Engine Yard acquires Orchestra. Red Hat considers NoSQL move. And more.

# Engine Yard announced a definitive agreement to acquire Orchestra, bringing PHP expertise to the Engine Yard platform.

# Red Hat’s CEO indicated the company is interested in a NoSQL or Hadoop acquisition.

# Gluster announced Apache Hadoop compatibility in the next GlusterFS release.

# Microsoft signed an agreement with China Standard Software Co (CS2C) to …

InternetNews.com yesterday published an article based on an interview with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst asking the question “Is Red Hat Interested in the Database Market?”

In truth there was no real need to ask the question, as Whitehurst’s comments made it pretty clear that Red Hat is interested in the database market, and specifically the NoSQL database market.

“When I say I don’t want to be a database company, I’m saying that I don’t want to be a SQL database company,” Whitehurst said.

In case the implications of that statement were not entirely clear, he later added:

“But we would be very interested in a NoSQL type database or Hadoop type thing,” Whitehurst said. “Those are interesting as they represent net new.”

The article adds that Whitehurst would not …

Conor O'Mahony over at IBM wrote a good post on a favorite topic of mine “The Future of the NoSQL, SQL, and RDBMS Markets”.  If this is of interest to you then I suggest you read his original post.  I replied in the comments but thought I would also repost my reply here.

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Hi Connor, I wish it was as simple as SQL & RDBMS is good for this and NoSQL is good for that.  For me at least, the waters are much muddier than that.

The benefit of SQL & RDBMS is that its general purpose nature has meant it can be applied to a lot of problems, and because of its …

Opscode appoints a new CEO. SugarCRM gains a new CFO. And more.

# Opscode named Mitch Hill as CEO, with Jesse Robbins becoming Chief Community Officer.

# SugarCRM claimed billings up 58% in Q2 and appointed a new CFO.

# Tasktop released Tasktop Dev 2.1 and announced Tasktop Sync 1.0.

# Pentaho delivered improved support for Hadoop …

Google and Microsoft trade patent claims. Actuate announces Q2 results. And more.

# Google accused Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies of organising a hostile patent campaign against Android. That prompted Microsoft executives to claim that Microsoft invited Google to be involved in the CPTN purchase of Novell’s patents. However, Google explained that joining CPTN might have decreased its ability to defend itself against potential patent claims.

# Actuate announced its Q2 …

My friends over at IA Ventures are looking both for an Analyst and for an Associate to their team.  If Big Data, New York and start-ups is in your blood then I can’t think of a better VC to be involved in. 

From the IA blog:

"IA Ventures funds early-stage Big Data companies creating competitive advantage through data and we’re looking for two start-up junkies to join our team – one full-time associate / community manager and one full time analyst. Because there are only four of us (we’re a start-up ourselves, in fact), we’ll need you to help us investigate companies, learn about industries, develop investment theses, perform internal operations, organize community events, and work with portfolio companies—basically, you can take on as much …

In life there are really two major types of data analytics.  Firstly, we don’t know what we want to know – so we need analytics to tell us what is interesting.  This is broadly called discovery.  Secondly, we already know what we want to know – we just need analytics to tell us this information, often repeatedly and as quickly as possible.  This is called anything from reporting or dashboarding through more general data transformation and so on.

Typically we are using the same techniques to achieve this.  We shove lots of data into a repository of some from (SQL, MPP SQL, NoSQL, HDFS etc) then run queries/ jobs/ processes across that data to retrieve the information we care about.  

Now this makes sense for data discovery.  If we don’t know what we want to know, having lots of data in a big pile that we can slice and dice in interesting ways is good.   But when we already know what …

Update

Since this article was written, HPCC has undergone a number of significant changes and updates. This addresses some of the critique voiced in this blog post, such as the license (updated from AGPL to Apache 2.0) and integration with other tools. For more information, refer to the comments placed by Flavio Villanustre and Azana Baksh.

The original article can be read unaltered below:

Yesterday I noticed this tweet by Andrei Savu: . This prompted me to read the related GigaOM article and then check out the HPCC Systems …

“Our experience from PNUTS also tells that these systems are hard to build: performance, but also scaleout, elasticity, failure handling, replication. You can’t afford to take any of these for granted when choosing a system. We wanted to find a way to call these out.” – Adam Silberstein and Raghu Ramakrishnan, Yahoo! Research. ___________________________________ A [...]

Shuttleworth opens a can of worms. Fedora 15. IBM commits to Hadoop. And more.

# Mark Shuttleworth shared his thoughts on companies, contributor agreements and free software, prompting responses from Simon Phipps, and Dave Neary.

# The Fedora Project launched Fedora 15.

# IBM launched a new version of its BigInsight software, based on Hadoop, committed $100m to …