Even though Data warehouse is picking very rapidly in the last year or so, but few companies who are already made a right mark in the right time could not[...]

In our recent report on the data warehousing market we speculated that there would soon be a change in the number of vendors operating in what is a crowded market. We were anticipating that the number of vendors would go down, rather than up, but - in the short term at least - we have been proved wrong, as two new open source analytical databases emerged this week.

First came the formation of Dynamo Business Intelligence Corp, (aka Dynamo BI), a new commercially supported distribution, and sponsor, of LucidDB. Then came the launch of InfiniDB Community Edition, a new open source analytic database based on MySQL from Calpont.

Read the rest of …

In my recent post on the EU antitrust regulators' probe into the Oracle Sun merger I did not mention an important class of stakeholders: the MySQL-based special purpose database startups. By these I mean:

• 
  
• Kickfire
  
• Infobright
  
• Calpont
  
• ScaleDB
  

I think it's safe to say the first three are comparable in the sense that they are all analytical databases: they are designed for data warehousing and business intelligence applications. ScaleDB might be a good fit for those …

By now you are probably aware that the European Commission has decided to launch an extended investigation into Oracle’s acquisition of Sun based on concerns over MySQL.

The new has prompted a lot of criticism of the EC, much of it suggesting that the delay will do considerable harm to Sun (and therefore Oracle). This argument is valid - Sun’s already declining revenue has been in freefall since the deal was announced and one wonders how far it will fall in another 90 days of stasis.

Other criticism, (such as this from Matt Asay) focuses on the suggestion that the delay will do little to help MySQL or its users, and that the EC fails to understand open source.

This also has some …

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 …

Departmental or subject-specific data warehouses – known as “data marts” in the industry – seem to be gaining in popularity.  Fueled partly by companies wanting to start small with focused projects in today’s economy, and partly by advances in data warehousing technology improving affordability and deployability, data marts seem to be popping-up everywhere.

In most cases, data mart projects are driven by the head of a business unit or a functional group (like Sales) needing to analyze their own slice of data in order to run their department more efficiently and effectively.  The data may come directly from an operational system or a combination of source systems resulting in what’s called an “independent data mart”, or it may come directly from a larger, enterprise data warehouse in a hub-and-spoke or “dependent data mart” configuration.

In either case today, according to industry analysts, companies …

Departmental or subject-specific data warehouses - known as "data marts" in the industry - seem to be gaining in popularity.  Fueled partly by companies wanting to start small with focused projects in today's economy, and partly by advances in data warehousing technology improving affordability and deployability, data marts seem to be popping-up everywhere.

In most cases, data mart projects are driven by the head of a business unit or a functional group (like Sales) needing to analyze their own slice of data in order to run their department more efficiently and effectively.  The data may come directly from an operational system or a combination of source systems resulting in what's called an "independent data mart", or it may come directly from a larger, enterprise data warehouse in a hub-and-spoke or "dependent data mart" configuration.

In either case today, according to industry analysts, companies are looking for data …

This is the first post in a new series of “Kickfire Basics” blog posts by myself and others here at Kickfire.  This series will review the basics of the Kickfire appliance starting from this post describing how data is stored on disk, to future posts on topics such as loading data into the appliance and writing queries which best leverage the capabilities of the SQL chip.

The Kickfire Equation
Column store + Compression + SQL Chip = performance

The Kickfire Analytic Appliance features the new KFDB storage engine which was built from scratch to handle queries over vast amounts of data.  KFDB is a column store in contrast to most MySQL storage engines which are row stores.  What follows is a description of our column oriented storage engine and how it improves performance over typical row stores.

This post concerns itself with the first part of the equation, the KFDB …

Join the Sun and Kickfire team tomorrow to see the unveiling of the Kickfire’s On-Demand Trial. You can sign up for the live webinar and trial review here: http://tinyurl.com/kickfiretrial.

At Kickfire we’re very excited about this launch. We’ve had many customers who have asked for a quick way to trial the system to get a sense of the performance. In order to speed up setup time we are providing users with access to US Bureau of Transportation’s database. This database contains flight data from the last twenty years. The trial consists of four parts:

1) An overview of Kickfire and its technology (includes a short Flash movie)
2) An interactive tutorial of a couple of sample queries. The tutorial explains the DB schema, the SQL and the Kickfire features that get performance
3) A pick list of sample queries and comparison times against MySQL …

We’re sponsoring an important webinar series along with Sun/MySQL starting this week on June 25th – The Kimball Group Data Warehousing Educational Webinar Series.  This webinar series will introduce the audience to data warehousing concepts and best practices, and will cover the history and evolution of data warehousing, provide an overview of dimensional modeling, and review the full life cycle of designing and implementing a data warehouse.  Part 1, on June 25th at 1:00P PDT, is on Data Warehousing Fundamentals.

There are two key reasons why we think this webinar series is important:

• First, we believe this webinar further advances data warehousing in the MySQL world. There is a whole new generation of database developers in the MySQL community that are at various stages of understanding data warehousing – …