Naming the DBMS disruptors
Edit: This post has largely been superseded by this more recent one defining mid-range relational DBMS.
I find myself defining a new product category – midrange OLTP/multipurpose DBMS. (Or just midrange DBMS for brevity.) Nothing earthshaking here; I’m simply referring to those products that: Read more
Comments are fine again, and my email should be better too.
The site move went fine, for the most part. Everything’s at the new host. Please comment away.
Even better, my email addresses at dbms2.com and monash.com (both firstnamelastname, and I check them both) are now with different hosts. The chance of a simulataneous outage is much reduced.
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This is not a good time to post a comment on DBMS2
The blog is being moved from one hosting provider to another. Comments made today might get lost in the transition. The weekend won’t be so hot either. After that it should be fine.
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Deal prospects for data warehouse DBMS vendors
The fourth Monash Letter is now posted for Monash Advantage members (just 3 pages this time). It’s about forthcoming M&A in data warehouse DBMS, something that seems likely just because of the large number of current players. Some of the observations are:
- Oracle needs to buy somebody, because of its rather dire product problems at the data warehouse high end. And it’s very much in keeping with their recent behavior to do so.
- Teradata could be acquired sooner than people think. While there are tax considerations preventing an outright sale, these should be obviated if all of the current NCR is taken private. What’s more NCR minus Teradata is exactly the kind of healthy, slow-growth, niche company that private equity loves.
- DATAllegro is a natural merger partner for somebody. Their technical differentiation is almost DBMS-independent, so it could be easy to roll them into a larger overall product strategy. And they have enough market traction to have proved some non-trivial value.
- Kognitio seems desperate these days, with several odd or even underhanded marketing tactics. But they do have MPP bitmap software, something Sybase sorely lacks. So there’s an obvious potential combination between those two.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Kognitio, Oracle, Sybase, Teradata | 3 Comments |
ANTs Software is finally making some sense
ANTs Software is in essence a “public venture capital” outfit, with over $100 million in market capitalization and negligible revenue. It also features some interesting ideas in OLTP data management, a new management team (as of last year), and a new strategy. ANTs’ new strategy, in my opinion, stands a better chance of success than its predecessor, which in essence was to tell large enterprises “Throw out Oracle and use ANTs DB instead for your most mission-critical OLTP apps, because it’s faster, cheaper, and compatible.”
There actually are two prongs to ANTs’ new strategy. One of them, however, is a Big Secret that the company adamantly insists I not write about, notwithstanding that it is pretty much spelled out in this press release. The other is high-performance OLTP for specialized apps, in defense, telecom, financial trading, etc. The best way to summarize what “high-performance” means is this: When I asked what the technical sweet spot for ANTs DB, Engineering VP Rao Yendluri said “Half a million updates per second.” Read more
| Categories: ANTs Software, Memory-centric data management | 3 Comments |
Lessons from EnterpriseDB
I had a nice conversation yesterday with Jim Mlodgenski of EnterpriseDB, covering both generalities and EnterpriseDB-specific stuff. Many of the generalities were predictable, and none were terribly shocking. Even so, I am dressed as Captain Obvious, and shall repeat a few of the ones I found interesting below:
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, OLTP, Open source, Structured documents, Theory and architecture | 2 Comments |
Do you have any trouble subscribing to my integrated feed?
For a couple of months, I’ve been pushing everybody to switch their subscriptions from individual blogs to my integrated feed, because I write about closely related subjects on several different blogs. There are two subscription options, RSS/XML (via Feedburner) and e-mail (via Feedblitz), both of which can be found via this link or this one or, for that matter, on the Monash Information Services home page.
But I just heard today from a customer who was having trouble subscribing via Bloglines. Fortunately, Feedblitz e-mail worked for her just fine. Is anybody else having difficulties too? Please let me know! I really want you to have the full integrated-feed scoop.
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What’s going on at Calpont?
It’s been quite a while since anything substantive-sounding emerged from Calpont. They now have an odd one-page web site, with essentially no substance other than a tagline suggesting they’re shipping product (not bloody likely) and the names, titles, and email addresses of the president and seven vice-presidents. Only two of those officers were listed on the May, 2006 version of the site. Does anybody have an idea what may or may not be going on?
(Quick refresher: Calpont was developing a SQL processing chip, and designing an appliance around it. Whether this appliance would have disks or be all in-memory changed from time to time, a flexibility that was made possible by the apparent fact that none of these boxes actually shipped.)
| Categories: Calpont, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing | 2 Comments |
HP Neoview — smoke or fire?
The consistently outstanding blog Serious About Consulting has a detailed article about HP Neoview. I must admit, however, to some skepticism about the Neoview project. Edit: As of September, 2008, that’s a dead link, and the blog has been replaced by spam junk. Part of this is just the fact that a data warehouse appliance outfit that’s never gotten around to briefing me — ever — clearly doesn’t have its marketing act together. 😉 Also, I’ve never heard much about them competitively from anybody except Greenplum.
That said — as Jerry Held reminded me in a recent Vertica-related call, there’s no cosmic architectural reason why they couldn’t make it work. And if anybody’s going to see HP first competitively, it’s going to be Sun/Greenplum and maybe Teradata, and I’ll confess to not having chatted with Teradata for approximately six months.
Where the next query performance crunch may come from
For close to a decade, I’ve been pointing out that true enterprise business intelligence will require a lot of custom KPIs. Basically, each decision-maker needs her own private dashboard and set of alerts, with a bunch of custom metrics that she can tweak to support the way her own personal brain best operates.
To date the BI vendors still haven’t gotten the message … but suppose they did. Depending on the frequency of refresh, the result could be one hell of an analytic processing load.
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Technorati Tags: Business activity monitoring, BAM, key performance indicators, KPIs, dashboards, business intelligence, data warehouses
| Categories: Data warehousing | Leave a Comment |