Data mart outsourcing

Discussion of services that analyze large databases on an outsourced basis. Related subjects include:

February 8, 2012

Comments on the analytic DBMS industry and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for same

This year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems is out.* I shall now comment, just as I did on the 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrants, to varying extents. To frame the discussion, let me start by saying:

*As of February, 2012 — and surely for many months thereafter — Teradata is graciously paying for a link to the report.

Specific company comments, roughly in line with Gartner’s rough single-dimensional rank ordering, include: Read more

January 25, 2012

Departmental analytics — best practices

I believe IT departments should support and encourage departmental analytics efforts, where “support” and “encourage” are not synonyms for “control”, “dominate”, “overwhelm”, or even “tame”. A big part of that is:
Let, and indeed help, departments have the data they want, when they want it, served with blazing performance.

Three things that absolutely should NOT be obstacles to these ends are:

Read more

November 12, 2011

Clarifying SAND’s customer metrics, positioning and technical story

Talking with my clients at SAND can be confusing. That said:

A few months ago, I wrote:

SAND Technology reported >600 total customers, including >100 direct.

Upon talking with the company, I need to revise that figure downward, from > 600 to 15.

Read more

July 5, 2011

Eight kinds of analytic database (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this two-part series, I outlined four variants on the traditional enterprise data warehouse/data mart dichotomy, and suggested what kinds of DBMS products you might use for each. In Part 2 I’ll cover four more kinds of analytic database — even newer, for the most part, with a use case/product short list match that is even less clear.  Read more

May 23, 2010

More on Sybase IQ, including Version 15.2

Back in March, Sybase was kind enough to give me permission to post a slide deck about Sybase IQ. Well, I’m finally getting around to doing so. Highlights include but are not limited to:

Sybase IQ may have a bit of a funky architecture (e.g., no MPP), but the age of the product and the substantial revenue it generates have allowed Sybase to put in a bunch of product features that newer vendors haven’t gotten around to yet.

More recently, Sybase volunteered permission for me to preannounce Sybase IQ Version 15.2 by a few days (it’s scheduled to come out this week). Read more

May 15, 2010

Stakeholder-facing analytics

There’s a point I keep making in speeches, and used to keep making in white papers, yet have almost never spelled out in this blog. Let me now (somewhat) correct the oversight.

Analytic technology isn’t only for you. It’s also for your customers, citizens, and other stakeholders.

I am not referring here to what is well understood to be an important, fast-growing activity — providing data and its analysis to customers as your primary or only business — nor to the related business of taking people’s data, crunching it for them, and giving them results. That combined sector — which I am pretty alone in aggregating into one and calling data mart outsourcing — is one of the top several vertical markets for a lot of the analytic DBMS vendors I write about. Rather, I’m talking about enterprises that gather data for some primary purpose, and have discovered that a good secondary use of the data is to reflect it back to stakeholders, often the same ones who provided or created it in the first place.

For now I’ll call this category stakeholder-facing analytics, as the shorter phrase “stakeholder analytics” would be ambiguous.* I first picked up the idea early this decade from Information Builders, for whom it had become something of a specialty. I’ve been asking analytics vendors for examples of stakeholder-facing analytics ever since, and a number have been able to comply. But the whole thing is in its early days even so; almost any sufficiently large enterprise should be more active in stakeholder-facing analytics than it currently is.
Read more

March 19, 2010

Infobright blog update

I often offer that, if a company puts up a sufficiently good blog post, I’ll link to it. Well, I just noticed that Infobright CEO Mark Burton (somewhere along the way he seems to have dropped the “interim”) put up an excellent post last month.

Highlights on the market share/sector side include: Read more

January 25, 2010

Netezza Skimmer

As I previously complained, last week wasn’t a very convenient time for me to have briefings. So when Netezza emailed to say it would release its new entry-level Skimmer appliance this morning, while I asked for and got a Friday afternoon briefing, I kept it quick and basic.

That said, highlights of my Netezza Skimmer briefing included:

Read more

October 14, 2009

Infobright notes

I had lunch w/ Bob Zurek and Susan Davis of Infobright today. This wasn’t primarily a briefing, but a few takeaways are:

September 29, 2009

What Nielsen really uses in data warehousing DBMS

In its latest earnings call, Oracle made a reference to The Nielsen Company that was — to put it politely — rather confusing. I just plopped down in a chair next to Greg Goff, who evidently runs data warehousing at Nielsen, and had a quick chat. Here’s the real story.

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