The Sybase Aleri RAP
Well, I got a quick Sybase/Aleri briefing, along with multiple apologies for not being prebriefed. (Main excuse: News was getting out, which accelerated the announcement.) Nothing badly contradicted my prior post on the Sybase/Aleri deal.
To understand Sybase’s plans for Aleri and CEP, it helps to understand Sybase’s current CEP-oriented offering, Sybase RAP. So far as I can tell, Sybase RAP has to date only been sold in the form of Sybase RAP: The Trading Edition. In that guise, Sybase RAP has been sold to >40 outfits since its May, 2008 launch, mainly big names in the investment banking and stock exchange sectors. If I understood correctly, the next target market for Sybase RAP is telcos, for real-time network tuning and management.
In addition to any domain-specific applications, Sybase RAP has three layers:
- CEP (Complex Event Processing). Sybase RAP CEP is based on a version of the Coral8 engine Sybase licensed and has been subsequently developing.
- In-memory DBMS. Sybase’s IMDB is part of (but I guess separable from) and has the same API as Sybase’s OLTP DBMS Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE, aka Sybase Classic).
- Sybase IQ. Actually, Sybase used the phrase “based on Sybase IQ,” but I’m guessing it’s just Sybase IQ.
There sure seem to be a lot of inaccuracies on ParAccel’s website
In what is actually an interesting post on database compression, ParAccel CTO Barry Zane threw in
Anyone who has met with us knows ParAccel shies away from hype.
But like many things ParAccel says, that is not true.
Edit (October, 2010): Like other posts I’ve linked to from Barry Zane’s blog, that one seems to be gone, with the URL redirecting elsewhere on ParAccel’s website.
The latest whoppers came in the form of several customers ParAccel listed on its website who hadn’t actually bought ParAccel’s DBMS, nor even decided to do so. It is fairly common to to claim a customer win, then retract the claim due to lack of permission to disclose. But that’s not what happened in these cases. Based on emails helpfully shared by a ParAccel competitor competing in some of those accounts, it seems clear that ParAccel actually posted fabricated claims of customer wins. Read more
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression, Market share and customer counts, ParAccel, Telecommunications | 24 Comments |
Introduction to Gooddata
Around the end of the Cold War, Esther Dyson took it upon herself to go repeatedly to Eastern Europe and do a lot of rah-rah and catalysis, hoping to spark software and other computer entrepreneurs. I don’t know how many people’s lives she significantly affected – I’d guess it’s actually quite a few – but in any case the number is not zero. Roman Stanek, who has built and sold a couple of software business, cites her as a key influence setting him on his path.
Roman’s latest venture is business intelligence firm Gooddata. Gooddata was founded in 2007 and has been soliciting and getting attention for a while, so I was surprised to learn that Gooddata officially launched just a few weeks ago. Anyhow, some less technical highlights of the Gooddata story include: Read more
Notes on RainStor, the company formerly known as Clearpace
Information preservation* DBMS vendor Clearpace officially changed its name to RainStor this week. RainStor is also relocating its CEO John Bantleman and more generally its headquarters to San Francisco. This all led to a visit with John and his colleague Ramon Chen, highlights of which included: Read more
| Categories: Archiving and information preservation, Market share and customer counts, Oracle, Rainstor, SenSage, Telecommunications | 1 Comment |
Comments on a fabricated press release quote
My clients at Kickfire put out a press release last week quoting me as saying things I neither said nor believe. The press release is about a “Queen For A Day” kind of contest announced way back in April, in which users were invited to submit stories of their data warehouse problems, with the biggest sob stories winning free Kickfire appliances. The fabricated “quote” reads: Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kickfire, Market share and customer counts, Sybase | 3 Comments |
Boston Big Data Summit keynote outline
Last month, Bob Zurek asked me to give a talk on “Big Data”, where “big” is anything from a few terabytes on up, then moderate a panel on cloud computing. We agreed that I could talk just from notes, without slides. So, since I have them typed up, I’m posting them below.
Aster Data 4.0 and the evolution of “advanced analytic(s) servers”
Since Linda and I are leaving on vacation in a few hours, Aster Data graciously gave me permission to morph its “12:01 am Monday, November 2” embargo into “late Friday night.”
Aster Data is officially announcing the 4.0 release of nCluster. There are two big pieces to this announcement:
- Aster is offering a slick vision for integrating big-database management and general analytic processing on the same MPP cluster, under the not-so-slick name “Data-Application Server.”
- Aster is also offering a sophisticated vision for workload management.
In addition, Aster has matured nCluster in various ways, for example cleaning up a performance problem with single-row updates.
Highlights of the Aster “Data-Application Server” story include: Read more
| Categories: Aster Data, Cloud computing, Data warehousing, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, MapReduce, Market share and customer counts, Teradata, Theory and architecture, Workload management | 9 Comments |
Greenplum customer notes
In a briefing about a forthcoming product announcement, Greenplum threw in a slide saying:
- Greenplum is getting 12-15 new (paying) customers per quarter, all of whom it fondly refers to as “Tier 1” enterprises.
- Greenplum will hit the 100+ customer mark this quarter (thus joining Vertica and Infobright).
- <10% of Greenplum business is now “influenced” by Sun hardware.
I asked Ben Werther to unpack that last claim for me. He quickly noted that it wasn’t his slide, but rather had been put together by colleagues. That said:
- As of the past quarter or two, <10% of Greenplum’s sales activity is on Sun, which works out to maybe one sale per quarter and at most a small number of sales cycles. (That’s down from from 50%+ not that long ago.)
- Most Greenplum business is now on HP or Dell equipment. Some is on IBM. There are some interesting sales cycles on Cisco’s new UCS (Unified Computing System) blades, but no closed deals yet. EMC seems to be part of the Cisco story.
No doubt part of the reason for the move away from Sun equipment is the impending Oracle acquisition. Another may be that the Greenplum/Sun appliance is somewhat underpowered. E.g., without particularly high levels of compression, eBay puts over 60 terabytes of data on each Greenplum node, which probably isn’t ideal from the standpoint of query performance.
Greenplum also says that 50% or so of sales are subscription-priced, rather than perpetual-licensed. I don’t have a sense for how long that’s been going on. (Edit: Ben Werther tells me this has been true for over a year.)
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Market share and customer counts, Pricing | 2 Comments |
Infobright notes
I had lunch w/ Bob Zurek and Susan Davis of Infobright today. This wasn’t primarily a briefing, but a few takeaways are:
- Infobright now has >100 paying customers.
- Typical database size is from the low 100s of gigabytes to the low single-digit number of terabytes.
- Agile development is at or approaching two-week release cycles.
- Like Kickfire, Infobright has a multi-year deal with MySQL that insulates it against many potential Oracle/MySQL shenanigans.
- From an industry perspective, Infobright’s customer base sounds a lot like other vendors’:
- Data mart outsourcing/online analytics
- Log files for websites
- Telecommunications
- Financial services
- OEM, especially in the markets cited above
- “Hey, we’re beginning to see the occasional energy deal”
- A few random others
- Infobright is seeing some household-name customers, who surely have big-name analytic DBMS products, but who also have a policy that open source is the default choice, and if open source can get the job done then the favorite closed-source choices aren’t used.
- Infobright has the usual open-source community story — lots of involvement and engagement in the forums, but contributions are limited mainly to connectivity, utility scripts, etc. (Maybe some national language translation too; I’m not sure.)
Oracle Exadata customers presenting at Oracle Open World
Greg Rahn tweeted a list of Exadata-focused sessions at Oracle Open World next week. As Oracle employees and supporters have been foreshadowing, there will be Exadata users and user-like folks presenting. I identified what look like half a dozen (not counting any who, for example, will make surprise appearances at keynote addresses), specifically: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Exadata, Market share and customer counts, Oracle, Teradata | 5 Comments |