This post was a bit of a test to see if I could write a serious post about a database platform called Hamster.  I think I just made it :)

With all the noise over key/value stores recently, we should keep in mind that this technology isn’t exactly new.  It is being applied to new problems, but many of the foundations have been around for decades.  Probably the oldest of them all, Berkley DB came into existence during the mid ‘80’s and now has over 200 million deployments (according to the Oracle web site).

HamsterDB, while not having the same pedigree of Berkley, has been steadily worked on by Christoph Rupp for the last 5 years.  I spoke to Christoph yesterday about his release of a new edition of …

I spoke to Daniel Abadi this morning about his HadoopDB announcement that came out a couple of days back.  I am sure this has been a busy time for Daniel and his team over in Yale as HadoopDB has been getting a lot of interest which I am sure will continue to build.

Some notes from our discussion:

• HadoopDB is primarily focused on high scalability and the required availability at scale.  Daniel questions current MPP’s ability to truly scale past 100 nodes whereas Hadoop has real examples on 3000+ nodes.
• HadoopDB like many MPP analytical database platforms uses shared nothing relational database as processing units. HadoopDB uses Postgres.  Unlike other MPP databases, HadoopDB uses Hadoop as the …

Yes!

Finally, it's there: In a few hours, I will be flying off to San Franscisco to attend OSCON 2009 in San Jose, California. This is the first time I'm attending, and I'm tremendously excited to be there! The sessions look very promising, and I'm looking forward to seeing some excellent speakers. I expect to learn a lot.

I'm also very proud and feel honoured to have the chance to deliver a session myself. It's called Taming Your Data: Practical Data Integration Solutions with Kettle.

Unsurprisingly, I will be talkig a lot about Kettle, a.k.a. Pentaho Data Integration. Recently, I talked about Kettle too at the …

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A while ago, about 16 years ago now, I had a desktop computer.  It wasn’t a PC.  It was an Acorn.  It had an ARM processor in it.  Despite the rest of the world starting going crazy for the new Pentium chip, the Acorn with its ARM processor could run rings about it in terms of computing power.  And it was simple and easy to use, I used to write applications in assembly code for it (and it didn't have a fan!).

Not too long after that Acorn went under, Arm was already off on its own to find a new market.  Its …

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Apparently, Google and Panorama Software has been giving away free analytical and data-mining capabilities within Google Spreadsheets for a while now.

So to spread the word, here is the tutorial page:http://www.panoramasoftware.com/google/pivot-table-overview.html
and here are 2 interviews discussing the product: …

What if you could evaluate, deploy and maintain a Data Warehouse (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) solution for up to 90% less than the cost of proprietary software? What if you can find a solution that has been adopted by customers in all industries and is technically sound and scalable?

You can, with open source Data Warehousing from MySQL and Business Intelligence from Pentaho.

Join this webcast to find out about real world BI/DW deployment strategies that that offer you robust capabilities, yet with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

The MySQL and Pentaho solution has been proven in diverse deployments, from small companies to large enterprises. The subscription support model aligns customer and vendor interests, lowering both your costs and project risks. Join this webcast and learn how to be successful in your BI/DW projects. We will show you how MySQL and Pentaho can easily provide a complete …

Forrester put out its Enterprise Data Management Q2 2009 report a few days ago, you can buy it from Forrester but it also seems to now be available for free from Microsoft here.  I don’t actively seek out these reports as they usually just re-enforce common knowledge (this one was no exception), however as it turned up I managed to find some time on the weekend for a quick read through.

Few surprises in this report, but some key mentions are:

• DBMS market expected to grow 8% annually
• IBM, Microsoft & Oracle own 88% of the DBMS market (by revenue)
• Current market estimated at $27 billion, $32 billion by 2013
• IBM, Ingres, Microsoft, Oracle, PostgreSQL, …

(yeah, this company is going to have to get used to the Austin Powers references.)

Groovy Corp put out a press release last night that starts the official launch of their SQL Switch relational database platform.

I have been speaking with Groovy for a few months, and while the press release is a bit noisy there is actually some interesting stuff in it.

First, an overview

• They are an in memory RDBMS
• They have worked with Intel to architect from the ground up for large multi processor concurrency
• Initially they are launching as a multi-core appliance
• They claim 200,000 sql operations per second from a single box
• They are proprietary (not built on MySQL or any other open source …

Recently on a number of sites the benefits for and against have been debated with, on occasion, these conversations falling into abuse being thrown in both directions.

From a pure technical perspective, the TPC benchmarks make little sense and are probably not relevant to 99% of organizations looking to implement a database technology.  But as a tool for generating visibility, debate and improved public awareness of a vendors technology they still have an impact. 

This is marketing, pure and simple.  Having a great TPC result is akin to an author having a great review on Amazon.  Doesn’t mean it is relevant for you but if faced with a stack of titles you haven’t yet read you’ll probably look more closely at the ones you’ve heard something positive about.

TPC’s are a tool for the marketing department, just the same as any other form of …

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BI/Data Warehousing is an easier market to enter for new database platform vendors.  This is for a few reasons.  Firstly, most BI deployments are custom built projects for each organization.  This means the ability to pick and choose various layers of the stack is much greater. 

Secondly, BI/DW projects success/failure metrics are often tied to database platform driven properties – performance, scalability, load times etc.  The ability to stray outside any existing database platform “standards” to choose a platform that better meets key metrics is more tolerable.

Thirdly, because the ratio of BI to OLTP is low, the associated impact of violating a corporate standard is much lower.  With OLTP …