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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VoltDB – DIY OLTP. Open Source. Win.

May 26, 2010 by 5 Comments

In a seemingly perfect marriage of product and target market, database pioneer Mike Stonebraker’s new in-memory database company VoltDB has emerged from stealth mode using the open source model, soon to be open core. Its first release, GPL licensed Community Edition will appeal to developers who need blindingly fast transaction processing and are willing to do a lot of work themselves to get there – the do it yourself (DIY) database. Who better than the Gluecon community? Gluecon was the perfect place to do the formal roll out, filled as it is with hands-on folks looking to work with NoSQL products (like Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Riak, Voldemort, etc.)

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And Then There Were Three: POWER, x86 and z

April 5, 2010 by 1 Comment

by Joe Clabby, President, Clabby Analytics. Updated from a November 2009 publication

There is a major shakeout underway in the midrange/high-end server marketplace as sales of Sun SPARC/CMT (cellular multi-threading) and Hewlett-Packard (HP) Itanium-based servers decline significantly — and as new, more powerful versions of Intel’s Xeon and IBM’s POWER micro-architectures come to market. Read more of this post

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Sybase Will Step Up In-Memory Message With New Release

December 31, 2009 by 6 Comments

Sybase has quietly racked up a string of successful growth years, riding its pioneering status in commercial analytic databases (ADBMS) and holding on to its loyal base in everyday DBMS after being elbowed aside by Oracle a decade ago. Its steady market performance has not been driven by dramatic innovations: Sybase has seemed to lag the Big Three (Oracle, Microsoft and IBM) in new feature/function. But it has innovated: IQ has grown into a key revenue source, and Sybase RAP has established itself as one of the more successful event processing offerings, with a string of Wall Street customers creating a new class of applications.

In the current (5-year-old) major release level of its flagship Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) product, Sybase has added user-defined SQL functions, support for plugin Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and JVM components, xml tables, SQL statement replication, new statistical aggregate functions, and a shared disk cluster edition. And now, Sybase is about to add new in-memory database capabilities and step up its support for external storage management. I’ve spent some time recently with the Sybase team to discuss their plans for the upcoming 15.5 release (currently available in a developer version), and found palpable excitement about the possibilities of their new work. Read more of this post

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