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Category Archives: DBMS2

eBay doesn’t love MapReduce

17-Oct-08

eBay doesn’t love MapReduce
The first time I ever heard from Oliver Ratzesberger of eBay, the subject line of his email mentioned MapReduce.  That was early this year.  Subsequently, however, eBay seems to have become a MapReduce non-fan.  The reason is simple: eBay’s parallel efficiency tests show that MapReduce leaves most processors idle most of [...]

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A data warehouse pricing complication: Software vs. appliances

17-Oct-08

A data warehouse pricing complication: Software vs. appliances
Juan Loaiza of Oracle disagrees with a number of my opinions. We plan to talk about some of that when I visit on Thursday, after Teradata Partners. But I’d like to throw one of his ideas out there right now. Juan contends that comparisons [...]

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Lynda Moulton prefers enterprise search products that get up and running quickly

17-Oct-08

Lynda Moulton prefers enterprise search products that get up and running quickly
Lynda Moulton, to put it mildly, disagrees with the Gartner Magic Quadrant analysis of enterprise search. Her preferred approach is captured in:
Coveo, Exalead, ISYS, Recommind, Vivisimo, and X1 are a few of a select group that are marking a mark in their [...]

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Quick guide to Teradata’s announcements this week

17-Oct-08

Quick guide to Teradata’s announcements this week
The Teradata Partners (i.e., user) conference is this week.  So there have been lots of press releases, some presentations, lots of meetings, and so on.  A lot of Teradata’s messaging is in flux, as it moves fairly rapidly to correct what I believe have been some deficiencies in [...]

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Teradata Geospatial, and datatype extensibility in general

17-Oct-08

Teradata Geospatial, and datatype extensibility in general
As part of it’s 13.0 release this week, Teradata is productizing its geospatial datatype, which previously was just a downloadable library.  What Teradata Geospatial now amounts to is:
User-defined functions (UDF) written by Teradata (this is the part that existed before).
(Possibly new) Enhanced implementations of the Teradata geospatial UDFs, [...]

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Teradata Virtual Storage

17-Oct-08

Teradata Virtual Storage
One of the big features of Teradata 13.0, announced this week, is Teradata Virtual Storage, which sounds pretty cool.   So far as I can tell, Teradata Virtual Storage has two major aspects, namely:
Teradata has engineered its optimizer to take serious accounts of differences between kinds of storage. This fits the [...]

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Vertica offers some more numbers

17-Oct-08

Vertica offers some more numbers
Eric Lai interviewed Dave Menninger of Vertica.  Highlights included:
$20 million in trailing revenue.  Removing a single multi-million-dollar deal from the list, that’s a few hundred thousand dollars each for 50ish customers.  At $100K or so per terabyte, that’s an average of several terabytes of user data each, or more depending [...]

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Teradata’s Petabyte Power Players

17-Oct-08

Teradata’s Petabyte Power Players
As previously hinted, Teradata has now announced 4 of the 5 members of its “Petabyte Power Players” club.  These are enterprises with 1+ petabyte of data on Teradata equipment.  As is commonly the case when Teradata discusses such figures, there’s some confusion as to how they’re actually counting.  But as best [...]

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Oracle notes

17-Oct-08

Oracle notes
I spent about six hours at Oracle today — talking with Andy Mendelsohn, Ray Roccaforte, Juan Loaiza, Cetin Ozbutun, et al. — and plan to write more later.  For now, let me pass along a few quick comments.
The key philosophical point that I had perhaps been missing is that Oracle thinks there is [...]

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Introduction to Talend

17-Oct-08

Introduction to Talend
I didn’t spend much time on the show floor at Teradata Partners, but I did connect with Yves de Montcheuil of Talend for a couple of little chats.  Highlights of the Talend story include:
Talend does open source data integration.  If you’ve heard of one open source data integration company, it’s probably Talend.
Specifically, [...]

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Oracle is integrating clickstream and network analytics too

26-Sep-08

Oracle is integrating clickstream and network analytics too
Oracle announced today the not-so-concisely-named Oracle Real User Experience Insight, which actually seems to be an official nickname for what is more properly called “Oracle Enterprise Manager Real User Experience Insight.” Trying saying that 10 times straight at network speeds … but I digress.
If I’m reading [...]

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Vertica finally spells out its compression claims

26-Sep-08

Vertica finally spells out its compression claims
Omer Trajman of Vertica put up a must-read blog post spelling out detailed compression numbers, based on actual field experience (which I’d guess is from a combination of production systems and POCs):
CDR - 8:1 (87%)
Consumer Data - 30:1 (96%)
Marketing Analytics - 20:1 (95%)
Network logging - 60:1 (98%)
Switch Level [...]

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Exadata: Oracle finally answers the data warehouse challengers

26-Sep-08

Exadata: Oracle finally answers the data warehouse challengers
Oracle, in partnership with HP, has announced a new data warehouse appliance product line, cleverly branded “Exadata.” The basic idea seems to be that database processing is split among two sets of servers:
(The new stuff) A set of back-end servers — the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers [...]

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Some of Oracle’s largest data warehouses

26-Sep-08

Some of Oracle’s largest data warehouses
Googling around, I came across an Oracle presentation – given some time this year – that lists some of Oracle’s largest data warehouses. 10 databases total are listed with >16 TB, which is fairly consistent with Larry Ellison’s confession during the Exadata announcement that Oracle has trouble over 10 [...]

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Oracle Exadata and Oracle data warehouse appliance sound bites

26-Sep-08

Oracle Exadata and Oracle data warehouse appliance sound bites
In addition to my previously posted thoughts on the Oracle Exadata/data warehouse appliance announcement, let me offer some more concise observations.
Microsoft had leapfrogged Oracle with its DATAllegro acquisition. Now Oracle’s back in the game.
But Oracle Exadata Release 1 is hardly going to put Teradata, Netezza, [...]

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Peter Batty on Netezza Spatial

26-Sep-08

Peter Batty on Netezza Spatial
As previously noted, I’m not up to speed on Netezza Spatial. Phil Francisco of Netezza has promised we’ll fix that ASAP. In the mean time, I found a blog by a guy named Peter Batty, who evidently:
Knows a lot about geospatial data and its uses
Is consulting to Netezza
Is [...]

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Oracle spotlights its datatype support

26-Sep-08

Oracle spotlights its datatype support
Oracle put out a flurry of press releases today in conjunction with Oracle OpenWorld. One, which was simply positioned as a report on some “mission-critical” customer apps, caught my eye because all four detailed examples involved nonstandard datatypes:
Two Oracle Spatial
One “semantic,” which in Oracle lingo seems to mean — [...]

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A few operational BI/BPM/business rules stories

26-Sep-08

A few operational BI/BPM/business rules stories
Intersystems is rolling out DeepSee, which is a Cache’-specific BI engine. Since some Intersystems OEMs have been known to pay more money to Business Objects/Crystal Reports than to Intersystems itself, the business motivation is obvious. Technically, Intersystems’ claims include:
Intersystems integrated true bitmapped indexes into Cache’ 4-5 [...]

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