MySQL
Analysis of open source DBMS vendor MySQL (recently acquired by Sun Microsystems), its products, and other products in the MySQL ecosystem. Related subjects include:
Kickfire update
I talked recently with my clients at Kickfire, especially newish CEO Bruce Armstrong. I also visited the Kickfire blog, which among other virtues features a fairly clear overview of Kickfire technology. (I did my own Kickfire overview in October.) Highlights of the current Kickfire story include:
- Kickfire is initially focused on three heavily overlapping markets — network event analysis, the general Web 2.0/clickstream/online marketing analytics area, and MySQL/LAMP data warehousing.
- Kickfire has blogged about a few sales to unnamed customers in those markets.
- I think network management is a market that’s potentially friendly to five-figure-cost appliances. After all, networking equipment is generally sold in appliance form. Kickfire doesn’t dispute this analysis.
- Kickfire’s sales so far are to run databases in the sub-terabyte range, although both Kickfire and its customers intend to run bigger databases soon. (Kickfire describes the range as 300 GB – 1 TB.) Not coincidentally, Kickfire believes that MySQL doesn’t scale very well past 100 GB without a lot of partitioning effort (in the case of data warehouses) or sharding (in the case of OLTP).
- When Bruce became CEO, he let go some sales, marketing, and/or business development folks. He likes to call this a restructuring of Kickfire rather than a reduction-in-force, but anyhow — that’s what happened. There are now about 50 employees, and Kickfire still has most of the $20 million it raised last August in the bank. Edit: The company clarifies that it actually wound up with more sales and marketing people than before.
- Kickfire has thankfully deemphasized various marketing themes I found annoying, such as ascribing great weight to TPC-H benchmarks or explaining why John von Neumann originally made bad choices in his principles of computer design.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kickfire, MySQL, Open source, Web analytics | 1 Comment |
Database implications if IBM acquires Sun
Reported or rumored merger discussions between IBM and Sun are generating huge amounts of discussion today (some links below). Here are some quick thoughts around the subject of how the IBM/Sun deal — if it happens — might affect the database management system industry. Read more
Data warehousing business trends
I’ve talked with a whole lot of vendors recently, some here at TDWI, as well as users, fellow analysts, and so on. Repeated themes include: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Application areas, Data mart outsourcing, Data warehousing, eBay, Microsoft and SQL*Server, MySQL, Oracle, Teradata | Leave a Comment |
Draft slides on how to select an analytic DBMS
I need to finalize an already-too-long slide deck on how to select an analytic DBMS by late Thursday night. Anybody see something I’m overlooking, or just plain got wrong?
Edit: The slides have now been finalized.
DB2 engine coming soon for MySQL — but that’s DB2 on the iSeries
Chris Maxcer reports that a DB2 storage engine for MySQL is coming soon. But that’s specifically on the i Series — i.e., the heirs of the AS/400 and before that System 38 product lines. While those are arguably the best systems IBM ever produced, it’s still a non-event for most of the IT market. DB2 isn’t DB2 isn’t DB2 …
| Categories: IBM and DB2, MySQL | 2 Comments |
Gartner’s 2008 data warehouse database management system Magic Quadrant is out
February, 2011 edit: I’ve now commented on Gartner’s 2010 Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant as well.
Gartner’s annual Magic Quadrant for data warehouse DBMS is out. Thankfully, vendors don’t seem to be taking it as seriously as usual, so I didn’t immediately hear about it. (I finally noticed it in a Greenplum pay-per-click ad.) Links to Gartner MQs tend to come and go, but as of now here are two working links to the 2008 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System MQ. My posts on the 2007 and 2006 MQs have also been updated with working links. Read more
High-end MySQL use
To a large extent, MySQL lives in two different alternate universes from most other DBMS. One is for low-end, simple database applications. For example, of all the DBMS I write about, MySQL is the one I actually use in my own business — because MySQL sits underneath WordPress, and WordPress is what runs my blogs. My largest database (the one for DBMS2) contains 12 megabytes of data in 11 tables, none of which has yet reached 5000 rows in size. Read more
| Categories: Google, MySQL, OLTP, Open source, Parallelization | 1 Comment |
MySQL Query Analyzer
Given how the product’s rollout has been handled, it seems necessary to comment on MySQL’s recently released MySQL Query Analyzer without actually having much information on the subject. Mark Callaghan offers a good take — he’s generally very favorable, but notes that MySQL has some limitations that Query Analyzer has trouble getting around.
| Categories: MySQL | 2 Comments |
MySQL is being used in an IBM Lotus appliance
Apparently, IBM is rolling out an appliance for small businesses. MySQL is under the covers. The appliance won’t have a keyboard or monitor, so there won’t be a lot of database administration going on.
Before Solid and solidDB were acquired by IBM, one of the things Solid was proudest of was some embedded apps in which solidDB ran for years in boxes without keyboards or monitors.
I still think it’s a pity that IBM isn’t using solidDB as broadly as the technology deserves. Even so, this is a nice endorsement of MySQL for reliable zero-DBA mid-range use.
| Categories: DBMS product categories, IBM and DB2, Mid-range, MySQL, solidDB | Leave a Comment |
Introduction to Kickfire
I’ve spent a few hours visiting or otherwise talking with my new clients at Kickfire recently, so I think I have a better feel for their story. A few details are still missing, however, either because I didn’t get around to asking about them, or because an unexplained accident corrupted my notes (and I wasn’t even using Office 2007). Highlights include: Read more