Oracle's turn-about announcement of a NoSQL product wasn't really surprising. When Oracle spends time and effort putting down a technology, you can bet that its secretly impressed, and trying to re-implement it in its back room. So Oracle's paper "Debunking the NoSQL Hype" should really have been read as a backhanded product announcement. (By the way, don't click that link; the paper appears to have been taken down. Surprise.)

I have to agree with DataStax and other developers in the NoSQL movement: Oracle's announcement is a …

This is a written follow-up to a talk presented at a recent Strata online event.

A new breed of startup is emerging, built to take advantage of the rising tides of data across a variety of verticals and the maturing ecosystem of tools for its large-scale analysis.

These are data startups, and they are the sumo wrestlers on the startup stage. The weight of data is a source of their competitive advantage. But like their sumo mentors, size alone is not enough. The most successful of data startups must be fast (with data), big (with analytics), and focused (with services).

Setting the stage: The attack of the exponentials

The question of why this style of startup is arising today, versus a decade …