Updated: 2011-10-25 22:53:31
I’ve chatted with Datameer a couple of times recently, mainly with CEO Stefan Groschupf, most recently after XLDB last Tuesday. Nothing I learned greatly contradicts what I wrote about Datameer 1 1/2 years ago. In a nutshell, Datameer is designed to let you do simple stuff on large amounts of data, where “large amounts of [...]
Updated: 2011-10-24 05:20:27
Last week I visited with James Phillips of Couchbase, Max Schireson and Eliot Horowitz of 10gen, and Todd Lipcon, Eric Sammer, and Omer Trajman of Cloudera. I guess it’s time for a round-up NoSQL post. Views of the NoSQL market horse race are reasonably consistent, with perhaps some elements of “Where you stand depends upon [...]
Updated: 2011-10-24 05:19:09
There’s a perception that, if you want (relatively) worry-free database scale-out, you need a non-relational/NoSQL strategy. That perception is false. In the analytic case it’s completely ridiculous, as has been demonstrated by Teradata, Vertica, Netezza, and various other MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) analytic DBMS vendors. And now it’s false for short-request/OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) use [...]
Updated: 2011-10-24 05:18:11
Schooner Information Technology started out as a complete-system MySQL appliance vendor. Then Schooner went software-only, but continued to brag about great performance in configurations with solid-state drives. Now Schooner has pivoted further, and is emphasizing high availability, clustered performance, and other hardware-agnostic OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) features. Fortunately, Schooner has some interesting stuff in those [...]
Updated: 2011-10-20 16:49:31
A reporter asked me for some thoughts on Oracle’s new NoSQL product. For the most part, I stand by my previous comments on Oracle NoSQL. Still, NoSQL in general deserves a place in Oracle shops, so it makes sense for Oracle to try to coopt it. Oracle’s core DBMS is not well suited to track [...]
Updated: 2011-10-19 18:29:59
As I’ve noted before, the very big web companies have an issue with nested data structures. The subject came up in XLDB talks yesterday too, so my big goal for lunch was to finally understand what was being talked about. Sitting at a table full of eBay and LinkedIn folks turned out to be a [...]
Updated: 2011-10-18 17:09:56
Oracle is buying Endeca. The official talking points for the deal aren’t a perfect match for Endeca’s actual technology, but so be it. In that post, I wrote: … the Endeca paradigm is really to help you make your way through a structured database, where different portions of the database have different structures. Thus, at [...]
Updated: 2011-10-18 16:48:10
The press release announcing Vertica’s Community Edition is a bit vague. And indeed, much of what I know about Vertica Community Edition is along the lines of “This is what I think will happen, but of course it could still change.” That said, I believe: Vertica Community Edition has all of regular Vertica’s features. However [...]
Updated: 2011-10-14 07:21:21
As Jacek Becla explained: Academic scientists like their software to be open source, for reasons that include both free-like-speech and free-like-beer. What’s more, they like their software to be dead-simple to administer and use, since they often lack the dedicated human resources for anything else. Even so, I think that academic researchers, in the natural [...]
Updated: 2011-10-14 05:29:18
Sybase recently came up with Adaptive Server Enterprise 15.7, which is essentially the “Make SAP happy” release. Features that were slated for 2012 release, but which SAP wanted, were accelerated into 2011. Features that weren’t slated for 2012, but which SAP wanted, were also brought into 2011. Not coincidentally, SAP Business Suite will soon run [...]
Updated: 2011-10-07 13:45:40
The 2011 Boston Book Festival is being held on Saturday, October 15, 2011 around Boston’s Copley Square and it is free! Michael Ondaatje, author of the English Patient and his new novel, The Cat’s Table, will be the keynote speaker. One of the marquee panels will be on the Civil War with Adam Goodheart, author [...]
