Infobright
Analysis of Infobright and its MySQL-based data warehouse DBMS formerly known as Brighthouse. Related subjects include:
Web analytics — clickstream and network event data
It should surprise nobody that web analytics – and specifically clickstream data — is one of the biggest areas for high-end data warehousing. For example:
- I believe that both of the previously mentioned petabyte+ databases on Greenplum will feature clickstream data.
- Aster Data’s largest disclosed database, by almost two orders of magnitude, is at MySpace.
- Clickstream analytics is a big application area for Vertica Systems.
- Clickstream analytics is a big application area for Netezza.
- Infobright’s customer success stories appear to be concentrated in clickstream analytics.
- Coral8 tells me that CEP is also being used for clickstream data, although I suspect that a lot of Coral8’s evidence in that regard comes from a single flagship account. Edit: Actually, Coral8 has a bunch of clickstream customers.
| Categories: Aleri and Coral8, Aster Data, Greenplum, Infobright, Netezza, Streaming and complex event processing (CEP), Vertica Systems, Web analytics | 2 Comments |
Infobright update
In connection with the announcements that:
- Infobright is open sourcing its analytical DBMS product (which is a really good idea)
- Infobright raised a $10 million VC round, with Sun as a new investor
I got my first real Infobright update since January. Highlights included: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Open source | 2 Comments |
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: Read more
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Open source | 4 Comments |
Infobright goes open source — sound bites
As has recently become my custom 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 I’ve only slept about 10 hours since Thursday. So I hope these suffice, although if they don’t and you email me I’ll try to respond by some time Tuesday morning.
- For almost anybody in the MySQL world who needs high-performance analytics, Infobright is the first good solution.
- Infobright’s product strengths and use cases are a great match for open source.
- Most leading analytic DBMS have open source roots, but they generally haven’t been open sourced themselves. Infobright immediately becomes one of the premier open source analytic database offerings. The only serious open source rival that’s coming to mind is MonetDB.
- Storage engines are MySQL’s achilles heel. Each good MySQL storage engine is precious.
- Infobright has enough production references to show that it can get the job done for many data mart uses. It won’t meet everybody’s needs, but it’s well worth an experimental download.
- If you want to build a little data mart and run it yourself, most good products are too complicated or expensive. But in the right use cases, Infobright pretty much runs itself, and there’s no arguing with the Community Edition price (free).
- So Infobright is a great fit for the individual downloader – i.e., for the stereotypical open source user.
- Netezza, DATAllegro, Vertica, ParAccel, Greenplum, and Aster Data are all based in one way or another on PostgreSQL (even though Vertica includes no PostgreSQL code). DATAllegro was based on Ingres. Infobright and Kickfire are based on MySQL.
- If Infobright doesn’t get the job done, try downloading Vertica, which – while closed source – is also free for download and development.
- The “rough set” part of Infobright’s story is a lot of mumbo-jumbo, but the “knowledge grid” part is more real.
- When you compare Infobright to Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum, or even Vertica, it’s kind of a toy. But when you compare it to generic MySQL, it’s more like rocket science.
- Infobright was too little, too late in the mainstream analytic DBMS market. They had to do something different. Kudos to them for recognizing that.
- The Infobright product has some serious limitations. If you want a market that’s willing to adopt a DBMS with serious limitations, the MySQL world is the place for you.
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: Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Open source | 3 Comments |
My current customer list among the data warehouse specialists
One of my favorite pages on the Monash Research website is the list of many current and a few notable past customers. (Another favorite page is the one for testimonials.) For a variety of reasons, I won’t undertake to be more precise about my current customer list than that. But I don’t think it would hurt anything to list the data warehouse DBMS/appliance specialists in the group. They are:
- Aster Data
- Calpont
- DATAllegro
- Greenplum
- Infobright
- Netezza
- ParAccel
- Teradata
- Vertica
All of those are Monash Advantage members.
If you care about all this, you may also be interested in the rest of my standards and disclosures.
| Categories: About this blog, Aster Data, Calpont, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Greenplum, Infobright, Netezza, ParAccel, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 3 Comments |
How is MySQL’s join performance these days?
In a comment thread on a recent post comparing MySQL to Postgres, Jonathon Moore chimed in based on experience with both products. His characterization of some MySQL problems: Read more
| Categories: Infobright, MySQL, Open source | 8 Comments |
Outsourced data marts
Call me slow on the uptake if you like, but it’s finally dawned on me that outsourced data marts are a nontrivial segment of the analytics business. For example:
- I was just briefed by Vertica, and got the impression that data mart outsourcers may be Vertica’s #3 vertical market, after financial services and telecom. Certainly it seems like they are Vertica’s #3 market if you bundle together data mart outsourcers and more conventional OEMs.
- When Netezza started out, a bunch of its early customers were credit data-based analytics outsourcers like Acxiom.
- After nagging DATAllegro for a production reference, I finally got a good one — TEOCO. TEOCO specializes in figuring out whether inter-carrier telcom bills are correct. While there’s certainly a transactional invoice-processing aspect to this, the business seems to hinge mainly around doing calculations to figure out correct charges.
- I was talking with Pervasive about Pervasive Datarush, a beta product that lets you do super-fast analytics on data even if you never load it into a DBMS in the first place. I challenged them for use cases. One user turns out to be an insurance claims rule-checking outsourcer.
- One of Infobright’s references is a French CRM analytics outsourcer, 1024 Degres.
- 1010data has built up a client base of 50-60, including a number of financial and retail blue-chippers, with a soup-to-nuts BI/analysis/columnar database stack.
- I haven’t heard much about Verix in a while, but their niche was combining internal sales figures with external point-of-sale/prescription data to assess retail (especially pharma) microtrends.
To a first approximation, here’s what I think is going on. Read more
Positioning the data warehouse appliances and specialty DBMS
There now are four hardware vendors that each offer or seem about to announce two different tiers of data warehouse appliances: Sun, HP, EMC, and Teradata. Specifically:
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Sun partners with both Greenplum and ParAccel.
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HP sells Neoview, and also is partnered with Vertica.
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EMC (together with Dell in North America and Bull in Europe) sells DATAllegro. Now EMC is also entering a partnership with ParAccel.
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Teradata is pretty far down the road toward releasing a low-end product.
Will Brighthouse become the MySQL data warehouse of choice?
As I’ve previously noted:
- Infobright is about to make more noise about its MySQL-based data warehouse software, Brighthouse.
- Brighthouse has some very interesting technical features.
- A Sun/Infobright partnership would make a lot of sense.
Talking with Infobright today, I was again struck by how close their relationship with MySQL (the company is). Stay tuned.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL | Leave a Comment |
Infobright is gearing up for a press push
There’s another TDWI conference coming up, so it’s time for data warehouse-related press rollouts. Infobright (one of my many clients in this area) will be doing one of them, and ran an early version by me. Customer announcements, vendor partnerships, and so on are still being finalized, but anyhow Infobright has 7 revenue-recognized customers and a bunch more that are sold and in the implementation cycle. There’s a Release 3 of Brighthouse coming up. As one would expect, Release 3’s major claims to fame are the general addition of features (including some which elicit a “You didn’t have that already?” reaction), plus huge performance improvements in some queries (i.e., the biggest bottlenecks in Brighthouse Release 2).
On that level, it’s all standard stuff, as is Infobright’s core pitch — ease, simplicity, low cost, etc., and the benefits of same. But drilling down, there are some rather unique technical claims. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Infobright | 1 Comment |