Calpont’s InfiniDB – Another ADBMS Insurgent Arises
November 8, 2010 Leave a comment
Calpont, rapidly emerging as yet another contender in the ADBMS sweepstakes, has announced version 2.0 of InfiniDB, its columnar MPP offering over shared storage. The value proposition hits now-familiar themes: high-performance query, fast data loading, data compression, and parallelized user defined functions (UDFs), all of which are becoming key checkoff capabilities. InfiniDB also hits hard on pricing, which it says dramatically undercuts that of its competitors. And a 30-day free trial of the enterprise edition sweetens the offer. For those comfortable with open source, the 2.0 release of the community edition is available as well. Calpont says the community edition (which is limited to a single server but is otherwise database feature-complete) has had 15,000 downloads. But the company’s relationship with Oracle for its MySQL components must be considered a risk going forward.
InfiniDB, like Infobright, is built atop Oracle’s MySQL. (I posted about Infobright last year, and it also has made significant progress, drawing favorable comment in the open source community for its continuing maturation.) Calpont’s relationship with Oracle must be seen as a risk factor..Oracle’s recent decisions about support raise questions about its interest in supporting anyone who is not an enterprise-class user of the Oracle-branded MySQL offering. Calpont has a deal through 2012 that includes an OEM license to integrate and use MySQL as the InfiniDB branded solution, and access to the MySQL channel. What will happen beyond that is clearly a concern. Read more of this post
Analytic Database 3.5, Vertica is laying claim to leadership of the new ADBMS vendors. With its most recent numbers – several dozens of customers are now in production and the company expects to pass 100 this year – the assertion bears thinking about. Driving forward with an aggressive release strategy, Vertica is showing its maturity and increasing ability to challenge the old school leaders like Teradata and Netezza – but with a software-only strategy. This agility allowed it to offer early support for release 3.5 in quick succession after its last release, with GA scheduled for later this year. 
Oracle today announced it is buying 
(MicroStrategy has been doing a lot of seeding with the ADBMSs lately; it also has an introductory bundling deal with Sybase IQ.) Delivering a ‘compute rich’ appliance on commodity hardware, with reduced operating costs, certainly hits all the right notes. But is 1 Tb the sweet spot for MapReduce? I think not – although it makes a great starting point, and that may be Aster’s real opportunity – give ‘em a taste of what SQL plus MapReduce can do, and watch them demand more and more. And sell it to them. Dell and MicroStrategy should love this strategy - if it works. 
ParAccel has seen some skepticism in the analyst community because of its relatively small published number of customers. It claims a dozen, and half are listed on its web site. Other vendors, like Vertica and Greenplum, have been very forthcoming promoting theirs, but both have more time in the market. PADB was released in Q4 2007 and really began its arc in 2008; Vertica has a year head start, and Greenplum even more. Rumors have also floated about whether CTO and founder Barry Zane was leaving. I had a conversation with Barry in late June to discuss the business and the benchmarks. He was clearly excited about the benchmarks, in which he was very involved, even working on the full disclosure report personally – “It got to be like a hobby for me,” he said – and he was quite clear that he is not going anywhere. 
Greenplum 
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