I will be at VLDB 2010 next week.  If anyone on this blog is attending and wants to catch up to discuss start ups and innovation in DB, NoSQL, Big Data etc drop me a line and I will try to meet up.

Cassandra is one of the most interesting NoSQL platforms at the moment.  And by most interesting what I really mean is the most clearly justifiable.  Some NoSQL platforms offer new data models, improved query interfaces and/or good single node performance through relaxed consistency models.  As a database guy however, the justification for throwing out the RDBMS baby and bathwater is still difficult at this point as NoSQL platforms tend to be highly focused in one aspect of data management, and very immature in all other areas.  Cassandra is somewhat different as it is more mature in a number of key areas (albeit still immature in others).  Areas that can make Cassandra more justifiable for the right project, when compared with a more traditional RDBMS based solution.  This is because Cassandra’s primary capabilities can’t easily be replicated on those …

I work in all markets of the database industry, from web & startup through the largest and most established enterprises.  And to be completely honest, the name Ingres has not come up in conversation very much at all.  10 years ago maybe more often, but recently not all that much.  But Ingres has been quietly ticking away.  Despite being largely off the radar, they still have a sizable and loyal customer base, global offices and a focused & dedicated management team.  And importantly they have an open source business model which actually appears to be working.

I wrote last year that their "behind the scenes" status had the potential to change.  Ingres had been very clever and worked out a partnership relationship with Peter Bonzc’s Vectorwise.  …

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One of my favorite terms at the moment is “Big Data”.  While all terms are by nature subjective, in this post I will try and explain what Big Data means to me.

So what is Big Data?Big Data is the “modern scale” at which we are defining or data usage challenges.  Big Data begins at the point where need to seriously start thinking about the technologies used to drive our information needs.

While Big Data as a term seems to refer to volume this isn’t the case.  Many existing technologies have little problem physically handling large volumes (TB or PB) of data.  Instead the Big Data challenges result out of the combination of volume and our usage demands from that data.  And those …

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Oracle has published their promises which have reportedly gone a long way to appeasing the EU, so the likely outcome is the takeover of Sun will be approved in January.

My own personal opinion has been the anti-competitive stance really didn’t hold much water.  Reading Oracle’s promises, none appear very extreme (largely agreeing to maintain the status quo) which would lead you to question why it has taken so long to sort out.  But importantly for getting this resolved they are a concession by Oracle and a win for the EU.

 Hopefully shortly the mop up can begin.

The full Oracle press release …

Last week I spent some time speaking with Kevin Weil, head of analytics at Twitter. Twitter, from a technology perspective, has had a bit of a hard time due to their stability issues in their early days.  Kevin was keen to point out that he feels this was due to the incomparable growth Twitter was experiencing at the time and their constant struggle to keep up.  Kevin was also keen to show that Twitter prides themselves on striving for engineering excellence, the creation & contribution to new technologies and generally assisting in pushing the boundaries forward.  Our conversation naturally centered on analytics at Twitter.

Twitter, like many web 2.0 apps, started life as a MySQL based RBDMS application.  Today, Twitter is still using MySQL for much of their online operational functionality (although this is likely to change in the near future – think …

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Like many I was disappointed, yet not surprised, that the EC formally logged their objection to Oracle’s acquisition of Sun on account of MySQL a few days back.  And we also hear today that Oracle will be stating their position in Brussels on the 25th of this month.  To me this case has odd from the onset and as it goes on it is just getting odder.  And of course this all seems to be occuring at immense cost to Sun, Oracle and MySQL themselves.

There are several reasons why this is odd.  One of the key ones is that for some time MySQL has been quite open about their non compete focus with …

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<< Back from Blogging Hiatus - Update 2

IngresNo specific announcements from Ingres other than I think the VectorWise stuff is progressing well.

To me Ingres is a bit of a dark horse.  They are open source and doing reasonable revenues.  And they are active in the enterprise market (something MySQL hasn’t really achieved).  But they remain largely off the radar in commentary surrounding the DBMS industry.

My personal pick is this will start to change …

Back from Hiatus - Summary Update 1

GoodDataGoodData has launched and they are providing a cloud based analytics platform for use in integration with online apps.  Starting with some initial focus on SalesForce data, but working hard on expanding the list of ISV’s who choose to provide their customers analytics via GoodData.

GoodData was started by “good guy” Czech serial entrepreneur Roman Stanek (NetBeans) and has just raised funds from Andressen Horowitz and appointed Time O’Reilly to the board.  GoodData is interesting because it is simple, accessible and available on demand.  Still early days but think Roman is on to another winner here.  Certainly …

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FYI - the thoughts here have been gathered from conversations with several individuals, including an interesting conversation yesterday.  As these conversations were off the record I won’t name names here but thanks to those people.

I love open source software and I am a big supporter of many companies that produce open source offerings.  Here I am not going to debate if Oracle acquiring MySQL will be better for MySQL or not as that has been done to death.  But I do think it is relevant to discuss the dangers of blocking a commercial vendor from acquiring a potentially competitive open source vendor.

Many open source software initiatives are purely community backed and are …