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 …

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 …

Image by RaghuP via Flickr

It is important to realize that there is less diversity in the enterprise OLTP market than at any point in the last 20 years.  Essentially this market has been boiled down to Oracle, SQL Server & DB2 (with few isolated exceptions).   Most new deployments are typically using one of the first two options.  The lack of diversity has created a stalemate or chicken & egg situation.  Enterprises now only want to install new applications that have been built to support Oracle or SQL Server.  This is …

I have been speaking with a lot or new database vendors over the last 12 months and this has prompted me to revisit a post I wrote mid last year.  The basic premise of this post is that your strategy, and the group of people you’re selling to, largely depends on the market sector you are focusing on (Enterprise OLTP, BI/DW, Cloud & Web 2.0).

A database platform by itself is a largely pointless piece of software.  The only way value is produced from a database platform is through the applications that interact with it.  Therefore the only way to be a successful database platform is by making others successful and motivated to use your platform.

Ok, so as a database platform vendor how do you enter this market then? Well there are a few strategies.  Due to the length of this article I have broken it up into Enterprise OLTP, Enterprise Data Warehousing and Cloud & Web 2.0

Image by ToniVC via Flickr

SmugMug wins Best Design at The Crunchies 2007 by Luca Filigheddu Photography

I loved the idea behind The Crunchies even before we won for Best Design last year so I’m glad to see their triumphant return. And I see that nominations are open for 2008!

It looks like we’re probably eligible for a number of categories, but even if you don’t think we’re worthy, please go nominate your favorite startups. It really means a lot to the teams that work on these companies. Nothing like a little validation for all of our hard work…

…

This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader. Whitehurst’s presentation lacked anything especially insightful or noteworthy and he has the advantage of being the new guy so he’s off the hook for anything that might have happened before he took the job.

What is apparent Red Hat’s no longer exciting. They’ve crossed over to …

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