March 27, 2008

The illuminate guys have a CTO blog

If you want to know more about illuminate’s data warehouse offerings, CTO Joe Foley has a blog. A good starting point might be the post on value-based storage. Two key points seem to be:

The VBS also provides some data access features that can not be duplicated in any other structure. A search can be executed starting with a data value in the pool. By going from the value pool back to the index, it is possible to quickly locate every use of the value wherever is may be used in the logical record structures.

which makes sense, and

This structure also enables our incremental query capability. As the result of a query, the database returns a set of instance identifiers rather than a set of records. This is because there are no records, only pointers and values. With the response being a set of pointers, it is a simple matter to perform the next query step and then get the union or difference between the two sets of pointers for the result of the second query step. This process can be continued indefinitely with the result set shrinking or growing as the new results are merged with the old.

which still sounds like gobbledygook to me.

Perhaps a demo of that query capability would make the lightbulb go on, but right now it sounds like illuminate is pitching a whole new non-SQL database architecture on the strength of a particular BI capability that probably could be replicated in more conventional systems.

In other news, I’ve rarely seen a software company with a bigger SEO problem than illuminate. The search that worked best for me was illuminate data warehousing.

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