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 …
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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. And …
Image by Aranda\Lasch via Flickr
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 …
Image via Wikipedia
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 …
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
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 …
Image by Nathan Lanier via Flickr
<< 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 …
Image via Wikipedia
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 …