Some thoughts on the announcement that IBM is buying Netezza
As you’ve probably read, IBM and Netezza announced a deal today for IBM to buy Netezza. I didn’t sit in on the conference call, but I’ve seen the reporting. Naturally, I have some quick thoughts, which I’ve broken up into several sections below:
- Clearing some underbrush.
- Speculation about what IBM/Netezza will do.
- Speculation about alternative acquirers for Netezza.
- Speculation about what IBM/Netezza competitors will do.
Details of the JPMorgan Chase Oracle database outage
After posting my speculation about the JPMorgan Chase database outage, I was contacted by – well, by somebody who wants to be referred to as “a credible source close to the situation.” We chatted for a long time; I think it is very likely that this person is indeed what s/he claims to be; and I am honoring his/her requests to obfuscate many identifying details. However, I need a shorter phrase than “a credible source close to the situation,” so I’ll refer to him/her as “Deep Packet.”
According to Deep Packet,
- The JPMorgan Chase database outage was caused by corruption in an Oracle database.
- This Oracle database stored user profiles, which are more than just authentication data.
- Applications that went down include but may not be limited to:
- The main JPMorgan Chase portal.
- JPMorgan Chase’s ability to use the ACH (Automated Clearing House).
- Loan applications.
- Private client trading portfolio access.
- The Oracle database was back up by 1:12 Wednesday morning. But on Wednesday a second problem occurred, namely an overwhelming number of web requests. This turned out to be a cascade of retries in the face of – and of course exacerbating – poor response time. While there was no direct connection to the database outage, Deep Packet is sympathetic to my suggestions that:
- Network/app server traffic was bound to be particularly high as people tried to get caught up after the Tuesday outage, or just see what was going on in their accounts.
- Given that Deep Packet said there was a definite operator-error contributing cause, perhaps the error would not have happened if people weren’t so exhausted from dealing with the database outage.
Deep Packet stressed the opinion that the Oracle outage was not the fault of JPMorgan Chase (the Wednesday slowdown is a different matter), and rather can be blamed on an Oracle bug. Read more
| Categories: JPMorgan Chase, OLTP, Oracle | 43 Comments |
Speculation about the JPMorgan Chase authentication database outage
Edit: Subsequent to making this post, I obtained more detail about the JPMorgan Chase database outage.
I was just contacted for comment about the Chase database outage, about which they’ve released remarkably little information (they’ve even apologized for their terseness). About all Chase has said is:
A third-party database company’s software caused a corruption of systems information, disabling our ability to process customer log-ins to chase.com. This resulted in a long recovery process,
and even that quote is a bit hard to find. From other reporting, we know that ATM machines, bank branches, and the call centers continued to work, but various web and mobile access applications were disabled.
Of course, that quote is pretty ambiguous. My thoughts on it include: Read more
| Categories: Data types, JPMorgan Chase | 11 Comments |
Aster Data nCluster Version 4.6
The main thing in Aster Data nCluster Version 4.6 is Aster’s version of hybrid row-column store technology. Technical highlights include:
- Aster Data is simply taking the number of storage options in nCluster up from 1 to 2 – you now can store a table either in the Aster Data nCluster row store or column store.
- In fact, you can store parts of a table in the Aster Data nCluster row store and other parts in the Aster Data nCluster column store. I‘m a bit foggy on the details of that – Aster makes discussions of partitioning more complicated than they need to be — but it definitely sounds pretty flexible. Edit: See comment thread below.
- Anything you can do with the Aster Data nCluster row store you can also do with the Aster Data nCluster column store. In particular, that includes all of Aster Data’s analytic functionality.
- The same is true vice-versa. There is no columnar-oriented kind of compression in Aster Data nCluster at this time.
So Aster Data has now joined Greenplum/EMC among row-based analytic DBMS vendors with hybrid row-column stores. Oracle will join them some day, and the same probably applies to other row-based vendors as well. Similarly, Aster Data will probably join Oracle some day in having columnar compression. And so this all fits the model:
- Aster Data has an impressively competitive analytic relational DBMS, considering the youth and size of the company.
- Aster Data is a leader in extending its analytic relational DBMS by integrating in other analytic processing capabilities.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression | 4 Comments |
Reconciling medical privacy and elder care
In a previous post, I outlined how Friendship Village of Dublin has mishandled my father’s medical information, to the detriment of his medical care. Expanding on that story, here are some other complications or screw-ups in the same series of medical events. In these other cases, the blame clearly falls more on the information-flow system itself, rather than on some particular medical care provider such as Friendship Village of Dublin, Riverside Methodist Hospital, or the paramedics who transported my father from one to the other.
| Categories: Health care, Surveillance and privacy | 3 Comments |
Some of my travails
Two weeks ago tonight, my 86 year old father was taken unresponsive from his home at Friendship Village of Dublin (Ohio) to Riverside Methodist Hospital. He remains unresponsive, and his doctors and the Riverside Hospital nurses are trying to puzzle out how to bring him around. Riverside Hospital does not know what happened at Friendship Village of Dublin the night he wound up collapsing, so naturally I asked Friendship Village for the information, that I may relay it to Riverside Hospital, so that they may help him recover from his “critically stable” condition. Two weeks after the event, they are still refusing it to me.
| Categories: About this blog | 7 Comments |
Soundbites about Mark Hurd joining Oracle
I’m on “vacation”, so I don’t know how timely I’ll be in getting back to reporters with quotes on Mark Hurd’s new job at Oracle. I put “vacation” in quotes because my father has been in a coma for over a week back in Ohio; I’m getting stonewalled for information about his and especially about my senile mother’s condition (while there’s a support structure making sure nothing too ridiculous happens, the whole thing has been even harder to block out for a while than if a full set of medical ethics were being used); Linda arrived here with an injury that has largely wrecked the vacation for her (if we had confidence in the local doctors we’d be seeing them for sure, and may yet see them anyway); and the mix of lesser factors is otherwise normal — great place, I took way too much work with me and had clients demanding more, connectivity was deplorable and is still unreliable (this post has been spread out over several hours by yet another connectivity outage), and weather has been a pleasant surprise to date (but clearly I’m benefiting from it a lot less than usual).
My thoughts on Mark Hurd (who I’ve never met) joining Oracle include:
- Mark Hurd is one of the least successful leaders in the modern history of the DBMS industry.
- Mark Hurd presided over Teradata while Teradata allowed a bunch of smaller competitors to grow up.
- Mark Hurd was said to be the prime mover behind HP Neoview, which has been an epic failure.
- Mark Hurd was in charge of HP when HP lost the Exadata business to Sun, and it’s not clear that the loss was just because Oracle bought Sun.
- Mark Hurd seems to have done poorly running services businesses at HP as well, at least in terms of their reputations.
- None of this means that Mark Hurd can’t do a good job on the volume-hardware side of Oracle. Nor does it seem likely that Hurd would get the power to gut Oracle’s R&D the way he is reputed to have gutted HP’s. And by the way, the investment in the HP Neoview fiasco shows that Hurd didn’t COMPLETELY gut R&D at HP either.
- The Mark Hurd hire is a signal that Oracle is very serious about hardware/software integration. Notwithstanding any of the foregoing, Hurd can surely talk the hardware/software integration game. And one can reasonably spin Hurd’s HP Neoview failure as a high-desire, low-odds attempt to get into the database software/hardware stack business.
- The time to assess whether Oracle will continue with the hardware/software integration emphasis will be when Mark Hurd leaves. Just as Ray Lane’s departure coincided with a reversal of the software/services integration strategy he so successfully championed, Hurd’s eventual departure could signal a backing off from emphasizing a software/hardware stack.
- Mark Hurd’s sexual harassment problems sound similar to Al Gore’s:
- He got services of the sort that are often a euphemism (massage in Gore’s case, escort in Hurd’s).
- The provider(s) just wanted to provide the real thing, not the euphemistic part as well.
- Unpleasantness ensued.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Exadata, HP and Neoview, Oracle, Teradata | 12 Comments |
More on NoSQL and HVSP (or OLRP)
Since posting last Wednesday morning that I’m looking into NoSQL and HVSP, I’ve had a lot of conversations, including with (among others):
- Dwight Merriman of 10gen (MongoDB)
- Damien Katz of Couchio (CouchDB)
- Matt Pfeil of Riptano (Cassandra)
- Todd Lipcon of Cloudera (HBase committer)
- Tony Falco of Basho (Riak)
- John Busch of Schooner
- Ori Herrnstadt of Akiban
Workday comments on its database architecture
In my discussion of Workday’s technology, I gave an estimate that Workday’s database, if relationally designed, would require “1000s” of tables. That estimate came from Workday, Inc. CTO Stan Swete, in a thoughtful email that made several points about Workday’s database strategy. Workday kindly gave me permission to quote it below.
Read more
| Categories: Data models and architecture, Object, OLTP, Software as a Service (SaaS), Specific users, Theory and architecture, Workday | 3 Comments |
The Workday architecture — a new kind of OLTP software stack
One of my coolest company visits in some time was to SaaS (Software as a Service) vendor Workday, Inc., earlier this month. Reasons included:
- Workday has forward-thinking ideas about SaaS enterprise applications and the integration of business intelligence into same.
- Workday has highly innovative ideas in how it manages data.
- Companies founded by Dave Duffield tend to feature smart, likeable people who talk to one pleasantly and forthrightly. Workday is no exception; CTO Stan Swete and the other Workday folks present were a delight to talk with.
- I’d invited Merv Adrian to come along with me. He asked great questions, and I could gather myself a bit despite how sleep-deprived I was for the first part of that trip.
Workday kindly allowed me to post this Workday slide deck. Otherwise, I’ve split out a quick Workday, Inc. company overview into a separate post.
The biggie for me was the data and object management part. Specifically: Read more