I had a few comments on my recent piece on Illuminate, which deserve a quick reply. This will be brief. Several correspondents said they felt that an insistence on their own front end made iLuminate a bad choice – and it would if that were true. In fact, the database supports tools that can use ODBC, and I haven’t heard any evidence that the typical BI tool has any problems with it – in fact, they typically produce results much faster than non-analytic DBMSs will. We’ll need more data to see how iLuminate competes with other specialty engines over a broad set of use cases, but they certainly seem to win their share when they get the POCs they ask for.
The other question raised was the “lack of SQL-based update.” That’s true strictly speaking, but it doesn’t mean you can’t update iLuminate. You use the same mechanism you used in the first load, with the new feed being added as an increment. While I’m not in touch with specific load case studies, the company asserts that integrating update data is seamless and fast. And since everything is indexed and most queries simply run against the indexes themselves, queries that took 2 seconds yesterday will take 2 seconds after the new data is added.
The bottom line remains the same. Illuminate is worth shortlisting. Take them up on your challenging needs, and see how they do.
One thought on “Illuminate Update – Not Closed, or Static”