Join me Wednesday, September 18 at 10 a.m. PDT for an hour-long webinar where I will introduce the basic concepts behind column store technology. The webinar’s title is: “Introduction to open source column stores.”

What will be discussed?

This webinar will talk about Infobright, LucidDB, MonetDB, Hadoop (Impala) and other column stores

• I will compare features between major column stores (both open and closed source).
• Some benchmarks will be used to demonstrate the basic performance characteristics of the open source column stores.
• There will be a question and answer session to ask me anything you like about column stores (you can also ask in the …

Open source business intelligence and data warehousing are on the rise!

If you kept up with the MySQL Performance Blog, you might have noticed a number of posts comparing the open source analytical databases Infobright, LucidDB, and MonetDB. LucidDB …

Accidentally me and Baron played with InfoBright (see http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/09/29/quick-comparison-of-myisam-infobright-and-monetdb/) this week. And following Baron's example I also run the same load against MonetDB. Reading comments to Baron's post I tied to load the same data to LucidDB, but I was not successful in this.

I tried to analyze a bigger dataset and I took public available data
http://www.transtats.bts.gov/DL_SelectFields.asp?Table_ID=236&DB_Short_Name=On-Time about USA domestic flights with information about flight length and delays.

The data is available from 1988 to 2009 in chunks per month, so I downloaded 252 files (for 1988-2008 years) with …

Recently I was doing a little work for a client who has MyISAM tables with many columns (the same one Peter wrote about recently). The client's performance is suffering in part because of the number of columns, which is over 200. The queries are generally pretty simple (sums of columns), but they're ad-hoc (can access any columns) and it seems tailor-made for a column-oriented database.

I decided it was time to actually give Infobright a try. They have an open-source community edition, which is crippled but not enough to matter for this test. The "Knowledge Grid" architecture seems ideal for the types of queries the client runs. But hey, why not also try MonetDB, another open-source column-oriented database I've been …