Ralph Kimball’s TDWI Crowd Shows DW & BI are Thriving

The economy may be challenging, but 100 attendees on a weekday afternoon in San Francisco proved that there is plenty of interest in data warehousing. The Silicon Valley Chapter of the Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) drew a sizable, energetic group to its quarterly meeting. No doubt the presence of Ralph Kimball, a seminal and influential thinker, had a lotContinue reading “Ralph Kimball’s TDWI Crowd Shows DW & BI are Thriving”

Interview: SAP BusinessObjects’ Marge Breya Celebrates Progress and Anticipates Accelerated Growth

SAP BusinessObjects Executive Vice President & GM Intelligence & Netweaver Marge Breya recently sat down with IT Market Strategy to discuss the first full year of life within SAP. That interview is excerpted here; Breya gives a flavor of the challenges and opportunities that faced the newly acquired company, and her enthusiasm about their success so farContinue reading “Interview: SAP BusinessObjects’ Marge Breya Celebrates Progress and Anticipates Accelerated Growth”

Sybase Delivers Another Strong Quarter, Rep Server Refresh

Sybase is celebrating. Let everyone else complain about the bad economy; the perennial “Tier 1A” database, mobility and analytics vendor just had its best quarter ever to kick off 2009 – its 6th consecutive record quarter. With 14% growth in license revenue (31% in database) and a margin of 21%, there is certainly much toContinue reading “Sybase Delivers Another Strong Quarter, Rep Server Refresh”

IBM InfoSphere Now Supports Informix and z

IBM’s InfoSphere Data Warehouse has been a steady growth asset. As IBM has created and acquired pieces of the infrastructure and progressively created a more complete, end-to-end offering, it has continued to add new customers to (and from) one of the largest installed bases in the world. In reviewing 2008, IBM CFO  Mark Loughridge asserted compoundContinue reading “IBM InfoSphere Now Supports Informix and z”

PDF X-Change Rocks: AR Soft Copy Survey Participants Take Note

This is the third and final post on the topic of which format is best for providing soft copy of briefing material to analysts. After a few more votes were added, the combined total of PDF and annotatable PDF formats got closer to Powerpoint in our survey. The final total was PPT 29, PDF13, annotatableContinue reading “PDF X-Change Rocks: AR Soft Copy Survey Participants Take Note”

Confio Tries to Apply BI to DB Performance – Needs Work

The Boulder BI Braintrust hosted Confio this week. Confio is fairly small (25 people focusing on product development sales and support, with most other infrastructure outsourced), and privately held with angel and operating revenue funding it. The value proposition of their product, Ignite Performance Intelligence, (I’ll call it IPI from here) is to deliver information about database performance usingContinue reading “Confio Tries to Apply BI to DB Performance – Needs Work”

DB2 9.7 Focuses on Costs, Simpler Management

IBM has announced, a bit earlier than originally planned, DB2 9.7 as well as InfoSphere Warehouse 9.7 (we’ll cover the latter in another post). A steady 3rd place in the DBMS market behind Oracle and Microsoft, DB2 nonetheless continues to make gains. IBM claims that its non-mainframe (IBM calls it “distributed”) DB2 revenue grew at aContinue reading “DB2 9.7 Focuses on Costs, Simpler Management”

Gogo Inflight – Internet at 35,000 Feet. Yes, it works. Well.

On my last trip, I was delighted to see that American Airlines had added Gogo Inflight Internet on my plane. I’ve seen the occasional story about it, being the traveling dweeb that I am, but this was the first direct encounter. The flight attendant gave me a discount coupon!

EnterpriseDB’s Big Boost From IBM Only Part of the Story

EnterpriseDB has had a steady build as an Oracle-compatible alternative DBMS. IT Market Strategy had a chance to catch up with Andy Astor, co-founder and EVP of business development, in the midst of the frenzy around the launch of IBM’s DB2 version 9.7 (discussed here). Andy was gracious enough to make himself available late (veryContinue reading “EnterpriseDB’s Big Boost From IBM Only Part of the Story”

DB2 Runs PL/SQL. Say WHAT?

Today IBM announced new features, products, and solution packages in its DB2 9.7 (Cobra ) release. And a new version of InfoSphere, including Informix and z versions. I’ll post about those later, but here I’d like to just highlight a buried item that got little play: DB2 can now run PL/SQL. Natively. In the engine.