Gartner has released a few days ago the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010 list. Here you can see the wordle cloud:




While I don't want to spend time talking about  the usual suspects (Cloud, Green, Mobile and Virtualization) I wish to share my thoughts on two topics: Advanced Analytics and Reshaping the Data Center.

Advanced Analytics  
I'm not surprised that a branch of Business Intelligence is still in the list after years of top priority amongst CIOs. Business Intelligence is one of the fields that I love and it's promise is to transform in gold everything it touches, like …

Open source business intelligence and data warehousing are on the rise!

If you kept up with the MySQL Performance Blog, you might have noticed a number of posts comparing the open source analytical databases Infobright, LucidDB, and MonetDB. LucidDB …

In the information age, everyone collaborates on this worldwide knowledge exchange channel that's called Internet. Computing devices are proliferating and all interactions are finding a common home: the net. It binds us in a way that was inconceivable only a few years ago. I can stay up to date on what my US or Japan colleagues are doing. I can read articles and thoughts written in unknown cities all around the globe.

We are all on the web; MySQL is so popular because of the web I'll say. Whether you have a small niche blog or you are a famous writer in your field of expertise, you should care about analyzing your readers. This becomes more important if you are a company willing to publicize products on the web.

I just found …

Image by plαdys via Flickr

The following is a list of interesting DBMS related links for the week:

• Ellison's Impatience Over Sun
• Intel squeezes one million IOPS from desktop
• Is the RDBMS doomed (yada yada yada) ?
• EDS brand is no more (not DBMS but interesting)

…

Image by Snooch2TheNooch via Flickr

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 …

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There will be plenty of detailed coverage on Exadata V2 so I won’t attempt to replicate that.  However I do have a couple of initial thoughts which I would like to share.  For those who missed it, Oracle has just announced Exadata V2 (which is their pre-built “machine”).  Exadata V1 was built using HP equipment, Exadata V2 is using Sun.  The main addition to Exadata V2 seems to be an extra tier in the memory hierarchy, a flash cache.  Oracle is very quick to point out this is not flash disk, but it is flash memory, Sun’s FlashFire technology (flash disk or SSD’s was always going to be a transition technology, flash memory doesn’t have the …

I haven’t blogged in over a month now.  This is for a number of reasons.  Firstly I have been flat out with various activities.  This included a trip to VLDB in Lyon mid month.  Secondly, a lot of the companies I have spoken with this month aren’t ready to speak publically so hence no blog posts resulting from these sorts of discussions.

However there has been a wiff of a change in the air in terms of focus that is interesting and worth highlighting.  After years of lots of innovation around data analytics, OLTP is starting to make a comeback in terms of reclaiming some of the limelight.  Much more on this between now and the end of the year, but a couple things to watch:

• On the Radar: VoltDB
• …

In my recent post on the EU antitrust regulators' probe into the Oracle Sun merger I did not mention an important class of stakeholders: the MySQL-based special purpose database startups. By these I mean:

• 
  
• Kickfire
  
• Infobright
  
• Calpont
  
• ScaleDB
  

I think it's safe to say the first three are comparable in the sense that they are all analytical databases: they are designed for data warehousing and business intelligence applications. ScaleDB might be a good fit for those …

I was fortunate enough to speak with Marcin Zukowski earlier about VectorWise.  If you missed it, VectorWise came out of stealth mode a day or two ago.  The have announced a joint partnership with Ingres and essentially are claiming impressive analytic RDBMS performance gains on conventional hardware.

To start with, a key message that I think needs to be communicated here is that this is not a product announcement.  Ingres and VectorWise have announced a partnership in which they of course plan to build products together, today those products are still in the works.

VectorWise is a spin out of CWI based on research that was undertaken by Marcin and others, research …

The NoSQL movement has been gaining some steam lately, with discussion forums and mailing lists popping up all around the web.  Despite having a career that has been centered on the RDBMS, I have made no secret that I think we have gone too far down with our RDBMS for everything mindset.  I think we need to add a few more tools back into our data toolbox. 

Today, 99.5% of new data centric developments started will use a RDBMS by default.  Maybe .5 of a % will consider using something as obtuse as a NoSQL platform.  By experience I know the majority of people discussing NoSQL platforms today are web developers.  In fact there is almost a sense of trying to trying to keep this under the radar of DBAs.  If we don’t talk to the DBAs about this stuff then they won’t bother us with all that …