February 9th, 2012 — Data management
Next week – February 15, 2012, at 10am PT to be precise – I’ll be taking part in a webinar with Clustrix to discuss scaling big database applications with NewSQL databases.
I’ll be providing an overview of the origins of the term NewSQL, its adoption, and a discussion of the core technologies that we see fitting into the category, as well as an explanation of the key considerations for choosing between NoSQL and NewSQL databases.
Other webinar participants include Robin Purohit, Clustrix president and CEO; and Aaron Passey, Clustrix CTO, and there will also be a presentation by Massive Media, which recently announced that it has used Clustrix to build and grow Twoo, a social networking site, to more than four million users in only six months without sharding the application and without any downtime.
Register for the event here.
February 8th, 2012 — Data management
February 3rd, 2012 — Data management
New CEO at Revolution. Pentaho goes big data. EMC Hadoop gets Isilon. And more.
An occasional series of data-related news, views and links posts on Too Much Information. You can also follow the series @thedataday.
* Revolution Analytics Names David Rich New CEO
* Pentaho Open Sources Big Data Capabilities to Further Fuel Widespread Adoption
* EMC Isilon is Industry’s First Scale-Out NAS System with Native Hadoop Support
* Actuate Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2011 Financial Results
* Sumo Logic Raises $15M Series B Round for Next Generation Log Management and Analytics
* Announcing Oracle R Enterprise 1.0
* Paul Cormier Joins Hortonworks’ Board of Directors
* DataStax Launches First Complete Solution for Cassandra Development on Windows and Mac
* Latest Release of Kalido Information Engine Eliminates Data Mart Migration and Consolidation Hassles
* Karmasphere Brings More Power, Collaboration, and Faster Insights to Big Data Analytics Teams on Hadoop
* Why Big Data Won’t Make You Smart, Rich, Or Pretty
* SAP HANA – slowly moving out of hype into actual projects
* For 451 Research clients
# Actuate gets ready to go shopping in the ‘big data’ mall Acquirer IQ
# Couchbase cites enterprise adoption, clarifies distributed NoSQL database strategy Impact report
# SpagoBI illuminates 2012 roadmap, takes open source model to US, Latin America Impact report
# Customer data analysis provider nPario combines big data and smart segmentation Impact report
# Tableau details 2012 growth strategy, gets semantic for visual analytics Market development report
# EMC integrates re-branded Hadoop distribution with Isilon NAS Market development report
# Quiterian seeks funding for new customer analytics in the cloud focus Market development report
# Hortonworks refines its commercial strategy for Apache Hadoop Market development report
# Digital Reasoning pledges to automate the analysis of complex data Market development report
And that’s the Data Day, today.
February 2nd, 2012 — Data management
Thanks to everyone who has already taken part in our survey exploring changing attitudes to MySQL following its acquisition by Oracle and examining the competitive dynamic between MySQL and other database technologies, including NoSQL and NewSQL.
The response has been great and even a quick look at the results makes for interesting reading, particularly in the light of our previous findings which indicated declining MySQL usage.
I am really looking forward to having the opportunity for a deep dive into the results and break out the figures to get a better understanding of the potential impact of alternative MySQL distribution and support providers, as well as NoSQL and NewSQL, on continued usage of MySQL.
The survey results will be made freely available on our blogs, as well as being included in a long format report containing our additional analysis and research related to the MySQL ecosystem and competitive dynamic.
Right now, however, is your last chance to contribute to the survey and get your voice heard. There are just 12 questions to answer, spread over four pages, and the entire survey should take no longer than five minutes to complete. All individual responses are of course confidential.
The survey will close in 24 hours.
January 31st, 2012 — Data management
As expected, EMC has announced that it is integrating its Greenplum HD distribution of Apache Hadoop with its Isilon scale-out NAS technology. The move coincides with a re-branding of the company’s Hadoop distributions that, while slight, could prove significant.
Specifically, EMC has enabled the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) as a native protocol supported on OneFS in addition to Network File System (NFS) and Common Internet File System (CIFS) support, enabling Isilon systems to provide the underlying storage layer for Hadoop processing, as well as a common storage pool for Hadoop and other systems.
EMC is talking up the benefits of combining Isilon with Greenplum HD. For the record, that’s the Hadoop distribution previously known as Greenplum HD Community Edition, based on the Apache Hadoop 0.20.1 code branch.
Greenplum HD Enterprise Edition, based on MapR Technologies’ M5 distribution, is now known as Greenplum MR, and is not supported by Isilon due to the fact that it replaces HDFS with Direct Access NFS.
EMC notes that Greenplum MR is being positioned as a high-performance Hadoop offering for customers that have failed to achieve their required performance from other distributions.
While EMC is quick to maintain its happiness with the MapR relationship and its commitment to Greenplum MR, it’s clear that tight integration with Isilon, particularly in the EMC Greenplum DCA, will result in an expanded role for Greenplum HD.
Additionally, while the company’s Greenplum Command Center provides unified management for the Greenplum Database, Greenplum HD and Greenplum Chorus as part of the recently announced Unified Analytics Platform (UAP), MapR has its own management and monitoring functionality.
Since we expect EMC to pitch the benefits of integrated software in UAP and software and hardware in DCA, it is now clear that Greenplum HD, rather than the Greenplum MR, is considered the company’s primary Hadoop distribution.
Given Greenplum HD’s starring role in the Unified Analytics Platform (UAP), Data Computing Appliance (DCA) and integration with Isilon, Greenplum MR’s role is likely to become increasingly niche.
January 30th, 2012 — Data management
I put this slide together for my own benefit as I was trying to keep track of the various incarnations of Couchbase’s brands. Looks like I wasn’t the only one, so I thought I’d also make our perspective available.
There are a couple of differences between our slide and Koji Kawamura’s:
Ours contains an extra layer of names (e.g. “Elastic Couchbase”) that were briefly used by Couchbase in discussion and I believe in marketing, although never for shipping product.
Also ours doesn’t mention memcached. It could be on there given that Membase is based on it, and Couchbase Server can still be deployed in “memcached only mode”, but in that sense it is a feature of Membase/Couchbase Server. And anyway, I couldn’t fit it on 
January 27th, 2012 — Data management
January 27th, 2012 — Data management
451 Research yesterday announced that it has published its 2012 Previews report, an all-encompassing report highlighting the most disruptive and significant trends that our analysts expect to dominate and drive the enterprise IT industry agenda over the coming year.
The 93 page report provides an outlook and assessment across all 451 Research technology sectors and practice areas – including software infrastructure, cloud enablement, hosting, security, datacenter technologies, hardware, information management, mobility, networking and eco-efficient IT – with input from our team of 40+ analysts. The 2012 Previews report is available upon request here.
IM research director Simon Robinson has already provided a taster of our predictions as they relate to the information-centric landscape. Below I have outlined some of our core predictions related to the data-centric ecosystem:
The overall trend predicted for 2012 could best be described as the shifting focus from volume, velocity and velocity, to delivering value. Out concept of Total Data reflects the path from velocity and variety of information sources to the all-important endgame of deriving value from data. We expect to see increased interest in data integration and analytics technologies and approaches designed specifically to exploit the potential benefits of ‘big data’ and mainstream adoption of Hadoop and other new sources of data.
We also anticipate, and are beginning to see, increased focus on technologies that enable access to data in different storage platforms without requiring data movement. We believe there is an emerging role for what we are calling the ‘data hub‘ – an independent platform that is responsible for managing access to data on the various data storage and processing technologies.
Increased understanding of the value of analytics will also increase interest in the integration of analytics into operational applications. Embedded analytics is nothing new, but has the potential to achieve mainstream adoption this year as the dominant purveyors of applications used to run operations are increasingly focused on serving up embedded analytics as a key component within their product portfolios. Equally importantly, many of them now have database platforms capable of uniting previously disparate technologies to deliver true embedded analysis.
There has been a growing recognition over the past year or so that any type of data management project – whether focused on master data management (MDM), data or application integration, or data quality – needs to bring real benefits to business processes. Some may see this assertion as obvious and pretty easy to achieve, but that’s not necessarily the case. However, it is likely to become more so in the next 12-18 months as companies realize a process-driven approach to most data management programs makes sense and vendors deliver capabilities to meet this demand.
While ‘big data’ presents a number of opportunities, it also poses many challenges, not the least of which is the lack of developers, managers, analysts and scientists with analytics skills. The users and investors placing a bet on the opportunities offered by new data management products are unlikely to be laughing if it turns out that they cannot employ people to deploy, manage and run those products, or analysts to make sense of the data they produce. It is not surprising that, therefore, the vendors that supply those technologies are investing in ensuring that there is a competent workforce to support existing and new projects.
Finally, while cloud computing may be one of the technology industry’s hot topics, it has had relatively little impact on the data management sector to date. That is not to say that databases are not available on cloud computing platforms, but we must make a distinction between databases that are deployed in public clouds, and ‘cloud databases‘ that have the potential to fulfil the role of emerging databases in building private and hybrid clouds. The former have been available for many years. The latter are just beginning to come to fruition based on NoSQL databases, as well as a new breed of NewSQL relational databases, designed to meet the performance, scalability and flexibility needs of large-scale data processing.
451 Research clients can get more details of these specific predictions via our 2012 preview – Information Management, Part 2. Non-clients can apply for trial access at the same link, while the entire 2012 Previews report is available here.
Also, mark your diaries for a webinar discussing report highlights on Thursday Feb 9 at noon ET, which will be open for clients and non-clients to attend. Registration details to follow soon…
January 24th, 2012 — Data management
January 23rd, 2012 — Data management
If you’re a MySQL user, tell us about your adoption plans by taking our current survey.
Back in late 2009, at the height of the concern about Oracle’s imminent acquisition of Sun Microsystems and MySQL, 451 Research conducted a survey of open source software users to assess their database usage and attitudes towards Oracle.
The results provided an interesting snapshot of the potential implications of the acquisition and the concerns of MySQL users and even, so I am told, became part of the European Commission’s hearing into the proposed acquisition (used by both sides, apparently, which says something about both our independence and the malleability of data).
One of the most interesting aspects concerned the apparently imminent decline in the usage of MySQL. Of the 285 MySQL users in our 2009 survey, only 90.2% still expected to be using it two years later, and only 81.8% in 2014.
Other non-MySQL users expected to adopt the open source database after 2009, but the overall prediction was decline. While 82.1% of our sample of 347 open source users were using MySQL in 2009, only 78.7% expected to be using it in 2011, declining to 72.3% in 2014.
This represented an interesting snapshot of sentiment towards MySQL, but the result also had to be taken with a pinch of salt given the significant level of concern regarding MySQL future at the time the survey was conducted.
The survey also showed that only 17% of MySQL users thought that Oracle should be allowed to keep MySQL, while 14% of MySQL users were less likely to use MySQL if Oracle completed the acquisition.
That is why we are asking similar questions again, in our recently launched MySQL/NoSQL/NewSQL survey.
More than two years later Oracle has demonstrated that it did not have nefarious plans for MySQL. While its stewardship has not been without controversial moments, Oracle has also invested in the MySQL development process and improved the performance of the core product significantly. There are undoubtedly users that have turned away from MySQL because of Oracle but we also hear of others that have adopted the open source database specifically because of Oracle’s backing.
That is why we are now asking MySQL users to again tell us about their database usage, as well as attitudes to MySQL following its acquisition by Oracle. Since the database landscape has changed considerably late 2009, we are now also asking about NoSQL and NewSQL adoption plans.
Is MySQL usage really in decline, or was the dip suggested by our 2009 survey the result of a frenzy of uncertainty and doubt given the imminent acquisition. Will our current survey confirm or contradict that result? If you’re a MySQL user, tell us about your adoption plans by taking our current survey.
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