Yarcdata and Cray

Yarcdata, a division of Cray specializing in graph analytics.

July 12, 2012

Approximate query results

In theory:

And so it would seem that query results always have to be exact. Even so, there are at least four different practical scenarios in which query results can reasonably be regarded as approximate, each associated with query languages that can supersede standard set-theoretic SQL.

Actually, there’s a fifth, and it’s a huge one — some fraction of your data is just plain wrong. But that’s not what this post is about.

First, some queries don’t have binary results, even in principle. Notably, text queries are answered via relevancy rankings, which fit badly into the relational model.

Second — and this can be combined with the first — you might want to generalize the query to look for partial matches. For example, Yarcdata suggested to me a scenario in which:

Similarly, if you’re looking for geographic proximity, it’s common to extend the allowed radius to fish for more results. Or one can walk up the hierarchy in a dimensional model.

Third, sometimes you just don’t have the data for any kind of precise answer at all. One adaptation I’ve mentioned before is to interpolate time series with synthetic data, and send back “precise” results based on that. In the same post I mentioned the Vertica “range join”, wherein users deliberately throw away part of their data — only storing the range it was in — and then join accordingly.

As Donald Rumsfeld might have said — and would have done well to reflect upon — you go into decision-making with the data you have, not the data you wish you had.

Finally, sometimes there’s a precise answer in principle, but for performance reasons you accept an approximate one, at least to start with. Numerous companies have told me stories around this, including:

The latter two categories led me to ask vendors how customers actually make use of their exotic SQL capabilities. Answers boiled down to:

Perhaps the answers will never get much better; it’s tough to get packaged software vendors to support vendor-specific SQL, unless the vendor is Oracle. Even so, we’re seeing ever more ways in which conventional SQL DBMS are being superseded by data management and analytic alternatives.

July 2, 2012

Introduction to Yarcdata

Cray’s strategy these days seems to be:

At the moment, the main diversifications are:

The last of the three is what Cray subsidiary Yarcdata is all about. Read more

July 2, 2012

Catching up with Cray

Cray is a legendary name in supercomputing hardware. Cray CTO Bill Blake (Netezza’s early-rise VP Development) seem to be there in part because of Cray’s name and history. I’m now consulting to Cray largely because of Bill Blake, specifically to Cray subsidiary Yarcdata. Along the way, I’ve picked up enough about Cray in general — largely from Bill and from Cray president Pete Ungaro — to perhaps be worth splitting out as a separate post.

Cray business highlights include:

I haven’t sorted through all the details in Cray’s SEC filings, but huge government contracts play a big role, as do the associated revenue recognition delays.

At the highest level, Cray’s technical story looks like: Read more

May 13, 2012

Notes on the analysis of large graphs

This post is part of a series on managing and analyzing graph data. Posts to date include:

My series on graph data management and analytics got knocked off-stride by our website difficulties. Still, I want to return to one interesting set of issues — analyzing large graphs, specifically ones that don’t fit comfortably into RAM on a single server. By no means do I have the subject figured out. But here are a few notes on the matter.

How big can a graph be? That of course depends on:

*Even if your graph has 10 billion nodes, those can be tokenized in 34 bits, so the main concern is edges. Edges can include weights, timestamps, and so on, but how many specifics do you really need? At some point you can surely rely on a pointer to full detail stored elsewhere.

The biggest graph-size estimates I’ve gotten are from my clients at Yarcdata, a division of Cray. (“Yarc” is “Cray” spelled backwards.) To my surprise, they suggested that graphs about people could have 1000s of edges per node, whether in:

Yarcdata further suggested that bioinformatics use cases could have node counts higher yet, characterizing Bio2RDF as one of the “smaller” ones at 22 billion nodes. In these cases, the nodes/edge average seems lower than in people-analysis graphs, but we’re still talking about 100s of billions of edges.

Recalling that relationship analytics boils down to finding paths and subgraphs, the naive relational approach to such tasks would be: Read more

May 7, 2012

Terminology: Relationship analytics

This post is part of a series on managing and analyzing graph data. Posts to date include:

In late 2005, I encountered a company called Cogito that was using a graphical data manager to analyze relationships. They called this “relational analytics”, which I thought was a terrible name for something that they were trying to claim should NOT be done in a relational DBMS. On the spot, I coined relationship analytics as an alternative. A business relationship ensued, which included a short white paper. Cogito didn’t do so well, however, and for a while the term “relationship analytics” faltered too. But recently it’s made a bit of a comeback, having been adopted by Objectivity, Qlik Tech, Yarcdata and others.

“Relationship analytics” is not a perfect name, both because it’s longish and because it might over-connote a social-network focus. But then, no other term would be perfect either. So we might as well stick with it.

In that case, “relationship analytics” could use an actual definition, preferably one a little heftier than just:

Analytics on graphs.

Read more

March 31, 2012

Our clients, and where they are located

From time to time, I disclose our vendor client lists. Another iteration is below, the first since a little over a year ago. To be clear:

For reasons explained below, I’ll group the clients geographically. Obviously, companies often have multiple locations, but this is approximately how it works from the standpoint of their interactions with me. Read more

Feed: DBMS (database management system), DW (data warehousing), BI (business intelligence), and analytics technology Subscribe to the Monash Research feed via RSS or email:

Login

Search our blogs and white papers

Monash Research blogs

User consulting

Building a short list? Refining your strategic plan? We can help.

Vendor advisory

We tell vendors what's happening -- and, more important, what they should do about it.

Monash Research highlights

Learn about white papers, webcasts, and blog highlights, by RSS or email.