Schema on need

Discussion and analysis of support for what we call the schema-on-need feature.

October 15, 2015

Couchbase 4.0 and related subjects

I last wrote about Couchbase in November, 2012, around the time of Couchbase 2.0. One of the many new features I mentioned then was secondary indexing. Ravi Mayuram just checked in to tell me about Couchbase 4.0. One of the important new features he mentioned was what I think he said was Couchbase’s “first version” of secondary indexing. Obviously, I’m confused.

Now that you’re duly warned, let me remind you of aspects of Couchbase timeline.

Technical notes on Couchbase 4.0 — and related riffs 🙂 — start: Read more

March 5, 2015

Cask and CDAP

For starters:

Also:

So far as I can tell:

Read more

January 19, 2015

Where the innovation is

I hoped to write a reasonable overview of current- to medium-term future IT innovation. Yeah, right. 🙂 But if we abandon any hope that this post could be comprehensive, I can at least say:

1. Back in 2011, I ranted against the term Big Data, but expressed more fondness for the V words — Volume, Velocity, Variety and Variability. That said, when it comes to data management and movement, solutions to the V problems have generally been sketched out.

2. Even so, there’s much room for innovation around data movement and management. I’d start with:

3. As I suggested last year, data transformation is an important area for innovation.  Read more

September 7, 2014

An idealized log management and analysis system — from whom?

I’ve talked with many companies recently that believe they are:

At best, I think such competitive claims are overwrought. Still, it’s a genuinely important subject and opportunity, so let’s consider what a great log management and analysis system might look like.

Much of this discussion could apply to machine-generated data in general. But right now I think more players are doing product management with an explicit conception either of log management or event-series analytics, so for this post I’ll share that focus too.

A short answer might be “Splunk, but with more analytic functionality and more scalable performance, at lower cost, plus numerous coupons for free pizza.” A more constructive and bottoms-up approach might start with:  Read more

June 18, 2014

Using multiple data stores

I’m commonly asked to assess vendor claims of the kind:

So I thought it might be useful to quickly review some of the many ways organizations put multiple data stores to work. As usual, my bottom line is:

Horses for courses

It’s now widely accepted that different data managers are better for different use cases, based on distinctions such as:

Vendors are part of this consensus; already in 2005 I observed

For all practical purposes, there are no DBMS vendors left advocating single-server strategies.

Vendor agreement has become even stronger in the interim, as evidenced by Oracle/MySQL, IBM/Netezza, Oracle’s NoSQL dabblings, and various companies’ Hadoop offerings.

Multiple data stores for a single application

We commonly think of one data manager managing one or more databases, each in support of one or more applications. But the other way around works too; it’s normal for a single application to invoke multiple data stores. Indeed, all but the strictest relational bigots would likely agree:  Read more

March 23, 2014

DBMS2 revisited

The name of this blog comes from an August, 2005 column. 8 1/2 years later, that analysis holds up pretty well. Indeed, I’d keep the first two precepts exactly as I proposed back then:

I’d also keep the general sense of the third precept, namely appropriately-capable data integration, but for that one the specifics do need some serious rework.

For starters, let me say: Read more

March 17, 2014

Notes and comments, March 17, 2014

I have ever more business-advice posts up on Strategic Messaging. Recent subjects include pricing and stealth-mode marketing. Other stuff I’ve been up to includes:

The Spark buzz keeps increasing; almost everybody I talk with expects Spark to win big, probably across several use cases.

Disclosure: I’ll soon be in a substantial client relationship with Databricks, hoping to improve their stealth-mode marketing. 😀

The “real-time analytics” gold rush I called out last year continues. A large fraction of the vendors I talk with have some variant of “real-time analytics” as a central message.

Basho had a major change in leadership. A Twitter exchange ensued. 🙂 Joab Jackson offered a more sober — figuratively and literally — take.

Hadapt laid off its sales and marketing folks, and perhaps some engineers as well. In a nutshell, Hadapt’s approach to SQL-on-Hadoop wasn’t selling vs. the many alternatives, and Hadapt is doubling down on poly-structured data*/schema-on-need.

*While Hadapt doesn’t to my knowledge use the term “poly-structured data”, some other vendors do. And so I may start using it more myself, at least when the poly-structured/multi-structured distinction actually seems significant.

WibiData is partnering with DataStax, WibiData is of course pleased to get access to Cassandra’s user base, which gave me the opportunity to ask why they thought Cassandra had beaten HBase in those accounts. The answer was performance and availability, while Cassandra’s traditional lead in geo-distribution wasn’t mentioned at all.

Disclosure: My fingerprints are all over that deal.

In other news, WibiData has had some executive departures as well, but seems to be staying the course on its strategy. I continue to think that WibiData has a really interesting vision about how to do large-data-volume interactive computing, and anybody in that space would do well to talk with them or at least look into the open source projects WibiData sponsors.

I encountered another apparently-popular machine-learning term — bandit model. It seems to be glorified A/B testing, and it seems to be popular. I think the point is that it tries to optimize for just how much you invest in testing unproven (for good or bad) alternatives.

I had an awkward set of interactions with Gooddata, including my longest conversations with them since 2009. Gooddata is in the early days of trying to offer an all-things-to-all-people analytic stack via SaaS (Software as a Service). I gather that Hadoop, Vertica, PostgreSQL (a cheaper Vertica alternative), Spark, Shark (as a faster version of Hive) and Cassandra (under the covers) are all in the mix — but please don’t hold me to those details.

I continue to think that computing is moving to a combination of appliances, clusters, and clouds. That said, I recently bought a new gaming-class computer, and spent many hours gaming on it just yesterday.* I.e., there’s room for general-purpose workstations as well. But otherwise, I’m not hearing anything that contradicts my core point.

*The last beta weekend for The Elder Scrolls Online; I loved Morrowind.

December 5, 2013

Vertica 7

It took me a bit of time, and an extra call with Vertica’s long-time R&D chief Shilpa Lawande, but I think I have a decent handle now on Vertica 7, code-named Crane. The two aspects of Vertica 7 I find most interesting are:

Other Vertica 7 enhancements include:

Overall, two recurring themes in our discussion were:

Read more

October 30, 2013

Splunk strengthens its stack

I’m a little shaky on embargo details — but I do know what was in my own quote in a Splunk press release that went out yesterday. 🙂

Splunk has been rolling out a lot of news. In particular:

I imagine there are some operationally-oriented use cases for which Splunk instantly offers the best Hadoop business intelligence choice available. But what I really think is cool is Splunk’s schema-on-need story, wherein:

That highlights a pretty serious and flexible vertical analytic stack. I like it.

October 30, 2013

Glassbeam instantiates a lot of trends

Glassbeam checked in recently, and they turn out to exemplify quite a few of the themes I’ve been writing about. For starters:

Glassbeam basics include:

All Glassbeam customers except one are SaaS/cloud (Software as a Service), and even that one was only offered a subscription (as oppose to perpetual license) price.

So what does Glassbeam’s technology do? Glassbeam says it is focused on “machine data analytics,” specifically for the “Internet of Things”, which it distinguishes from IT logs.* Specifically, Glassbeam sells to manufacturers of complex devices — IT (most of its sales so far ), medical, automotive (aspirational to date), etc. — and helps them analyze “phone home” data, for both support/customer service and marketing kinds of use cases. As of a recent release, the Glassbeam stack can: Read more

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