve never gotten around to writing up. Let me now remedy that, at least in part. Read more
Introduction to Pentaho
I finally caught up with Pentaho, which along with Jaspersoft is one of the two most visible open source business intelligence companies, Actuate perhaps excepted. Highlights included:
- Much like Jaspersoft, Pentaho’s initial focus was mainly on embedded, operational BI.
- However, Pentaho now feels it has a decent end-user GUI as well, and traditional-BI is a bigger part of sales.
- Also, some sales are focused on data integration, perhaps in support of more traditional BI products. Pentaho has even had an Ab Initio replacement in data integration. (Can there be any change more extreme than going from Ab Initio to open source?)
- As an example of technical breadth, Pentaho says that its Mondrian OLAP engine is used by Jaspersoft.
- Pentaho has Excel output, but not in the form of live formulas.
- Pentaho does XQuery.
- Industries with more Pentaho adoption than average include:
- Financial services (traditionally open-source-friendly, according to Pentaho)
- Government (ditto)
- Web 2.0 (obviously ditto)
- Travel/transportation (cash-strapped)
- Frontier Airlines is a Pentaho/Greenplum customer.
- TradeDoubler is a Pentaho/InfoBright customer. (Pentaho thinks that TradeDoubler reloads its warehouse every day, which if true frankly casts some doubt on InfoBright’s architecture.)
- Data mining is something of a Pentaho sideline. There’s some university in New Zealand that built data mining capabilities in Pentaho, and some data mining research is done in that. Separately, Pentaho has been integrated with R.
- Community contributions are concentrated in the areas you’d expect — features some user or system integrator needs for a specific project, connectors, bug reports, and the like.
| Categories: Ab Initio Software, Application areas, Business intelligence, Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Greenplum, Infobright, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Pricing | 7 Comments |
DB2 engine coming soon for MySQL — but that’s DB2 on the iSeries
Chris Maxcer reports that a DB2 storage engine for MySQL is coming soon. But that’s specifically on the i Series — i.e., the heirs of the AS/400 and before that System 38 product lines. While those are arguably the best systems IBM ever produced, it’s still a non-event for most of the IT market. DB2 isn’t DB2 isn’t DB2 …
| Categories: IBM and DB2, MySQL | 2 Comments |
New England Database Day this Friday January 30
Dan Weinreb, to whose opinions I usually give great weight, spoke very favorably of last year’s New England Database Day conference. Well, this year’s is taking place on Friday. It’s at MIT and it’s free, with easy registration. A list of papers is here.
It’s pretty obvious who’s running the show. Sam Madden’s name is given as a contact; elsewhere it’s referred to as being organized by Madden and Mike Stonebraker. Of the six identified papers, 2-3 look like the subjects or people could be taken straight from Vertica’s Database Column blog. But that hardly means the event will be one long Vertica commercial. For example, the other papers include one from Netezza and one on Flash memory data access methods.
I really doubt I’ll make to Cambridge in time for the 9:00 am opening remarks ;), but I’ll try to swing by later on.
| Categories: Michael Stonebraker, Theory and architecture, Vertica Systems | 3 Comments |
Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence
A few days ago I tore into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse DBMS. Well, the 2009 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms is out too. Unlike the data warehouse MQ, Gartner’s BI MQ clusters its “Leaders” together tightly. But while less bold, the Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant’s claims are just as questionable as those in data warehousing.
February, 2011 edit: Here’s a partial link that works right now.
Of course, some parts do make sense. E.g.: Read more
Netezza’s marketing goes retro again
Netezza loves retro images in its marketing, such as classic rock lyrics, or psychedelic paint jobs on its SPUs. (Given the age demographics at, say, a Teradata or Netezza user conference, this isn’t as nutty as it first sounds.) Netezza’s latest is a creative peoples-liberation/revolution riff, under the name Data Liberators. The ambience of that site and especially its first download should seem instinctively familiar to anybody who recalls the Symbionese Liberation Army when it was active, or who has ever participated in a chant of “The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated!”
The substance of the first “pamphlet”, so far as I can make out, is that you should only trust vendors who do short, onsite POCs, and Oracle may not do those for Exadata. Read more
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Buying processes, Data warehouse appliances, Exadata, Netezza, Oracle | 2 Comments |
SAP slashed 1000 VP-level employees?
The late Art Buchwald, when giving talks at conventions, used to start by expressing his pleasure at the opportunity to see “thousands and thousands of vice presidents.” Well, according to a Seeking Alpha blog post,
SAP cut 1,000 VP-level employees in North America in 2008, and has plenty of room for additional cuts.
As Dave Kellogg points out, that would be 2% of SAP’s entire work force, all in laid-off VPs or VP-equivalents. That doesn’t seem right to me. At least in the parts of SAP’s organization I used to deal with, SAP didn’t seem particularly VP-heavy. Even with the grade inflation commonly represented on salespeople’s business cards, I’d be surprised to learn SAP had 1,000 VPs total, let alone 1,000 spare ones to lay off.
| Categories: SAP AG | Leave a Comment |
Kickfire reports a few customer wins
Kickfire has the kind of blog I emphatically advise my clients to publish even when they don’t have management bandwidth to do something “sexier.” If nothing else, at least they record their customer wins when they can.
The current list of cited customers is two application appliance OEM vendors (unnamed, but with some detail), plus one Web 2.0 company (ditto). They’ve also posted about a Sun partnership.