Software as a Service (SaaS)
Analysis of software-as-a-service offerings with a database or analytic focus, or data connectivity tools focused on SaaS. Related subjects include:
- Data mart outsourcing
- (in Text Technologies) Text analytics SaaS
- (in The Monash Report) Strategic issues in SaaS
Amazon Dynamo — when primary key access is enough
Amazon has a very decentralized technical operation. But even the individual pieces have interestingly huge scale. Thus, various different things they’re doing are of interest.
They recently presented a research paper on a high-performance transactional system called Dynamo. (Hat tip to Dare Obasanjo.) A key point is the following:
There are many services on Amazon’s platform that only need primary-key access to a data store. For many services, such as those that provide best seller lists, shopping carts, customer preferences, session management, sales rank, and product catalog, the common pattern of using a relational database would lead to inefficiencies and limit scale and availability. Dynamo provides a simple primary-key only interface to meet the requirements of these applications.
Now, I don’t think too many organizations past Amazon are going to decide that they can’t afford the overhead of an RDBMS for such OLTP-like applications. But I do think it will become increasingly common to find other reasons to eschew traditional OLTP relational architectures. Maybe you’ll want the schema flexibility of XML. Or perhaps you’ll be happy with a fixed relational schema, but will want to optimize for analytic performance.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Data models and architecture, Database diversity, NoSQL, OLTP, Theory and architecture | 1 Comment |
The boom in Salesforce.com integration
SaaS integration is in the air.
- I recently talked with Pervasive Software about their data integration line. A large part of Pervasive’s new business is Salesforce.com integration, including at some big-name software vendors as customer/partner switch-hitters.
- I just rechecked my notes from my January talk with Cast Iron Systems. A large part of Cast Iron’s new business is also integration with Salesforce.com, Netsuite, and other SaaS vendors.
- Informatica keeps putting out press releases about Salesforce.com integration, most recently by offering replication in SaaS form itself.
But of course this makes sense. Without good data integration, SaaS applications would be pretty useless, at least at large and medium-sized enterprises.