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One of my favorite terms at the moment is “Big Data”.  While all terms are by nature subjective, in this post I will try and explain what Big Data means to me.

So what is Big Data?Big Data is the “modern scale” at which we are defining or data usage challenges.  Big Data begins at the point where need to seriously start thinking about the technologies used to drive our information needs.

While Big Data as a term seems to refer to volume this isn’t the case.  Many existing technologies have little problem physically handling large volumes (TB or PB) of data.  Instead the Big Data challenges result out of the combination of volume and our usage demands from that data.  And those …

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Oracle has published their promises which have reportedly gone a long way to appeasing the EU, so the likely outcome is the takeover of Sun will be approved in January.

My own personal opinion has been the anti-competitive stance really didn’t hold much water.  Reading Oracle’s promises, none appear very extreme (largely agreeing to maintain the status quo) which would lead you to question why it has taken so long to sort out.  But importantly for getting this resolved they are a concession by Oracle and a win for the EU.

 Hopefully shortly the mop up can begin.

The full Oracle press release …

Cassandra is fast emerging as one of the key NoSQL databases.  While we often express that the point of NoSQL is to offer more choice than an “RDBMS” hammer for every nail, there are practical reasons why a small number of stack technologies gain dominance and others circle on the sidelines.

Cassandra has already ticked many of the boxes needed to shoot it into the stratosphere as a widely used, default database platform.  Especially so in the web world where high scalability, high availability, open source and being proven by a bigger fish all matter.  Specifically Cassandra has:

• The ability to scale across many nodes
• The ability to scale to many hundreds of gigabytes of data
• High availability, losing a node doesn’t take down the cluster & online node provisioning and data distribution (and …

Last week I spent some time speaking with Kevin Weil, head of analytics at Twitter. Twitter, from a technology perspective, has had a bit of a hard time due to their stability issues in their early days.  Kevin was keen to point out that he feels this was due to the incomparable growth Twitter was experiencing at the time and their constant struggle to keep up.  Kevin was also keen to show that Twitter prides themselves on striving for engineering excellence, the creation & contribution to new technologies and generally assisting in pushing the boundaries forward.  Our conversation naturally centered on analytics at Twitter.

Twitter, like many web 2.0 apps, started life as a MySQL based RBDMS application.  Today, Twitter is still using MySQL for much of their online operational functionality (although this is likely to change in the near future – think …

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Like many I was disappointed, yet not surprised, that the EC formally logged their objection to Oracle’s acquisition of Sun on account of MySQL a few days back.  And we also hear today that Oracle will be stating their position in Brussels on the 25th of this month.  To me this case has odd from the onset and as it goes on it is just getting odder.  And of course this all seems to be occuring at immense cost to Sun, Oracle and MySQL themselves.

There are several reasons why this is odd.  One of the key ones is that for some time MySQL has been quite open about their non compete focus with …

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<< Back from Blogging Hiatus - Update 2

IngresNo specific announcements from Ingres other than I think the VectorWise stuff is progressing well.

To me Ingres is a bit of a dark horse.  They are open source and doing reasonable revenues.  And they are active in the enterprise market (something MySQL hasn’t really achieved).  But they remain largely off the radar in commentary surrounding the DBMS industry.

My personal pick is this will start to change …

Back from Hiatus - Summary Update 1

GoodDataGoodData has launched and they are providing a cloud based analytics platform for use in integration with online apps.  Starting with some initial focus on SalesForce data, but working hard on expanding the list of ISV’s who choose to provide their customers analytics via GoodData.

GoodData was started by “good guy” Czech serial entrepreneur Roman Stanek (NetBeans) and has just raised funds from Andressen Horowitz and appointed Time O’Reilly to the board.  GoodData is interesting because it is simple, accessible and available on demand.  Still early days but think Roman is on to another winner here.  Certainly …

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FYI - the thoughts here have been gathered from conversations with several individuals, including an interesting conversation yesterday.  As these conversations were off the record I won’t name names here but thanks to those people.

I love open source software and I am a big supporter of many companies that produce open source offerings.  Here I am not going to debate if Oracle acquiring MySQL will be better for MySQL or not as that has been done to death.  But I do think it is relevant to discuss the dangers of blocking a commercial vendor from acquiring a potentially competitive open source vendor.

Many open source software initiatives are purely community backed and are …

Here is a summary of the key discussions I have had over the last month.  Keep in mind, I’m no analyst.  This is largely opinion based on various conversations I have had with the relevant companies (for analyst insight see Curt Monash).

KickFireI think Kickfire has been doing it a little tough lately.  The difficulties in a startup launching a hardware appliance (and associated logistics) combined with being too focused on the MySQL customer base has impacted the growth of this interesting start up.  But they aren’t taking it lying down and have adjusted the strategy and have added a new appliance to the range.  Kickfire now seems to have a stronger focus on the enterprise …

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I was speaking with Michael Stonebraker this morning.  I mentioned that lately many have been referencing comments he has made over the last couple of years.  And I also mentioned that many had interpreted them as he was implying the RDBMS is “doomed”.  Mike has been saying the same thing for years, but the current NoSQL movement seems to have picked up on this and highlighting one of the RDBMS's own pioneers is predicting its …