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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 …

Cassandra is fast emerging as one of the key NoSQL databases.  While we often express that the point of NoSQL is to offer more choice than an “RDBMS” hammer for every nail, there are practical reasons why a small number of stack technologies gain dominance and others circle on the sidelines.

Cassandra has already ticked many of the boxes needed to shoot it into the stratosphere as a widely used, default database platform.  Especially so in the web world where high scalability, high availability, open source and being proven by a bigger fish all matter.  Specifically Cassandra has:

• The ability to scale across many nodes
• The ability to scale to many hundreds of gigabytes of data
• High availability, losing a node doesn’t take down the cluster & online node provisioning and data distribution (and …

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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<< 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 …

Here is a summary of the key discussions I have had over the last month.  Keep in mind, I’m no analyst.  This is largely opinion based on various conversations I have had with the relevant companies (for analyst insight see Curt Monash).

KickFireI think Kickfire has been doing it a little tough lately.  The difficulties in a startup launching a hardware appliance (and associated logistics) combined with being too focused on the MySQL customer base has impacted the growth of this interesting start up.  But they aren’t taking it lying down and have adjusted the strategy and have added a new appliance to the range.  Kickfire now seems to have a stronger focus on the enterprise …

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The following is a list of interesting DBMS related links for the week:

• Ellison's Impatience Over Sun
• Intel squeezes one million IOPS from desktop
• Is the RDBMS doomed (yada yada yada) ?
• EDS brand is no more (not DBMS but interesting)

…

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I was speaking with Michael Stonebraker this morning.  I mentioned that lately many have been referencing comments he has made over the last couple of years.  And I also mentioned that many had interpreted them as he was implying the RDBMS is “doomed”.  Mike has been saying the same thing for years, but the current NoSQL movement seems to have picked up on this and highlighting one of the RDBMS's own pioneers is predicting its …

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There will be plenty of detailed coverage on Exadata V2 so I won’t attempt to replicate that.  However I do have a couple of initial thoughts which I would like to share.  For those who missed it, Oracle has just announced Exadata V2 (which is their pre-built “machine”).  Exadata V1 was built using HP equipment, Exadata V2 is using Sun.  The main addition to Exadata V2 seems to be an extra tier in the memory hierarchy, a flash cache.  Oracle is very quick to point out this is not flash disk, but it is flash memory, Sun’s FlashFire technology (flash disk or SSD’s was always going to be a transition technology, flash memory doesn’t have the …