More miscellany
Adding to yesterday’s varied quick comments:
Robert Hodges of Continuent offers a great outline of Continuent’s clustering story, with a lot of “Now we got right what we previously didn’t know/admit we got wrong.” Continuent now claims to have a strong clustering offering, both paid and free/open-source, for both MySQL and PostgreSQL, with Oracle support perhaps coming really soon.
Merv Adrian, who has overrated the importance of TPC benchmarks in the past, seems to have become more skeptical.
Interim CEO Mark Burton laid out Infobright’s focus pretty clearly when he took over:
… the focus must be in building products that fit market segments where ease-of-use and easily attainable performance are valued. This doesn’t sound like the high end of Data Warehousing to me where highly complex MPP architectures and teams of DBAs spend their time. It sounds like the realm of Departmental IT and SMB where business leaders are in a hurry to gain access to data and answers without the lead time and pain of complex architectures and high costs.
I’m hearing about a SaaS focus from a lot of companies. The Continuent link above mentions one. So does RainStor’s latest blog post. Gooddata, a SaaS vendor itself, seems focused on analyzing data that was originally created via SaaS. I haven’t talked with Cast Iron or Pervasive for a while, but when I did, their ETL market targeting was all about SaaS. And of course, I hear dumber SaaS-focus ideas as well. I think the biggest substantive reason for this trend is — if you don’t have the broadest feature set, and fear large enterprises therefore won’t want your stuff, going after SMBs makes sense. And SMBs are presumed to be going SaaS. Also in the mix, of course, are a single platform to support, a small number of large SaaS vendors to sell to or partner with, and/or general trendiness.
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2 Responses to “More miscellany”
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A vile canard. I don’t overrate the importance of TPC benchmarks. The point of my ParAccel post was that they would get lots of attention. And till it was taken down, they did. And now we have exactly zero columnar database TPC benchmarks. Seems to me that there is some significance in theat fact. We learn things from these benchmarks, and it’s always good to learn more…
Happy New Year, Curt. It’s going to be fun in 2010.
Merv,
The fact that you use “significance” and “TPC” in the same paragraph indicates that you overrate the TPCs indeed. 🙂
Happy New Year to you too!
(And by the way, the “zero columnar TPCs” claim would probably come as quite a surprise to our mutual clients at Sybase. 🙂 🙂 )