Memory-centric data management
Analysis of technologies that manage data entirely or primarily in random-access memory (RAM). Related subjects include:
- Oracle TimesTen
- solidDB
- QlikTech
- SAP‘s BI Accelerator
- Exasol
- Solid-state memory as a replacement for disk
IBM acquires SolidDB to compete with Oracle TimesTen
IBM is acquiring Solid Information Technology, makers of solidDB. Some quick comments:
- solidDB is actually a very interesting hybrid disk/in-memory memory-centric database management system. However, the press release announcing the deal makes it sound as if solidDB is in-memory only.
- That strongly suggests that IBM is buying Solid mainly to compete with Oracle TimesTen. As of last June, solidDB was already IBM’s TimesTen answer via a partnership; this deal just solidifies that arrangement.
- This probably isn’t good news for Solid’s MySQL engine. That’s a pity, since solidDB technically has the potential to be the best MySQL engine around.
- Notwithstanding IBM’s presumed intentions, Solid’s main market success historically is as an embedded system in telecommunications equipment, network software, and similar systems.
- Last year I wrote a white paper on memory-centric data management, showcasing four products. IBM now has bought two of them, namely Solid’s and Applix’s (via Cognos).
- Comparisons to IBM’s embedded Java DBMS Cloudscape are pointless. That’s just a failed product vs. solidDB or Sybase SQL Anywhere, and IBM long ago cut its losses.
| Categories: Cache, Cognos, IBM and DB2, In-memory DBMS, Memory-centric data management, MySQL, OLTP, Oracle TimesTen, solidDB, Sybase | 5 Comments |
Coral8 highlights some key issues with dashboards
Coral8 today is rolling out the Coral8 Portal, offering some BI basics for CEP (Complex Event Processing) filters and queries. In Release 1, this is primitive compared with other BI portals, and of direct interest only to organizations that have already decided they’re using CEP technology. Even so, it serves as a useful illustration of several important issues in dashboarding.
The simplest is that real-time dashboards require different visualizations than others. Most obvious is the ever-popular graph marching from right to left across the screen as time advances along the x-axis. There also are difference in styles between reports and tables that you actually read, vs. read-outs that you merely watch for flickers of change. (Of course those two examples hardly make for a complete list.)
More interesting is the flexibility and parameterization. While Coral8 sells to multiple markets, the design point for the portal is clearly financial trading. So, for example, a query may be registered with one ticker symbol, and an end user can easily customize it to slot in another one instead. In a way, this is a step toward the much greater flexibility that dashboards need overall.
Truth be told, if you put all such Coral8 flexibility features together they’re not yet very impressive. So what’s even more interesting is the overall architecture that could support much greater flexibility in the future. If dashboards gain the flexibility they need, and queries continue to be done in the conventional manner, query volumes will increase enormously. If it further is the case that they are upgraded in some near real-time manner, that’s another huge increase.
How huge? Well, I can make a case that it could be well over three orders of magnitude: Read more
| Categories: Aleri and Coral8, Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Memory-centric data management, Streaming and complex event processing (CEP) | 3 Comments |
An interesting claim regarding BI openness
Analyst conference calls about merger announcements are generally pretty boring. Indeed, the companies involved tend to feel they are legally barred from saying anything interesting, by mandate of both the antitrust regulators and the SEC.
Still, such calls are joyful events, full of strategic happy talk. If one is really lucky, there may a virtuouso tap dancing exhibition as well. On today’s IBM/Cognos call, Cognos CEO Rob Ashe was asked whether he thought Cognos’ independence or lack thereof was as important today as he said it was after SAP announced its BOBJ takeover. Without missing a beat, he responded that there were two kinds of openness:
- Database openness (not important)
- ERP/business process openness (indeed important)
Hmm. I’m not so sure I agree. To begin with, there aren’t just two major points of potential integration. There’s also a whole lot of middleware: obviously data integration, but also app servers, portals, and query execution acceleration as well. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Business Objects, Cognos, IBM and DB2, Memory-centric data management, ParAccel, SAP AG | 1 Comment |
The era of memory-centric BI may have finally started
SAP is acquiring Business Objects. There’s nothing inherent in BI Accelerator’s design that ties it to NetWeaver, SAP star schema InfoCubes, or any other particular current implementation detail. So BI Accelerator could become a lot more than an afterthought.
Combine that with Cognos’s acquisition of Applix and the continued success of upstart QlikView, and we could finally see a general memory-centric BI boom.
Maybe. There have been a lot of false alarms before.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Business Objects, Cognos, Memory-centric data management, QlikTech and QlikView, SAP AG | 3 Comments |
A negative take on QlikView
Apparently, one user isn’t happy with QlikView at all. The main problem seems to be, in effect, frequently-repeated bulk loads from disk into the in-memory structures. (Obviously — at least absent more information — that could be an artifact of a stupidly ignorant installation, rather than a fundamental problem with the technology itself.) He’s also not at all enamored of QlikView’s app dev tools.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Memory-centric data management, QlikTech and QlikView | 2 Comments |
Pervasive Summit PSQL v10
Pervasive Software has a long history – 25 years, in fact, as they’re emphasizing in some current marketing. Ownership and company name have changed a few times, as the company went from being an independent startup to being owned by Novell to being independent again. The original product, and still the cash cow, was a linked-list DBMS called Btrieve, eventually renamed Pervasive PSQL as it gained more and more relational functionality.
Pervasive Summit PSQL v10 has just been rolled out, and I wrote a nice little white paper to commemorate the event, describing some of the main advances over v9, primarily for the benefit of current Pervasive PSQL developers. In one major advance, Pervasive made the SQL functionality much stronger. In particular, you now can have a regular SQL data dictionary, so that the database can be used for other purposes – BI, additional apps, whatever. Apparently, that wasn’t possible before, although it had been possible in yet earlier releases. Pervasive also added view-based security permissions, which is obviously a Very Good Thing.
There also are some big performance boosts. Read more
Applix – Three huge opportunities Cognos will probably ignore
If I weren’t on a snorkeling vacation,* this might be a good time to write about why I once called Cognos “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” how Ron Zambonini used that label to help him gain the company’s top spot, why he’s such a big fan of mine, why I got my highest ever per-minute speaking fee to attend a Cognos sales kickoff event, why I went for a midnight touristing stroll in downtown Ottawa in zero degree Fahrenheit weather, or how I managed, while attending the aforementioned Cognos sales kickoff, to get snowed in for three days in, of all places, Dallas, Texas. But the wrasses and jacks await, so I’ll get straight to the point.
*Albeit fairly snorkel-free so far, thanks to Hurricane Felix. 🙁
As I discussed at considerable length in a white paper, Applix’s core technology is fully-featured, memory-centric MOLAP. This is certainly cool technology, and I think it is actually unique. That it’s historically been positioned as the engine for a mid-range set of performance management tools is a travesty, a shame, the result of a prior merger – and also the quite understandable consequence of RAM limitations. However, RAM is ever cheaper and Applix’s technology is now 64-bit, so the RAM barriers have been relaxed. Cognos can take Applix’s TM1 engine high-end if it wants to. And boy, should Cognos ever want to. Indeed, there are three different great ways Cognos could package and position TM1:
- As a no-data-warehouse-design quick-start analytics engine analogous to QlikView (the fastest-growing and most important newish BI suite, open source perhaps excepted);
- As the most sophisticated and versatile planning tool this side of SAP’s APO (and while APO’s sophistication is not in dispute, its versatility is questionable anyway);
- As the processing hub for dashboards-done-right.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Cognos, Memory-centric data management, MOLAP | 6 Comments |
Even Robin Bloor can get snookered once in a while
Robin Bloor is one of the best analysts around — which doesn’t say much about his eponymous firm, since he no longer works there, but I digress. Even so, he evidently got snookered by a Truviso spokesperson, as evidenced by this article.
Apparently, Truviso convinced him that other CEP firms execute one query at a time, while Truviso executes a bunch of queries at once. Well, the latter part of that is presumably true, but it’s hardly the big differentiatior for Truviso Robin would have one believe. That’s what everybody else — StreamBase, Coral8, Progress Apama, et al. — do too. I wouldn’t be surprised if Truviso had a somewhat different architecture for doing it (each vendor describes its approach in rather different language), or even if this were a particular focus and strongpoint of theirs. But fundamentally, all the CEP vendors are doing the same thing.
| Categories: Memory-centric data management, Streaming and complex event processing (CEP), Truviso | Leave a Comment |
And then there is predictability
Coral8 at the time of a recent product release stated that it was improving the predictability of its queries. While this may sound like it has something to do with determinism, it doesn’t. Rather, it’s a matter of making what actually happens as a query result be more in line with what one would think will happen when one reads the query.
Coral8 CTO Mark Tsimelzon goes on to note:
But remember, we are really talking about a corner case — highly complex queries involving loops. We only had a couple of customers who were occasionally hitting queries that complex. The beauty of our SQL-based language is that the vast majority of queries, perhaps 99%, are very easy to understand, and their behavior is exactly what you’d expect based on your SQL experience.
| Categories: Aleri and Coral8, Memory-centric data management, Streaming and complex event processing (CEP) | Leave a Comment |
Applications for not-so-low-latency CEP
The highest-profile applications for complex event/stream processing are probably the ones that require super-low latency, especially in financial trading. However, as I already noted in writing about StreamBase and Truviso, there are plenty of other CEP apps with less extreme latency requirements.
Commonly, these are data reduction apps – i.e., there’s a gushing stream of inputs, and the CEP engine filters and “enhances” it, so that only a small, modified subset is sent forward. In other cases, disk-based systems could do the job perfectly well from a performance standpoint, but the pattern matching and filtering requirements are just a better fit for the CEP paradigm.
Read more