DATAllegro

Analysis of data warehouse appliance vendor DATAllegro and its products. Related subjects include:

August 28, 2016

Are analytic RDBMS and data warehouse appliances obsolete?

I used to spend most of my time — blogging and consulting alike — on data warehouse appliances and analytic DBMS. Now I’m barely involved with them. The most obvious reason is that there have been drastic changes in industry structure:

Simply reciting all that, however, begs the question of whether one should still care about analytic RDBMS at all.

My answer, in a nutshell, is:

Analytic RDBMS — whether on premises in software, in the form of data warehouse appliances, or in the cloud — are still great for hard-core business intelligence, where “hard-core” can refer to ad-hoc query complexity, reporting/dashboard concurrency, or both. But they aren’t good for much else.

Read more

September 8, 2013

Layering of database technology & DBMS with multiple DMLs

Two subjects in one post, because they were too hard to separate from each other

Any sufficiently complex software is developed in modules and subsystems. DBMS are no exception; the core trinity of parser, optimizer/planner, and execution engine merely starts the discussion. But increasingly, database technology is layered in a more fundamental way as well, to the extent that different parts of what would seem to be an integrated DBMS can sometimes be developed by separate vendors.

Major examples of this trend — where by “major” I mean “spanning a lot of different vendors or projects” — include:

Other examples on my mind include:

And there are several others I hope to blog about soon, e.g. current-day PostgreSQL.

In an overlapping trend, DBMS increasingly have multiple data manipulation APIs. Examples include:  Read more

September 30, 2009

Facts and rumors

June 8, 2009

The future of data marts

Greenplum is announcing today a long-term vision, under the name Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC). Key observations around the concept — mixing mine and Greenplum’s together — include:

In essence, Greenplum is pitching the story:

When put that starkly, it’s overstated, not least because

Specialized Analytic DBMS != Data Warehouse Appliance

But basically it makes sense, for two main reasons:

Read more

March 5, 2009

DATAllegro sales price: $275 million

According to a press release announcing a venture capitalist’s job change,

Microsoft purchased DATAllegro for $275 million

Technically, that needn’t shut down the rumor mill altogether, since given the way deals are structured and reported, it’s unlikely that Microsoft actually cut checks to DATAllegro stockholders in the aggregate amount of $275 million promptly after the close of the acquisition.

Still, it’s a data point of some weight.

Hat tip to Mark Myers.

March 2, 2009

Closing the book on the DATAllegro customer base

I’m prepared to call an end to the “Guess DATAllegro’s customers” game.  Bottom line is that there are three in all, two of which are TEOCO and Dell, and the third of which is a semi-open secret.  I wrote last week:

The number of DATAllegro production references is expected to double imminently, from one to two. Few will be surprised at the identity of the second reference. I imagine the number will then stay at two, as DATAllegro technology is no longer being sold, and the third known production user has never been reputed to be particularly pleased with it.

Dell did indeed disclose at TDWI that it was a large DATAllegro user, notwithstanding that Dell is a huge Teradata user as well.  No doubt, Dell is gearing up to be a big user of Madison too.

Also at TDWI, I talked with some former DATAllegro employees who now work for rival vendors. None thinks DATAllegro has more than three customers.  Neither do I.

Edit: Subsequently, the DATAllegro customer count declined to 1.

October 5, 2008

Advance sound bites on the Microsoft/DATAllegro announcement

Microsoft said they’d prebrief me on at least the DATAllegro part of tomorrow’s SQL Server announcements, but that didn’t turn out to happen (at least as of 9 pm Eastern time Sunday night). An embargoed press release did just arrive, but it’s so concise and high-level as to contain almost nothing of interest.

So I might as well post sound bites in advance. Here goes:

I’m going to be pretty busy Monday anyway. Linda is having a bit of oral surgery. And if I get back from that in time, I have calls set up with a couple of clients.

September 17, 2008

Microsoft/DATAllegro time frame announced

Edit:  Actually, an email did eventually wend its way to me about a day later, which evidently had run into major congestion somewhere in the intertubes.

My resolve to eschew scathing sarcasm is being sorely tested tonight. The lastest trial is my discovery that nobody thought to so much as email me a press release, let alone brief me, on Microsoft’s announcement of a timetable for DATAllegro/SQL Server integration. Per Ina Fried — with a hat tip to anonymous commenter L.J. — Microsoft says:

The final version of that product is slated for the first half of 2010, though Microsoft said it will begin giving customers and partners access to early “community technology preview” releases within the next 12 months.

August 24, 2008

My current customer list among the data warehouse specialists

One of my favorite pages on the Monash Research website is the list of many current and a few notable past customers. (Another favorite page is the one for testimonials.) For a variety of reasons, I won’t undertake to be more precise about my current customer list than that. But I don’t think it would hurt anything to list the data warehouse DBMS/appliance specialists in the group. They are:

All of those are Monash Advantage members.

If you care about all this, you may also be interested in the rest of my standards and disclosures.

August 18, 2008

Three happy 100 terabyte-plus customers for DATAllegro

Over on my Network World blog, I asked the question “So who are DATAllegro’s actual current customers?” As regular readers know, that’s a fairly hard question to answer. TEOCO is widely known as DATAllegro’s flagship reference, but after that the list gets thin in a hurry.

As a by-the-by to other discussions, DATAllegro Stuart Frost undertook to respond in part himself. Specifically, he gave me two names of two other happy customers that are or imminently will be running DATAllegro against 100+ terabytes of user data. Read more

Next Page →

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.