Opportunities for disruption in the OLTP database management market (deck-clearing post #2)
The standard Clayton Christensen “Innovator’s Dilemma” disruption narrative goes something like this:
- Market leaders have many advantages, including top technology.
- Followers come up with good technology too.
- The leaders stay ahead by making their products ever better and more complex.
- The followers sell into new or non-mainstream markets, at prices the leaders can’t match. So they dominate new markets.
- Old markets turn into low-margin commodity-fests.
- Old leaders are screwed.
And it’s really hard for market leaders to avert this sad fate, because the short- and intermediate-term margin hit would be too great.
I think the OLTP DBMS market is ripe for that kind of disruption – riper than commentators generally realize. Here are some key potential drivers:
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OLTP database management system market – the consensus isn’t ALL wrong (deck-clearing post #1)
Most of what I’ve written lately about database management seems to have been focused on analytic technologies. But I have a lot to say on the OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) side too. So let’s start by clearing the decks. Here’s a list of some consensus views that I in essence agree with:
- Oracle is the top of the line, and has nothing wrong with it other than cost of ownership and the non-joys of doing business with Oracle Corporation.
- DB2/mainframe is a fine product, but only if you like IBM mainframes.
- DB2/open systems is another fine product, but it’s hard to think of reasons to use it over Oracle.
- Microsoft SQL Server has great cost of ownership if you’re a Windows (server) shop anyway, especially on the administrative side. It does most but not all of what Oracle does.
- Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise is a lot like SQL Server, but without the Windows dependence or the great Microsoft tools. If you have it installed or are Chinese, you should strongly consider using it, but otherwise there are better alternatives.
- Progress’ DBMS is great if you don’t need any of the features it’s missing. Administration, for example, is a super-low-cost breeze. But why use it unless you’re also using the Progress development tools?
- Intersystems’ Cache’ is another fine mid-range product that involves buying into the vendors’ whole tool set – all the more so because it isn’t relational.
- Small-footprint embedded DBMS, from vendors such as Sybase’s iAnywhere division or Solid Information Technologies, are off in their own little world. Mainly, that world is telecom, with a satellite in medical devices, although other kinds of networked equipment also sometimes use these products.
- IBM’s non-DB2 database management products – IMS, Informix, etc. – are fine things to stick with until you have to change. Ditto products from Software AG, Computer Associates, Cincom, etc.
- MySQL Version 4 is an OLTP joke, but it’s a joke many people share. (Hey — a lot of blogs, including mine, run on WordPress and MySQL 4.)
- Until Ingres is meaningfully marketed and sold outside its installed base, it’s not worth worrying about.
- PostgreSQL is more significant as the underpinning of other products — mainly EnterpriseDB in the OLTP space — than it is in its own right.
Really big databases
Business Intelligence Lowdown has a well-dugg post listing what it claims are the 10 largest databases in the world. The accuracy leaves much to be desired, as is illustrated by the fact that #10 on the list is only 20 terabytes, while entirely unmentioned is eBay’s 2-petabyte database (mentioned here, and also here). Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Greenplum, IBM and DB2, Netezza, Oracle, SAS Institute, Teradata, Theory and architecture | 4 Comments |
If you can’t trust the storage vendors …
… isn’t that another reason to go with massively parallel systems?
StorageMojo has a great post on storage myth and reality.
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QlikTech – flexible, memory-centric, columnar BI
QlikTech has a pretty interesting story, and a number of customers seem to agree. Their flagship product QlikView is a BI suite that runs off an in-memory copy of the data. Specifically, that copy is logically relational and physically columnar. In an important feature, QlikView is happy to import data from multiple sources at once, such as a warehouse plus an operational data store.
So the QlikTech pitch is essentially “Buy our stuff, and you can start doing BI immediately, running any queries and reports you want to. No reason to limit your queries to any kind of dimensional model. No need to prepare the data.” More precisely, QlikTech claims to do away with some kinds of data preparation; obviously, cleaning and so on might still be necessary. Indeed, they describe their classic use case as being the combination of data partly from an operational store and partly from a pre-existing warehouse. Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence, Memory-centric data management, QlikTech and QlikView, SAP AG | 1 Comment |
QlikTech numbers update
I chatted with QlikTech again yesterday. The update on their numbers is that they ended 2006 with 5,436 customers in 68 countries. Of those, 3,200 were added over the year. (I.e., they only had 2,200 or so at the end of 2005.) Revenue growth was slightly more than 80% for the year, for the third straight year over 80%. (I think their real goal is to double.) That should put them at $40 million or so in license fees, for classical BI only. (Budgeting/planning features are apparently slated for QlikView Release 8 in May.) Read more
Do modern databases have too many tables?
Mike Robinson thinks modern databases have too many tables. However, I’m not sure about his argument. He argues that more tables = more code, but is that really true? Or are they just a good framework from which to modularize code? Some of his specifics might be perhaps addressed by updatable views. And other of his complaints were about performance hacks (caches, history tables), that have little to do with database normalization.
Frankly, the kind of application he describes is one I think should be bought from a third-party vendor, who probably should indeed use lots of tables. I agree that relational fundamentalism is way overblown, but perhaps for different reasons than Mike does.
| Categories: Theory and architecture | Leave a Comment |
Leaving Microsoft with a laugh
Jim Allchin’s farewell blog post is a hoot. There’s even a bit of database stuff in it.
| Categories: Humor, Microsoft and SQL*Server | Leave a Comment |