September 15, 2008
Infobright’s open source move has a lot of potential
Infobright announced today that it’s going full-bore into open source – specifically in the MySQL ecosystem — with the licensing approach, pricing, distribution strategy, and VC money from Sun that such a move naturally entails. I think this is a great idea, for a number of reasons:
- The famous high end of the MySQL market is a handful of web businesses with tons of user traffic and clickstream data. Those outfits have already been buying massive data warehouse appliances – or doing things even more dramatic — and don’t need Infobright. But for anybody else in the MySQL world who needs high-performance analytics, Infobright is the first good solution.
- OK, there’s also Kickfire, even less mature than Infobright. But Infobright can be downloaded and run on a single commodity server, while Kickfire makes a proprietary box. Unless they need Kickfire’s screaming performance, most MySQL users will prefer Infobright’s packaging.
- The Infobright product has serious limitations, including some pretty basic missing DBMS functionality, although Infobright’s Release 3 approaches the level of some other vendors’ Release 1. Well, if you want a market that’s willing to adopt a DBMS with serious limitations, the MySQL world is the place for you.
- Infobright’s technology is all about running basic queries quickly, with a minimum of administration, on a minimum of hardware. That’s a good fit for small departments. So is open source. And given that Infobright hasn’t achieved much in the concurrency area yet, small departments is what it’s best suited for anyway.
- The Infobright architecture is one-of-a-kind. Nobody should adopt it without downloading and playing with the product anyway. On the other hand, with low hardware footprint, low administration, and fast load, downloading and testing Infobright isn’t necessarily much of hassle.
- Above all, Infobright was too little, too late in the mainstream analytic DBMS market. They had to do something different. Kudos to them for recognizing that.
On the downside, since Infobright is the first serious open source analytic DBMS – or maybe the second after MonetDB, but that’s not well promoted – the market is quite unproven. For example, even when open source BI products like Jaspersoft do get enterprise adoption, their use cases aren’t necessarily the ones Infobright would fit with.
Posts today on open source DBMS
- Infobright’s smart move to open source
- General Infobright update
- Infobright sound bites
- The many faces of open source DBMS
Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Open source
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4 Responses to “Infobright’s open source move has a lot of potential”
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[…] Infobright is open sourcing its analytical DBMS product (which is a really good idea) […]
[…] when there is industry news, I herewith provide quotable sound bites about Infobright and its move to an open source strategy. Weather permitting, I’ll be on a plane to the Netezza conference this afternoon. And […]
Regarding your question about ACID compliance, we have not seen a requirement for it to date, as customers and prospects use source system integrity enforcement and the ETL process to ensure integrity of the data and prefer this over enforcing integrity on load (which slows the load down and is often unnecessary if strong data quality management is in place). If however our customers or community see it as a requirement, we would certainly consider it as part of our product roadmap. One of the great benefits to us of the open source model is to get very direct feedback on what is needed – and we look forward to that.
In regard to the “serious limitations” you mention, some features are available with the use of third party products so they don’t get referenced in our product information, such as backup tools, monitoring tools etc. Since they can be easily implemented we don’t see these as limitation. Of course we’ll be adding additional features in both ICE and IEE every quarter or so, so both products will continue to evolve. We are also focused on the data warehousing market place and many features of a traditional database system are simply not used (nor demanded by our customers). We are not trying to provide a solution for the very high end of the market – where companies have 100’s of terabytes and up, and have the millions of dollars and scores of highly technical experts to plan and implement a complex solution. We think for those companies who need a product that can support up to about 30TB of data, don’t have millions to spend or lots of DBAs, Infobright’s solution will be a great fit.
Cheers -Victoria
The marketing for InfoBright talks about sizes from 500GB to 30TB. I think that InfoBright Community Edition will see most of its adoption in small companies with just a few gigabytes. These are companies that report directly against the transactional system and use canned structured reports. InfoBright is one half of a low/no-cost reporting system that allows speed-of-thought interactivity. What emerges is a game changer in every business I’ve consulted to. It’s hard to sell an emergent benefit. QlikView, my preferred tool, relies on on-site proof-of-concepts that invariably amaze customers. I’m eager to have open-source tools to build these systems for a tenth of the cost of QlikView, which is itself a tenth of the cost of its predecessors.
http://andpointsbeyond.com/2008/09/16/infobright-open-source-column-store-dbms/