Where I’m at now
My parents’ health issues didn’t work out as I hoped, and my parents wound up dying 53 hours apart. I’m dealing with the aftermath, and expect that to continue pretty much until Thanksgiving. Thus, for a while I’ve stopped taking briefings, writing my usual kind of blog posts, and all that stuff. I’ve been responding to quick client inquiries, but that’s about it.
Naturally, when I get back to work, there will be a massive backlog. Highlights include:
- My quarterly trip to California, in this case to see clients both old and new.
- Catch-up blogging.
- A white paper/webinar project.
- Monash Advantage renewals.
To make things simple, 2011 Monash Advantage terms and conditions will be completely unchanged from 2010. That’s never been the case before; if nothing else, I’ve raised prices every year. But even if I’d had more time on my hands, I might have made only minor tweaks this time around, as the current version seems to be working well for vendor (that would be me) and clients alike. If I find the time, I’ll edit the contracts for typos and so on.* But what you get and what you pay will be exactly as they have been this year, except to the extent I can persuade you to make better use of what’s always been on offer to you.
*First two on the hit list: “Action, MA” should be “Acton, MA”, and some people dislike the actually sensible reference to the year 2019.
Obviously, various schedules I was trying to work to are no longer operative. But I really, really want to move forward promptly on the Privacy 3.0 project I mentioned to some of you. All the other stuff — post-print journalism and so on — can happen when it happens.
| Categories: About this blog | 12 Comments |
Teradata announcements made very simple
For reasons of health,* I very regretfully canceled my trip to what is the first conference to go on my schedule every year — Teradata Partners. From afar, I’m not plugged into the details of Teradata’s announcement/embargo schedule. But what you need to know starts with this:
- Teradata signaled a year ago that its software focus was on adding analytic functionality, including specifically in the temporal area.
- Teradata likes to refresh its hardware annually, with a 50%+ price/performance improvement. (This year Teradata is going to 6-core Xeon processors.)
*Just a cough, but I’m both exhausted and potentially contagious, and this wasn’t a trip on which I had any truly urgent obligations (speeches, packed-room consulting sessions, whatever).
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Teradata | Leave a Comment |
The privacy discussion is heating up
Internet privacy issues are getting more and more attention. Frankly, I think we’re getting past the point where the only big risk is loss of liberty. More and more, the risk of an excessive backlash is upon us as well. (In the medical area, I’d say it’s already more than a risk — it’s a life-wrecking reality. But now the problem is poised to become wider-spread.) Read more
| Categories: Health care, Surveillance and privacy, Web analytics | 2 Comments |
Notes and links October 22, 2010
A number of recent posts have had good comments. This time, I won’t call them out individually.
Evidently Mike Olson of Cloudera is still telling the machine-generated data story, exactly as he should be. The Information Arbitrage/IA Ventures folks said something similar, focusing specifically on “sensor data” …
… and, even better, went on to say: Read more
With luck the Monash Research RSS feed is now fixed
Our integrated RSS feed went out. Melissa Bradshaw has now replaced Feedjumbler with Yahoo Pipes, so the feed should be working again.
Is it?
| Categories: About this blog | 4 Comments |
Introduction to Kaminario
At its core, the Kaminario story is simple:
- Throw out your disks and replace them with, not Flash, but actual DRAM.
-
Your IOPS (Input/Output Per Second) are so high* that you get the performance you need without any further system changes.
- The whole thing is very fast to set up.
In other words, Kaminario pitches a value proposition something like (my words, not theirs) “A shortcut around your performance bottlenecks.”
*1 million or so on the smallest Kaminario K2 appliance.
Kaminario asserts that both analytics and OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) are represented in its user base. Even so, the use cases Kaminario mentioned seemed to be concentrated on the analytic side. I suspect there are two main reasons:
- As Kaminario points out, OLTP apps commonly are designed to perform in the face of regrettable I/O wait.
- Also, analytic performance problems tend to arise more suddenly than OLTP ones do.*
*Somebody can think up a new analytic query overnight that takes 10 times the processing of anything they’ve ever run before. Or they can get the urge to run the same queries 10 times as often as before. Both those kinds of thing happen less often in the OLTP world.
Accordingly, Kaminario likes to sell against the alternative of getting a better analytic DBMS, stressing that you can get a Kaminario K2 appliance into production a lot faster than you can move your processing to even the simplest data warehouse appliance. Kaminario is probably technically correct in saying that; even so, I suspect it would often make more sense to view Kaminario K2 appliances as a transition technology, by which I mean:
- You have an annoying performance problem.
- Kaminario K2 could solve it very quickly.
- That buys you time for a more substantive fix.*
- If you want, you can redeploy your Kaminario K2 storage to solve your next-worst performance bottleneck.
On that basis, I could see Kaminario-like devices eventually getting to the point that every sufficiently large enterprise should have some of them, whether or not that enterprise has an application it believes should run permanently against DRAM block storage. Read more
| Categories: Investment research and trading, Kaminario, Solid-state memory, Storage, Telecommunications, Web analytics | 7 Comments |
More notes on Membase and memcached
As a companion to my post about Membase last week, the company has graciously allowed me to post a rather detailed Membase slide deck. (It even has pricing.) Also, I left one point out.
Membase announced a Cloudera partnership. I couldn’t detect anything technically exciting about that, but it serves to highlight what I do find to be an interesting usage trend. A couple of big Web players (AOL and ShareThis) are using Hadoop to crunch data and derive customer profile data, then feed that back into Membase. Why Membase? Because it can serve up the profile in a millisecond, as part of a bigger 40-millisecond-latency request.
And why Hadoop, rather than Aster Data nCluster, which ShareThis also uses? Umm, I didn’t ask.
When I mentioned this to Colin Mahony, he said Vertica had similar stories. However, I don’t recall whether they were about Membase or just memcached, and he hasn’t had a chance to get back to me with clarification. (Edit: As per Colin’s comment below, it’s both.)
| Categories: Aster Data, Cache, Cloudera, Couchbase, Hadoop, memcached, Memory-centric data management, NoSQL, Pricing, Specific users, Vertica Systems, Web analytics | 7 Comments |
I understand the Monash Research RSS feed isn’t working
I gather from a few folks (who use at least two different RSS readers) that the last post to come through our integrated RSS feed was a Monash Report post from September 29. Is this everybody’s experience? And how are our blog-specific feeds going?
Thanks!
| Categories: About this blog | 5 Comments |
Where ParAccel is at
Until recently, I was extremely critical of ParAccel’s marketing. But there was an almost-clean sweep of the relevant ParAccel executives, and the specific worst practices I was calling out have for the most part been eliminated. So I was open to talking and working with ParAccel again, and that’s now happening. On my recent California trip, I chatted with three ParAccel folks for a few hours. Based on that and other conversation, here’s the current ParAccel story as I understand it.
Read more
Notes on data warehouse appliance prices
I’m not terribly motivated to do a detailed analysis of data warehouse appliance list prices, in part because:
- Everybody knows that in practice data warehouse appliances tend to be deeply discounted from list price.
- The only realistic metric to use for pricing data warehouse appliances is price-per-terabyte, and people have gotten pretty sick of that one.
That said, here are some notes on data warehouse appliance prices. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, EMC, Exadata, Greenplum, Netezza, Oracle, Pricing | 8 Comments |