It can be hard to analyze analytics
When vendors talk about the integration of advanced analytics into database technology, confusion tends to ensue. For example: Read more
| Categories: Aster Data, Greenplum, Netezza, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, SAS Institute | 7 Comments |
eBay followup — Greenplum out, Teradata > 10 petabytes, Hadoop has some value, and more
I chatted with Oliver Ratzesberger of eBay around a Stanford picnic table yesterday (the XLDB 4 conference is being held at Jacek Becla’s home base of SLAC, which used to stand for “Stanford Linear Accelerator Center”). Todd Walter of Teradata also sat in on the latter part of the conversation. Things I learned included: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Derived data, eBay, Greenplum, Hadoop, HBase, Log analysis, Petabyte-scale data management, Teradata | 30 Comments |
Notes and links October 3 2010
Some notes, follow-up, and links before I head out to California: Read more
| Categories: GIS and geospatial, Google, HP and Neoview, Humor, Kickfire, Netezza, Solid-state memory, Teradata, Web analytics | 3 Comments |
Ray Lane at HP
Leo Apotheker is taking over as CEO of HP, and Ray Lane as chairman. I don’t know Leo, but I did talk a lot with Ray when he was at Oracle in the 1990s. Quick observations include: Read more
| Categories: HP and Neoview, Oracle, Vertica Systems | 9 Comments |
Evidently IBM bought Cast Iron Systems for $190 million
Sequoia told TechCrunch that Cast Iron Systems was acquired for $190 million. That’s a much more successful exit than I thought.
| Categories: Cast Iron Systems, Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, IBM and DB2 | 2 Comments |
A rant about medical records
It is very difficult to convey utterly tedious frustration without — well, without thoroughly boring one’s audience. And hence I will not try to explain the full awfulness of modern medical records and information compartmentalization. But I was personally present 5 times in one recent week while Linda gave detailed information about her contact information, medical history, etc. — and all 5 times it was to the same hospital.
In our case, that just costs time. But the information flow in my father’s case upsets me more. Read more
| Categories: Health care, Surveillance and privacy | 2 Comments |
Further thoughts on previous posts
One thing I love about DBMS 2 is the really smart comments a number of readers — that would be you guys — make. However, not all the smart comments are made in the first 5 minutes a post is up, so some readers (unless you circle back) might miss great points other readers make. Well, here are some pointers to some of what you might have missed, along with other follow-up comments to old posts while I’m at it. Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Calpont, IBM and DB2, Netezza, Oracle, SAS Institute | Leave a Comment |
A little more on the JPMorgan Chase Oracle outage
Jaikumar Vijayan of Computerworld did a story based on my reporting on the JP Morgan Chase Oracle outage. He did a good job, getting me to simplify some of what I said before. 🙂 He also added a quote from Chase to the effect:
the “long recovery process” was caused by a corruption of systems data that disabled the bank’s “ability to process customer log-ins to chase.com”
While that’s true, and indeed is the reason I first referred to this as an “authentication” problem, I believe it to be incomplete. For example, the $132 million in missed ACH payments weren’t directly driven by log-ins; they were to be done on schedule, perhaps based on previous log-ins. Or as Jai and I put it in the guts of his story: Read more
| Categories: JPMorgan Chase, Oracle | 6 Comments |
Where I’m at
It would be an exaggeration to say that my family health issues are “under control.” My father still isn’t fully alert. He also has tubes surgically implanted in his throat and belly, and will not be able to speak during a months-long rehab. (He will HATE that; he’s the kind of guy who always charms or at least entertains his caretakers.) In one of my better pieces of writing, I explained all that in a long note to my partly-senile mother, who seems to be handling it; but of course she remains a concern. Linda’s leg is still broken.
One moral in all this is that it is a VERY good idea for the elderly to live in the same metropolitan area as their children. When I’m with my father, I can rein in his overconfidence about muddling through episodes of weakness. When I’m not, bad things happen.
Still, things are moving forward. A long, slow rehab will be very unpleasant for my parents, but at least there’s good hope we won’t have too many more near-term urgent crises. Communication and coordination among my parents’ support structure is better, even in the case of Friendship Village. And Linda seems sufficiently able to fend for herself that I’ll keep my plans to go to the SF Bay area the week of October 4, albeit being very careful to stock the house with food beforehand.
I’ve kept up client service through all this, cutting relatively few corners, and that won’t change. Read more
| Categories: About this blog | 12 Comments |
How to tell whether you need ACID-compliant transaction integrity
In a post about the recent JPMorgan Chase database outage, I suggested that JPMorgan Chase’s user profile database was over-engineered, in that various web surfing data was stored in a fully ACID-compliant manner when it didn’t really need to be. I’ve since gotten private communication expressing vehement agreement, and telling of the opposite choice being major in other major web-facing transactional systems.
What’s going on is this:
- ACID-compliant transaction integrity commonly costs more in terms of DBMS licenses and many other components of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) than less rigorous approaches.
- Worse, it can actually hurt application uptime, by forcing your system to pull in its horns and stop functioning in the face of failures that a non-transactional system might smoothly work around.
- Other flavors of “complexity can be a bad thing” apply as well.
Thus, transaction integrity can be more trouble than it’s worth.
In essence, of course, that’s half of the classic NoSQL claim, where the other half of the claim is to assert that the same may be said of joins.
So when should you go for ACID-compliant transaction integrity, and when shouldn’t you bother? Every situation is different, but here’s a set of considerations to start you off. Read more
| Categories: NoSQL, Web analytics | 12 Comments |