Apache Hadoop 1.0 Doesn’t Clear Up Trunks and Branches Questions. Do Distributions?

January 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

In early January 2012, the world of big data was treated to an interesting series of product releases, press announcements, and blog posts about Hadoop versions.  To begin with, we had the announcement of Apache version 1.0 at long last, in a press release. Although there were grumblings here and there in the twittersphere that changes to release numbers are meaningless, my discussions with Gartner’s enterprise customers indicate otherwise. Products with release numbers like 0.20.2 make the hair on Procurement’s neck stand on end, and as Hadoop begins to get mainstream attention (Gartner’s clients, see Hype Cycle for Data Management 2011), IT architects and executives find such optics quite important. Hadoop is moving beyond pioneers like Amazon, Yahoo! and LinkedIn into shops like JP Morgan Chase, and they pay attention to such things.

…more…

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Decoding BI Market Share Numbers – Play Sudoku With Analysts

July 21, 2010 by 2 Comments

In a recent post I discussed Oracle’s market share in BI, based on a press-published chart taken from IDC data – showing Oracle coming in second. As often happens in such discussions, I got quite a few direct emails and twitter messages – some in no uncertain terms – about why the particular metric I chose was not sufficiently nuanced or representative of the true picture. I freely admit: that’s true. In general, market observers know Oracle is not typically placed second overall – but the picture is more complex than a single ranking. My point was, and is, that it’s too easy to slip into a “who’s on top” mentality that obscures true market dynamics. In this post, I’ll dig a bit deeper, and describe what different approaches or categorizations show us – and what they don’t. Finally I’ll talk about how much this matters – and to whom. Read more of this post

Filed under Analyst Relations, Data Management, Data Warehousing, On Business Intelligence, Research Industry, Vendor image and communications Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

You Know You Have Big Data When…(Humor)

July 18, 2010 by 4 Comments

One of the more philosophical questions analysts like to ask is “What is Big Data?” It’s relative – it begs the question, “what’s big?” And that is a constantly moving number, and always assessed by comparison to the ridiculous amounts some companies work with. But Big Data as a concept in IT parlance today tends to mean something fairly specific, not just about size but also about composition and the nature of the processing. So I considered a serious attempt at a fairly rigorous discussion about the nature of the workload, structure of the data and the kinds of analytics that comprise what people think of as Big Data….and then I thought of Steve Martin, who would have considered this carefully and then looked into the camera and said “Naaaahh.” So I determined to emulate him and have a bit of fun instead, by crowdsourcing some help completing the sentence “You know you have Big Data when…” Here’s what some Twitter folks said> Some are funny, some more serious … Read more of this post

Filed under Data Management, Data Warehousing, The Computing Life

EMC Buys Greenplum – Big Data Realignment Continues

July 6, 2010 by 15 Comments

EMC’s acquisition of Greenplum, announced today as a cash transaction, reaffirms the obvious: the Big Data tsunami upends conventional wisdom. It has already reshaped the market, spawning the most ferment in the RDBMS (and non-R DBMS via the noSQL players) space in years. When I first posted on Greenplum over a year ago, I said that

“Open source + capital has created an intriguing new model of rapid innovation in “mature” markets, and the database space - like BI – is not a done deal. It is indeed possible to escape the gravity well, if you execute. Greenplum is getting it done, and is among the new stars to watch.”

Why the open source reference? Greenplum uses a parallelization layer atop PostgreSQL (like Aster, another of the new breed of ADBMS.)

Now EMC has written the next chapter in that story. In the process, it adds a new piece (after literally dozens of others in the past few years) to its own portfolio, which already includes unstructured data (via Documentum) and virtualization (via VMWare), layered in among the industry-leading storage and information management pieces. Disruptive? You bet. Is EMC finished? I doubt it. Candidates? BI tools, ETL, MDM, data integration come to mind. Losers? At least one big one. Read on. Read more of this post

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Sybase SQL Anywhere 12 Extends Mobile Leadership

June 27, 2010 by 3 Comments

In my coverage of SAP’s Sybase acquisition, I noted that SQL Anywhere is a best kept secret among more than 20,000 developers who relish its ease of embedding and minimal database administration. Now Sybase is about to release its next version, SQL Anywhere 12, with ambitions to add to its claimed ten million users worldwide using SQL Anywhere-powered applications. Geospatial features, key to mobile applications, will feature prominently. Read more of this post

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Migrate From Mainframe? To What?

June 24, 2010 by 16 Comments

From Joe Clabby, www.clabbyanalytics.com

Gartner, the industry’s preeminent information technology (IT) research and analysis firm, has published several reports and case studies over the past few years that promote the idea that IT buyers should migrate their applications off of mainframes and move them to other, more “modern platforms”.  Part of Gartner’s logic, it appears, is that there is an impending-doom shortage of mainframe managers that is about to occur as elderly mainframe managers retire — so Gartner implies that moving applications to other “more modern” platforms might ensure the long term viability of enterprise applications on those platforms.

I have two major issues with Gartner’s perspective and its recommendation:

  1. Where is the proof that mainframe skills will decline to critical levels over the next several years?  And,
  2. Which “modern platform” is Gartner advocating? Read more of this post

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Microsoft’s Parallel DW – Still Waiting

June 16, 2010 by 2 Comments

Microsoft’s SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) has been eagerly awaited for a long time. It still is. Though much of the news at the BI Conference running in parallel with TechEd in New Orleans (discussed here) was generally quite good, the PDW story was much less so. It’s late, and it’s not all there. Read more of this post

Filed under Data Management, Data Warehousing, Hardware platforms, Industry trends Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oracle Exadata: Early Signs Promising

June 15, 2010 by 1 Comment

Exadata is looking good. In the past few months, I’ve had the chance to talk to several early adopters of Oracle Exadata V2, some in connection with a sponsored white paper Oracle has just published. It’s still early, but I see this product as a milestone, regardless of its commercial success. That is still to be determined, although I wouldn’t bet against it. How it will be affected by Oracle’s execution of the Sun acquisition is another open question, and the recent surprise layoffs, which showed that either the announced expectations were laughably off base or Ellison’s early announcements about  hiring plans were less than candid, don’t bode too well for the near term. Rob Enderle made some strong and provocative points in his guest post here. Read more of this post

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Informatica Re-Factors the Value Chain for the Cloud

June 15, 2010 by 2 Comments

Informatica’s cloud ambitions continue and deepen with each new release. In the years since its 2006 launch, Informatica Cloud, the strategic initiative launched to bring Informatica’s data integration assets to the cloud,  has won salesforce.com’s Best of AppExchange award for 2008 and 2009, added other cloud-based applications as targets, and most significant, signed up 650 clients. Customers like Qualcomm and Toshiba are syncing their SaaS apps with on-premise data, enhancing compliance, and extending their BI capabilities.  In a recent conversation, Darren Cunningham, Vice President, Cloud Marketing told me that Informatica is processing over 30,000 jobs per day, involving over 6.5B rows of data per month. Read more of this post

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Oracle’s Surprise Layoff: Is Snorkel (Sun + Oracle) Underwater?

June 14, 2010 by 2 Comments

From Rob Enderle, Enderle Group

Mergers are very difficult to do, and while Oracle is one of the best at doing them there are degrees of difficulty.  On a scale of 1 to 10 the Sun acquisition by Oracle is likely an 11 and will probably fail.   Whether it takes Oracle with it may be a question for a later time, but let’s explore why Snorkel appears to be trending back to becoming Oracle at some future point. Read more of this post

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