Ellen Rubin is leaving Netezza
The problem with filling a VP Marketing job is that all the good ones want — and are qualified — to be CEOs. It’s possible to have a great sales manager who doesn’t understand technology very well, or a wonderful development chief who doesn’t quite mesh with coin-operated sales folks. But a marketer has to understand sales and technology and strategy and a bit of management, and hence the best ones are safe bets to move on to CEO opportunities.
And so Ellen Rubin is leaving Netezza, after six years. Read more
| Categories: Netezza | 6 Comments |
Why not database SaaS?
After a flurry of recent announcements of database SaaS (Software as a Service), eWeek has published a backlash article. The angle is that database SaaS is too expensive, because you can get decent DBMS for free and per-gig usage charges might be expensive for big databases.
I think that’s missing the point. Most OLTP databases are pretty small. Or, if they’re big, they get that way through a lot of transactions. In the first case, hosted management is cheap. In the second case, hosted management is taking care of a large burden for you. Read more
| Categories: Kognitio, OLTP, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 2 Comments |
5 kinds of data structure and 16 kinds of data access method
My recent post about datatype extensibility zoomed over at least one head, as per the comment thread. Since then I’ve googled, and come to suspect that part of what I was assuming as common knowledge may not be so common after all. So I’m going to back up and explain a bit about data access methods, as well as the sub-topic of data structures. If you take nothing else away from this post, I hope it will at least remind of you of the sheer variety of ways data can be stored on disk or in RAM.
First, let’s define the concept of data access method in three steps:
| Categories: Data types | 3 Comments |
EnterpriseDB joins Elastra in the Amazon cloud
When Elastra announced their service to host MySQL and PostgreSQL in the Amazon S3/EC2 cloud, I immediately told my dear darling clients at EnterpriseDB they should do the same. Whereupon they told me it would happen soon. However, they neglected to tell me when it was actually announced. So I know no more than can be found in this Computerworld article.
But I’ll say this — it’s a very tempting option, both for new web-based applications or businesses, or simply as a development platform pending later redeployment.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Elastra, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, OLTP, Open source, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 2 Comments |
What hard-core transactional applications have actually been built in MySQL, PostgreSQL, EnterpriseDB, or FileMaker?
And here’s the biggie.
Question of the day #3
What complex, high-volume transactional applications have actually been built in mid-range DBMS such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, FileMaker, or EnterpriseDB?
I’ve been flamed for suggesting that MySQL or FileMaker aren’t fully equal to Oracle and DB2 in supporting hard-core transactional applications. (Which is ironic, because I’ve also been flamed for suggesting hard-core transactional support isn’t as big a deal for DBMS selection as some relational purists insist. But I digress …) So I’m putting the question out there — what impressive transactional applications do the stand-alone mid-range DBMS actually support? Read more
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, FileMaker, Mid-range, MySQL, OLTP, Open source, PostgreSQL | 20 Comments |
Who is actually using native XML?
Question of the day #2
Who is actually using native XML?
Mark Logic is having a fine time using its native XML engine for custom publishing. One outfit I know of is using a native XML for something like web analytics, but is driving me crazy by never coming through on permission to divulge details. There’s a bit of native XML use out there supporting the insurance industry’s ACORD standard.
And after that I quickly run out of examples of native XML use. Read more
| Categories: Data types, IBM and DB2, MarkLogic, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Oracle, Structured documents | 3 Comments |
Is anybody actually using image, video, or sound indexing?
I have quite the excess of “flu-like symptoms,” and nothing substantive I’m writing today is coming to fruition. So instead of forcing the issue, I’m going to put a few questions out for discussion.
Question of the day #1
Is anybody indexing the actual contents of still images, video, or sound files?
Obviously, there are applications that serve huge numbers of videos, pictures, and/or songs — YouTube, Flickr, iTunes, and so on. But generally, these media are just handled as files or BLOBs, while all the database indexing is on alphanumeric metadata such as title, tags, uploader, date, download stats, comments, and so on.
The technology certainly exists to be more sophisticated. Consider, for example, Oracle’s Still Image datatype, which in typical Oracle fashion implements the relevant parts of SQL/MM and goes yet further. Read more
| Categories: Data types, Oracle | 3 Comments |
The 4 main approaches to datatype extensibility
Based on a variety of conversations – including some of the flames about my recent confession that mid-range DBMS aren’t suitable for everything — it seems as if a quick primer may be in order on the subject of datatype support. So here goes.
“Database management” usually deals with numeric or alphabetical data – i.e., the kind of stuff that goes nicely into tables. It commonly has a natural one-dimensional sort order, which is very useful for sort/merge joins, b-tree indexes, and the like. This kind of tabular data is what relational database management systems were invented for.
But ever more, there are important datatypes beyond character strings, numbers and dates. Leaving out generic BLOBs and CLOBs (Binary/Character Large OBjects), the big four surely are:
- Text. Text search is a huge business on the web, and a separate big business in enterprises. And text doesn’t fit well into the relational paradigm at all.
- Geospatial. Information about locations on the earth’s surface is essentially two-dimensional. Some geospatial apps use three dimensions.
- Object. There are two main reasons for using object datatypes. First, the data can have complex internal structures. Second, it can comprise a variety of simpler types. Object structures are well-suited for engineering and medical applications.
- XML. A great deal of XML is, at its heart, either relational/tabular data or text documents. Still, there are a variety of applications for which the most natural datatype truly is XML.
Numerous other datatypes are important as well, with the top runners-up probably being images, sound, video, time series (even though they’re numeric, they benefit from special handling).
Four major ways have evolved to manage data of non-tabular datatype, either on their own or within an essentially relational data management environment. Read more
| Categories: Data types, GIS and geospatial, Object, Structured documents, Text | 10 Comments |
Kognitio WX2 overview
I had a call today with Kognitio execs Paul Groom and John Thompson. Hopefully I can now clear up some confusion that was created in this comment thread. (Most of what I wrote about Kognitio in October, 2006 still applies.) Here are some highlights. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kognitio | 12 Comments |
A high write-volume MySQL user
Spinn3r crawls and indexes blogs. It says it covers 1 million blogs and 25K posts/hour, doing thousands of write transactions per second. And it does this into federated MySQL — but with a lot of software built on top. To wit: Read more
| Categories: MySQL, Specific users | 1 Comment |