Why was Teradata able to become the leader of data warehousing at the super high-end (e.g. greater than 25 TB’s)?  Why was Netezza only the second pure-play data warehousing company to go public by focusing on the 10 – 25 TB range of opportunities?  Why did Oracle after so many years of denial finally announce a joint hardware / software product for data warehousing with HP, the Exadata data warehouse server?  Why did Microsoft acquire DATAllegro, one of the earlier data warehousing appliances? Why are there now dozens of data warehouse appliances available on the market today, and – more importantly – how should a customer choose which one to purchase? 

In all these cases, the vendors have listened to the market and concluded that the most optimal way to serve the customer is through a true data warehouse appliance.  Given that there are so many flavors of appliances, though, here are some things to …

This is the 149th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

MySQL

Let’s begin with the big-picture stuff. Jeremy Zawodny laid out his view of the state of MySQL in Linux Magazine’s blog, noting the rough transition between versions 5.0 and 5.1, the status of storage engines, and outside contributions.

Like Baron Schwartz’s Maatkit, for example. Baron announced this week that he is writing a book about Maatkit, and also …

I am reading SQL and Relational Theory by C. J. Date. Baron Schwartz wrote a nice review for it. I am reading the online version, about half way through, so am not sure if it has an accompanying CD with source code. In any case, if you want to play with some SQL code listed in the book, here is the script to generate the tables and rows (or should I say relations at a certain point in time with tuples?)

CREATE TABLE S
   ( SNO    VARCHAR(5)   NOT NULL ,
     SNAME  VARCHAR(25)  NOT NULL ,
     STATUS INTEGER      NOT NULL ,
     CITY   VARCHAR(20)  NOT NULL ,
     UNIQUE ( SNO ) ) ;

 CREATE TABLE P
   ( PNO    VARCHAR(6)   NOT NULL ,
     PNAME  VARCHAR(25)  NOT NULL ,
     COLOR  CHAR(10)     NOT NULL ,
     WEIGHT NUMERIC(5,1) NOT NULL ,
     CITY   VARCHAR(20)  NOT NULL ,
     UNIQUE ( PNO ) ) ;

 CREATE TABLE SP
   ( SNO …

A bit of fun for a Sunday.  Below is the list of my top 10 interesting companies in Data Management right now.  Interesting to me means doing new stuff and being somewhat disruptive, or have a “watch and see” quality about them.  Note this is about companies not data management applications. 

While I find a bunch of other data management applications interesting (PNUTS, Cassandra, Redis etc) these aren’t really encapsulated in a company with a go to market strategy.

10gen - They are making interesting noises not sure about delivery yet
Amazon – SimpleDB is neat, but not a grown up data platform yet
Aster Data – Doing funky things with Map/Reduce
GroovyChannel – Are they nuts, they have to change …

This is the 148th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome.

PostgreSQL

Since PGCon ‘09 has concluded not long ago (and not far away), let’s start with Postgres stuff, much of which has to do with the convention.

Here are Robert Treat’s reflections on PGCon 2009, on his zillablog: “ . . . PGCon always presents the strongest line up of Postgres information available, and this year was certainly no exception.”

Josh Berkus was there, of course, and he sends two detailed reports: …

A great post from Jonathan Ellis on "Why you won't be building your killer app on a distributed hash table"

Scroll down to see my comment.  I agree a simple DHT is not a suitable solution for mainstream data management issues, but also I think that there is a gap between RDBMS and DHT.

I had the pleasure to sit on the Performance Panel at the recent Percona Performance Conference. While the panel contained a number of usual MySQL suspects, one person was not familiar, that being Cary Millsap from Method R.

An expert in optimizing Oracle performance, Cary also gave an session on Day 2 that I attended. While he opened professing not to be an expert in MySQL, his talk provided valuable foundation knowledge irrespective of whether you use MySQL or another database product.

Having come myself from 7 straight years in system architecture and performance tuning in Ingres, then a further 6 years in Oracle again heavily involved in system architecture and performance tuning, a lot of my …

• Introduction
• The Problem with the Relational Database (Part 1 ) –The Deployment Model

I met with a friend of mine in New York recently who runs a credit card processing end-point company.  They specifically built their business around a non-relational database platform and feel they would have major issues had they chosen to build their business around a traditional …

• Introduction
• The Problem with the Relational Database (Part 2) – Predictability

This is the first detail post in a series I am doing focusing on the issues that exist today with the Relational Database.  This first post is on the deployment model.  It could be argued that this isn’t directly related to the “relational database” but rather is an implementation model problem.  I disagree with this as many characteristics of the relational database lead to the deployment model …

Welcome to the 147th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Let’s start this week, with blogs from the SQL Server world, where a number of excellent technical posts appear. Alexander Kuznetsov surprises his readers with this assertion: without ORDER BY, there is no default sort order. “Sounds trivial? Right, but different flavors of this myth still persist.  . . .  Because apparently many visitors agreed with this myth, I decided to post a repro script which demonstrates that this is simply not true.”

In their post on …