Hoping for true columnar storage in Oracle12c
I was asked to clarify one of my July comments on Oracle12c, I wonder whether Oracle will finally introduce a true columnar storage option, a year behind Teradata. That would be the obvious enhancement...
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Notes on the Oracle OpenWorld Sunday keynote
I’m not at Oracle OpenWorld, but as usual that won’t keep me from commenting. My bottom line on the first night’s announcements is: At many large enterprises, Oracle has a lock on much of their IT...
View ArticleHadapt Version 2
My clients at Hadapt are coming out with a Version 2 to be available in Q1 2013, and perhaps slipstreaming some of the features before then. At that point, it will be reasonable to regard Hadapt as...
View ArticleNotes on analytic hardware
I took the opportunity of Teradata’s Aster/Hadoop appliance announcement to catch up with Teradata hardware chief Carson Schmidt. I love talking with Carson, about both general design philosophy and...
View ArticleIntroduction to Platfora
When I wrote last week that I have at least 5 clients claiming they’re uniquely positioned to support BI over Hadoop (most of whom partner with a 6th client, Tableau) the non-partnering exception I had...
View ArticleMore on Cloudera Impala
What I wrote before about Cloudera Impala was quite incomplete. After a followup call, I now feel I have a better handle on the whole thing. First, some basics: Impala is open source code, developed to...
View ArticleDo you need an analytic RDBMS?
I can think of seven major reasons not to use an analytic RDBMS. One is good; but the other six seem pretty questionable, niche circumstances excepted, especially at this time. The good reason to not...
View ArticleNotes on Microsoft SQL Server
I’ve been known to gripe that covering big companies such as Microsoft is hard. Still, Doug Leland of Microsoft’s SQL Server team checked in for phone calls in August and again today, and I think I got...
View ArticleParAccel update
In connection with Amazon’s Redshift announcement, ParAccel reached out, and so I talked with them for the first time in a long while. At the highest level: ParAccel now has 60+ customers, up from 30+...
View ArticleAmazon Redshift and its implications
Merv Adrian and Doug Henschen both reported more details about Amazon Redshift than I intend to; see also the comments on Doug’s article. I did talk with Rick Glick of ParAccel a bit about the project,...
View ArticleEditing code is easier than writing it
I’ve hacked both the PHP and CSS that drive this website. But if I had to write PHP or CSS from scratch, I literally wouldn’t know how to begin. Something similar, I suspect, is broadly true of...
View ArticleComments on Gartner’s 2012 Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database...
The 2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems is out. I’ll split my comments into two posts — this one on concepts, and a companion on specific vendor evaluations....
View ArticleComments on Gartner’s 2012 Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database...
To my taste, the most glaring mis-rankings in the 2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management are that it is too positive on Kognitio and too negative on Infobright. Secondarily,...
View ArticleKey questions when selecting an analytic RDBMS
I recently complained that the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse DBMS conflates many use cases into one set of rankings. So perhaps now would be a good time to offer some thoughts on how to...
View ArticleIt’s hard to make data easy to analyze
It’s hard to make data easy to analyze. While everybody seems to realize this — a few marketeers perhaps aside — some remarks might be useful even so. Many different technologies purport to make data...
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One database to rule them all?
Perhaps the single toughest question in all database technology is: Which different purposes can a single data store serve well? — or to phrase it more technically — Which different usage patterns can...
View ArticlePlatfora at the time of first GA
Well-resourced Silicon Valley start-ups typically announce their existence multiple times. Company formation, angel funding, Series A funding, Series B funding, company launch, product beta, and...
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Some notes on new-era data management, March 31, 2013
Hmm. I probably should have broken this out as three posts rather than one after all. Sorry about that. Performance confusion Discussions of DBMS performance are always odd, for starters because:...
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Teradata SQL-H
As vendors so often do, Teradata has caused itself some naming confusion. SQL-H was introduced as a facility of Teradata Aster, to complement SQL-MR.* But while SQL-MR is in essence a set of SQL...
View ArticleNotes on Teradata systems
Teradata is announcing its new high-end systems, the Teradata 6700 series. Notes on that include: Teradata tends to get 35-55% (roughly speaking) annual performance improvements, as measured by its...
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