Sybase

Analysis of Sybase and its various product lines, such as Sybase IQ. Related subjects include:

November 12, 2011

Exasol update

I last wrote about Exasol in 2008. After talking with the team Friday, I’m fixing that now. 🙂 The general theme was as you’d expect: Since last we talked, Exasol has added some new management, put some effort into sales and marketing, got some customers, kept enhancing the product and so on.

Top-level points included:

Read more

November 10, 2011

Very brief CEP/streaming catchup

When I agreed to launch the StreamBase LiveView product via DBMS 2, I planned to catch up on the whole CEP/streaming area first. Due to the power and internet outages last week, that didn’t entirely happen. So I’ll do a bit of that now, albeit more cryptically than I hoped and intended.

Meanwhile, if you want to see technically nitty-gritty posts about the CEP/streaming area, you may want to look at my CEP/streaming coverage circa 2007-9, based on conversations with (among others) Mike Stonebraker, John Bates, and Mark Tsimelzon.

October 13, 2011

Compression in Sybase ASE 15.7

Sybase recently came up with Adaptive Server Enterprise 15.7, which is essentially the “Make SAP happy” release. Features that were slated for 2012 release, but which SAP wanted, were accelerated into 2011. Features that weren’t slated for 2012, but which SAP wanted, were also brought into 2011. Not coincidentally, SAP Business Suite will soon run on Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 15.7.

15.7 turns out to be the first release of Sybase ASE with data compression. Sybase fondly believes that it is matching DB2 and leapfrogging Oracle in compression rate with a single compression scheme, namely page-level tokenization. More precisely, SAP and Sybase seem to believe that about compression rates for actual SAP application databases, based on some degree of testing.   Read more

August 26, 2011

Virtual data marts in Sybase IQ

I made a few remarks about Sybase IQ 15.3 when it became generally available in July. Now that I’ve had a current briefing, I’ll make a few more.

The key enhancement in Sybase IQ 15.3 is distributed query — what others might call parallel query — aka PlexQ. A Sybase IQ query can now be distributed among many nodes, all talking to the same SAN (Storage-Area Network). Any Sybase IQ node can take the responsibility of being the “leader” for that particular query.

In itself, this isn’t that impressive; all the same things could have been said about pre-Exadata Oracle.* But PlexQ goes somewhat further than just removing a bottleneck from Sybase IQ. Notably, Sybase has rolled out a virtual data mart capability. Highlights of the Sybase IQ virtual data mart story include:   Read more

July 7, 2011

Sybase IQ soundbites

Sybase made a total hash of the timing of this week’s press release. I got annoyed after they promised to inform me of the new embargo time, then broke the promise. Other people got annoyed earlier than that.

So be it. Below is the draft of a post I was holding, with brackets added around one word that is no longer accurate.

I don’t write enough about Sybase IQ. That said, I offered a couple of quotes to a reporter [yesterday] in connection with the general availability of Sybase IQ 15.3. Lightly edited, they go:

Beyond that, I should note:

July 5, 2011

Eight kinds of analytic database (Part 1)

Analytic data management technology has blossomed, leading to many questions along the lines of “So which products should I use for which category of problem?” The old EDW/data mart dichotomy is hopelessly outdated for that purpose, and adding a third category for “big data” is little help.

Let’s try eight categories instead. While no categorization is ever perfect, these each have at least some degree of technical homogeneity. Figuring out which types of analytic database you have or need — and in most cases you’ll need several — is a great early step in your analytic technology planning.  Read more

June 20, 2011

Temporal data, time series, and imprecise predicates

I’ve been confused about temporal data management for a while, because there are several different things going on.

In essence, the point of time series/event series SQL functionality is to do SQL against incomplete, imprecise, or derived data.* Read more

June 20, 2011

Columnar DBMS vendor customer metrics

Last April, I asked some columnar DBMS vendors to share customer metrics. They answered, but it took until now to iron out a couple of details. Overall, the answers are pretty impressive.  Read more

April 14, 2011

Attensity update

I talked with Michelle de Haaff and Ian Hersey of Attensity back in February. We covered a lot of ground, so let’s start with a very high-level view.

The four most interesting technical points were probably:

Some more specific notes include:  Read more

April 4, 2011

ANTs Software updates

I drafted the partial post quoted below some months ago, but never finished it, as my general posting hiatus hit. Anyhow, I just thought of ANTs again, due to a LinkedIn request from an exec, and it came back to mind. Subsequent news includes that the product had to be temporarily pulled from the market (what a shock), there was $200,000 of IBM revenue through the end of 2010 (by ANTs’ standards, that’s a lot), and at some point three Sybase-to-IBM product sales actually got closed.

ANTs Software recently came (back) to my attention when, ego-surfing, I saw they had made up some falsehoods about me and posted same in their blog. So I posted about ANTs Software. Now that the ANTs Software blog is on my radar, I see there’s another post from CEO Joe Kozak stating his case that ANTs Software is a good investment. I also notice that there’s an active S-1 to sell ANTs Software stock, dated two weeks before the blog post. Frankly, it surprises me that it’s legal to recommend your own stock that emphatically while you’re in registration — but hey, I tend to be on the side of favoring more communication over less.

According to the ANTs Software 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, ANTs Software has >$2 million in negative working capital — which this offering apparently won’t change (it’s for a shareholder to sell stock, not for ANTs to raise more money for itself).

Actually, ANTs did manage to get its working capital positive again. The key paragraph from the 10-K linked above, emphasis mine, is

The consolidated financial statements contemplate continuation of the Company as a going concern.  However, the Company has had minimal revenues since inception, suffered recurring losses from operations, has generated negative cash flows from operations and has an accumulated deficit of $156.97 million as of December 31, 2010 that raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern. The Company also had significant near-term liquidity needs as of December 31, 2010, including $0.25 million currently due on a line of credit and $2.00 million in notes payable due January 31, 2011. Subsequent to December 31, 2010, the Company received proceeds from a $3.00 million subscription receivable (less $0.39 million in fees, including $0.24 million in dispute) for the sale of 5.18 million shares of common stock pursuant to the BRG Agreement, $0.06 million in proceeds from the exercise of warrants covering 0.13 million shares of common stock and gross proceeds of $0.75 million from the Note and Warrant Purchase Agreements.  The outstanding balance on the line of credit was subsequently repaid and the notes payable were subsequently deferred until January 31, 2013. The Company’s ability to continue as a going concern is dependent upon management’s ability to generate profitable operations in the future and obtain the necessary financing to meet obligations and repay liabilities arising from normal business operations when they come due. The Company anticipates generating profitable operations from marketing and sales of ACS and the growth of our Professional Services offerings for ACS implementations. If the Company does not generate profitable operations or obtain the necessary financing, the Company may not have enough operating funds to continue to operate as a going concern. Securing additional sources of financing to enable the Company to continue the development and commercialization of proprietary technologies will be difficult and there is no assurance of our ability to secure such financing. A failure to generate profitable operations or obtain additional financing could prevent the Company from making expenditures that are needed to pay current obligations, allow the hiring of additional development personnel and continue development of its software and technologies. The Company continues actively seeking additional capital through private placements of equity and debt.

Bottom line: $157 million in losses have produced 3 sales (with more presumably coming) of a product that isn’t that important in the first place (it just helps you move from a perfectly decent DBMS to one you might like better while saving on migration costs). That makes almost any other failure in software industry history look like a rousing success by comparison.

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