Infobright
Analysis of Infobright and its MySQL-based data warehouse DBMS formerly known as Brighthouse. Related subjects include:
Things could get interesting for Infobright
Of the many new specialty data warehouse DBMS and appliances, Infobright’s BrightHouse is the only leading one based on MySQL. I expect Sun and Infobright to have some interesting conversations now. Conversely, I wouldn’t be optimistic about any partnering discussions Infobright might have with, say, HP.
The most directly competitive relationship Sun now has to any future Infobright partnership is with ParAccel.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Open source, ParAccel | 2 Comments |
Infobright responds
An InfoBright employee posted something quite reasonable-looking in response to my inaugaral post about BrightHouse. Even so, InfoBright asked if they could substitute something with a slightly different tone. I agreed. Here’s what they sent in.
Curt, thanks for the write-up and the opportunity to talk about our customer success stories. As you say, our customer story is definitely “more than zero.” We are addressing a number of critical customer issues with our unique approach to data warehousing.
Infobright currently has 5 customers – customers that have bucked the trend of throwing hardware at the problem. To be perfectly braggadocio about this, we have never lost a competitive proof of concept in which we’ve been engaged. This is accomplished with the horsepower of one box (though for redundancy customers may deploy multiple boxes with a load balancer). Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression, Infobright | Leave a Comment |
Infobright BrightHouse — columnar, VERY compressed, simple, and related to MySQL
To a first approximation, Infobright – maker of BrightHouse — is yet another data warehouse DBMS specialist with a columnar architecture, boasting great compression and running on commodity hardware, emphasizing easy set-up, simple administration, great price-performance, and hence generally low TCO. BrightHouse isn’t actually MPP yet, but Infobright confidently promises a generally available MPP version by the end of 2008. The company says that experience shows >10:1 compression of user data is realistic – i.e., an expansion ratio that’s fractional, and indeed better than 1/10:1. Accordingly, despite the lack of shared-nothing parallelism, Infobright claims a sweet spot of 1-10 terabyte warehouses, and makes occasional references to figures up to 30 terabytes or so of user data.
BrightHouse is essentially a MySQL storage engine, and hence gets a lot of connectivity and BI tool support features from MySQL for “free.” Beyond that, Infobright’s core technical idea is to chop columns of data into 64K chunks, called data packs, and then store concise information about what’s in the packs. The more basic information is stored in data pack nodes,* one per data pack. If you’re familiar with Netezza zone maps, data pack nodes sound like zone maps on steroids. They store maximum values, minimum values, and (where meaningful) aggregates, and also encode information as to which intervals between the min and max values do or don’t contain actual data values. Read more