As well as contributing to the CAOS research practice here at The 451 Group I am also part of the information management team, with a focus on databases, data caching, CEP, and - from the start of this year - data warehousing.

I’ve covered data warehousing before but taking a fresh look at this space in recent months it’s been fascinating to see the variety of technologies and strategies that vendors are applying to the data warehousing problem. It’s also been interesting to compare the role that open source has played in the data warehousing market, compared to the database market.

I’m preparing a major report on the data warehousing sector, for publication in the next couple of months. What follows is a rough outline of the role open source has played in the sector. Any comments or corrections much appreciated:

Unlike other …

OIN offers cash for patents. CentOS crisis averted. Microsoft denies GPL violation. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Open Invention Network offered individual inventors cash for patents, and acquired patents from V_Graph.

# The H Open reported that the management problems at CentOS are now resolved.

# Sam Ramji told Network World in detail why Microsoft believes its Linux IC code did not violate the GPL (from 15m 30s).

# Canonical delivered an on-premise version of …

I was fortunate enough to speak with Marcin Zukowski earlier about VectorWise.  If you missed it, VectorWise came out of stealth mode a day or two ago.  The have announced a joint partnership with Ingres and essentially are claiming impressive analytic RDBMS performance gains on conventional hardware.

To start with, a key message that I think needs to be communicated here is that this is not a product announcement.  Ingres and VectorWise have announced a partnership in which they of course plan to build products together, today those products are still in the works.

VectorWise is a spin out of CWI based on research that was undertaken by Marcin and others, research …

Welcome to the 156th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Oracle

Jonathan Lewis gets things rolling with his post, Empiricism. Jonathan asks his readers if an empirical approach to tuning would be appropriate for a particular wait scenario.

Doug Burns was also looking into wait times, beginning, “Sometimes you think a subject is understood so well, including by yourself, that you tend to overlook it until asked to explain it. That which seems intuitive to us …

Image by Sebastian Bergmann via Flickr

I had a quick chat with Michael Widenius today.  He is on vacation so tried to keep the call short.  Essentially spoke about two topics, Oracle & an update on Maria.

The Monty Program has 15 staff now.  Their focus is getting the MariaDB branch of MySQL ready for release, I understand they have a target of next month (August) for this release.  The Maria storage engine has been delayed for the time being with the focus being on the branch release instead.  PBXT and XtraDB will two …

Intuit launches open source project. SFLC on Microsoft GPL violation accusations.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Intuit launched open source projects and community to develop apps based on its Intuit Partner Platform, while Savio Rodrigues declared Intuit’s open source play is all business.

# SFLC’s Bradley Kuhn told SDTimes Microsoft was in violation of the GPL.

# MySQL and Memcached-based appliance vendor Schooner Info Tech has raised $20m in Series B funding.

# …

This is the 155th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

SQL Server

On the SQL Server blogs this week, CSS SQL Server Engineers demonstrated that using DateDiff can query performance problems in SQL 2005 and 2008.

The kind of problems, perhaps, that Linchi Shea examines in his post on linked server security configuration and how it can hurt you. Linchi writes, …

At OSCON in 2006, I followed sessions that discussed how open source companies would fare when big corporations come in. Back then there were only a handful of examples of big companies purchasing small open source companies. Three years later, we've witnessed MySQL AB get swallowed by Sun, only to have Sun be swallowed by Oracle. Now there are more open questions than ever and at least three versions of MySQL that are jockeying to continue the MySQL blood-line. Yesterday I attended talks by two of these groups and I have to wonder how the MySQL game will play itself out over time.

The first talk I attended was: "Drizzle: Status, Principles, and Ecosystem" where a number of Drizzle developers shared their thoughts about this project. …

I spoke to Daniel Abadi this morning about his HadoopDB announcement that came out a couple of days back.  I am sure this has been a busy time for Daniel and his team over in Yale as HadoopDB has been getting a lot of interest which I am sure will continue to build.

Some notes from our discussion:

• HadoopDB is primarily focused on high scalability and the required availability at scale.  Daniel questions current MPP’s ability to truly scale past 100 nodes whereas Hadoop has real examples on 3000+ nodes.
• HadoopDB like many MPP analytical database platforms uses shared nothing relational database as processing units. HadoopDB uses Postgres.  Unlike other MPP databases, HadoopDB uses Hadoop as the …

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Sun is now/soon-to-be part of Oracle and I am extremely concerned about MySQL. There has been reassurances from the community... and I believe they could probably work.

I was wondering however, about the hardware side of Sun. Sun has always thought that by giving something for free, you encourage customers to buy something else from the same company.
They put that model to work with open-source software like MySQL and hoped that customer will buy …