Intelligent Enterprise’s list of 12/36/48 vendors
I’m getting a flood of press releases today, because many of the companies I write about were selected to Intelligent Enterprise’s list of 12 most influential vendors plus 36 more to watch in the areas Intelligent Enterprise covers (which seems to be pretty much the analytics-related parts of what I write about here and on Text Technologies). It looks like a pretty reasonable list, although I think they forced the issue in some of the small analytics vendors they selected, and of course anybody can quibble with some of the omissions.
Among the companies they cited, you can find topical categories here for IBM (and Cognos), Informatica, Microsoft, Netezza, Oracle, SAP/Business Objects (both), SAS, and Teradata; QlikTech; Cast Iron, Coral8, DATAllegro, HP, ParAccel, and StreamBase; and Software AG. On Text Technologies you’ll find categories for some of the same vendors, plus Attensity, Clarabridge, and Google. There also are categories for some of these vendors on the Monash Report.
Netezza targets 1 petabyte
Netezza is promising petabyte-scale appliances later this year, up from 100 terabytes. That’s user data (I checked), and assumes 2-3X compression, or a little less than they think is actually likely. I.e., they’re describing their capacity in the same kinds of terms other responsible vendors do. They haven’t actually built and tested any 1 petabyte systems internally yet, but they’ve gone over 100 terabytes.
Basically, this leaves Netezza’s high-end capability about 10X below Teradata’s. On the other hand, it should leave them capable of handling pretty much every Teradata database in existence. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Petabyte-scale data management, Teradata | Leave a Comment |
The world according to Derek Rodner of EnterpriseDB
If you’re interested in the world of mid-range, OLTP, and/or open source database management systems, Derek Rodner’s blog is worth checking out. His 2007 Year in Review post deserves a look — even though it’s about as unbiased and spin-free as Bill O’Reilly’s TV show, in that combines multiple shots each at Oracle and MySQL with some plugs for EnterpriseDB. I’ve already praised his post a month ago listing large numbers of EnterpriseDB successes. Of course there are multiple heartfelt arguments on behalf of Postgres (too many to link to specifically). And he even has a great set of tips — which I hereby recommend to all my vendor clients — on how best to use Google AdWords.
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, OLTP, Open source, PostgreSQL | 1 Comment |
DBMS2 should now be trojan-free, the feeds should work too, and so should my email
On New Year’s Eve, I got the impression there might be trojans being served up on monash.com. New Year’s Day, Melissa Bradshaw confirmed that there were indeed trojans on both monash.com and dbms2.com. My web hosting company tracked this problem down into the server OS, and recompiled it last night. The resulting planned outage caused our FeedBlitz-based email feed to include broken links.
The malware appears to have been inserted during a Christmas Eve mailbombing, so I can’t be sure how soon trojans first appeared. What I CAN be sure of is that some of my email was lost forever, and that other mail was sent back with bounce messages.
Needless, to say, this has not been fun. And I am very apologetic to any of you who have been inconvenienced. I’d offer you all a refund — but the blogs are already free. 🙂 So the best I can do is try to have great posts going forward, making it worth your while to keep reading here.
At this point, I am optimistic that the technical problems are behind us. My sites are up. My email is working. I’ll be shocked if the feeds don’t work.
| Categories: About this blog | 2 Comments |
Optimizer geekdom
I’ve been a DBMS analyst since before there were cost-based optimizers or, for that matter, a whole lot of relational DBMS. And in the 20 years that optimizers have been around, I’ve never fully understood why they’re so simple-minded. Even so, I think they’re pretty cool, as per the fanboyish discussion in this 2004 Computerworld column.
So I’m delighted to see that the Oracle folks have started a hardcore blog on optimizer details. If you want to get a sense of how smart a leading DBMS is or isn’t, I encourage you to check it out.
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IBM acquires SolidDB to compete with Oracle TimesTen
IBM is acquiring Solid Information Technology, makers of solidDB. Some quick comments:
- solidDB is actually a very interesting hybrid disk/in-memory memory-centric database management system. However, the press release announcing the deal makes it sound as if solidDB is in-memory only.
- That strongly suggests that IBM is buying Solid mainly to compete with Oracle TimesTen. As of last June, solidDB was already IBM’s TimesTen answer via a partnership; this deal just solidifies that arrangement.
- This probably isn’t good news for Solid’s MySQL engine. That’s a pity, since solidDB technically has the potential to be the best MySQL engine around.
- Notwithstanding IBM’s presumed intentions, Solid’s main market success historically is as an embedded system in telecommunications equipment, network software, and similar systems.
- Last year I wrote a white paper on memory-centric data management, showcasing four products. IBM now has bought two of them, namely Solid’s and Applix’s (via Cognos).
- Comparisons to IBM’s embedded Java DBMS Cloudscape are pointless. That’s just a failed product vs. solidDB or Sybase SQL Anywhere, and IBM long ago cut its losses.
| Categories: Cache, Cognos, IBM and DB2, In-memory DBMS, Memory-centric data management, MySQL, OLTP, Oracle TimesTen, solidDB, Sybase | 5 Comments |
Elastra – somewhat more sensible Amazon-based DBMS option
Elastra is a startup offering MySQL and PostgreSQL SaaS instances in the Amazon S3/EC2 cloud. On their board is John Hummer, which I generally regard as a good thing, although it’s hardly a guarantee of success.* High Scalability raises some doubts about Elastra’s pricing, but I think that may be missing the point. Read more
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Elastra, MySQL, OLTP, Open source, PostgreSQL, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 2 Comments |
Amazon SimpleDB – when less is, supposedly, enough
I’ve posted several times about Amazon as an innovative, super-high-end user — doing transactional object caching with ObjectStore, building an inhouse less-than-DBMS called Dynamo, or just generally adopting a very DBMS2-like approach to data management. Now Amazon is bring the Dynamo idea to the public, via a SaaS offering called SimpleDB. (Hat tip to Tim Anderson.)
SimpleDB is obviously meant to be a data server for online applications. There are no joins, and queries don’t run over 5 seconds, so serious analytics are out of the question. Domains are limited to 10GB for now, so extreme media file serving also isn’t what’s intended; indeed, Amazon encourages one to use SimpleDB to store pointers to larger objects stored as files in Amazon S3.
On the other hand, if you think of SimpleDB as an OLTP DBMS, your head might explode. There’s no sense of transaction, no mechanisms to help with integrity, no way to do arithmetic, and indeed no assurance that writes will be immediately reflected in reads. Read more
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Data models and architecture, NoSQL, OLTP, Software as a Service (SaaS), Theory and architecture | 6 Comments |
Intersystems’ stealth marketing has gotten pretty extreme
Every few months I try to make contact with Intersystems. Sometimes they graciously respond, promising to schedule a briefing, which then never happens. Other times they don’t even bother. Now, on one level I can’t blame them, based on what happened at my last briefing. Read more
| Categories: Intersystems and Cache', Object | 5 Comments |
A cautionary tale
Maybe I was just in an odd mood, but I laughed for a LONG time at this cautionary tale.
Hat tip to Dan Weinreb, who introduced me to xkcd by sending over a link to this funny cartoon, in response to this filksong.
| Categories: Humor | 2 Comments |