Full Table Scan - Links

Links for the Week

tom@fulltablescan.com (Tom) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:57:00 -0400

Ok, so at this point, the best I can do is bad jokes and link collections. Real content will resume next week. I hope.

• "The Drizzle project is building a database optimized for Cloud and Net applications. It is being designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-cpu/core architecture. The code is originally derived from MySQL." Really? I'll believe it when I see it...

• Apparently I'm not the only one questioning the over-use of the term "appliance".

• LewisC has suggested some new database taglines. My suggestion for a Netezza tagline: With so many lights, it must be fast.

• My first thought when I read Good Data had gotten funding was "uh-huh", but now I think I might want to sign up for their limited beta.

Links for the Week

tom@fulltablescan.com (Tom) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:57:00 -0400

Disclaimer: some of these are a bit old for the obvious reason.

• Apparently there was a recent radio show about columnar databases. Go figure.

• This TDWI article about Aster Data left me scratching my head. Is this a description of Aster's nCluster product or every MPP database ever?

• xkoto "enables commercial off-the-shelf databases to run on a cluster of commodity systems with the same or better reliability and performance as much more expensive proprietary systems". Sounds like a poor man's Oracle RAC to me, not that that's necessarily a bad thing.

• Google search trends for Netezza, DATAllegro, ParAccel, Vertica and Dataupia over the last 12 months. I wonder why Vertica gets so much attention in Canada.

• A great interview with Don Feinberg about hosted database services (both DBaaS and cloud-based). Especially cool is the grid of vendors on the second page.

• Two weeks ago I found this blog post very interesting. I'm no longer sure why.

Links for the Week

tom@fulltablescan.com (Tom) — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:07:00 -0400

• A blog post by an admittedly-biased KickFire employee who makes some interesting points about power consumption.

• DATAllegro's take on why they're better than Netezza. We don't get to see open and public assaults like this nearly often enough.

• An interesting perspective on InfoBright, especially given Netezza's recent acquisition of NuTech Solutions (which was founded by Dr. Zbigniew Michalewicz).

• In yet another spin on the term appliance, VMWare is making available virtual appliances - "pre-built, pre-configured, ready-to-run enterprise applications packaged with an operating system inside a virtual machine". Why does this matter to you? Because there are Vertica, DB2 Express-C, Ingres, MS SQL Server 2005, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Derby and Firebird virtual appliances available. Pretty cool, huh?

• A good writeup of some of the announcements made at last week's TDWI World Conference. Of particular interest to me is the final portion about Sybase. More on that later.

Links for the Week

tom@fulltablescan.com (Tom) — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:14:00 -0400

Regarding the last link in this list, I have to ask: is there any reason InfoBright's approach couldn't be applied to a row-based system? Sounds a lot like Netezza Zone Maps to me... Thoughts/opinions/answers, anyone? (InfoBright, are you listening?)

• I'm not 100% positive, but I believe that these comments are about Ab Initio. Regardless, this sounds like another potential piece of a Data Management System.

• Don't Just Do Something, Stand There! Avoiding Junior DBA Mistakes - This article is four years old, but it's still damn good advice.

• Vertica Analytic Database for the Cloud - This could very quietly become the biggest shock to the database industry since Netezza.

• Oracle Caches In on Its Acquired TimesTen Technology - Interesting thoughts on Oracle's use of its TimesTen product. Multi-temperature databases, anyone?

• SQL Server 2008 Data Warehousing Solutions - Setting aside the fact that the title sounds like an oxymoron, I'm not sure there's anything here other than "me too" features. MS clearly continues to close the gap on Oracle and DB2 though, at least feature-wise.

• A good write-up about InfoBright by David Raab. Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough, but this is the first lucid description of why InfoBright is different that I've seen.

Links for the Week

tom@fulltablescan.com (Tom) — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:21:00 -0400

Ok, I admit it, a couple of these are left over from last week...

• KickFire 300GB TPC-H results

• Recording of the Vertica/LogiXML webinar "A New Era in Business Intelligence" that was presented last Wednesday. Worth watching if you missed it.

• 1010data - "A revolutionary, high–performance, user–friendly, web–based service for analyzing and managing data"

• ANTs Software - ANTs develops "full-featured, standards-compliant relational database management system (RDBMS) that supports the SQL92 database programming language as well as the most popular features from SQL 99". Their data sheet is chock full of interesting assertions, particularly about how fast and cheap the system is. I will have to learn more...

• Slides from Monty Widenius’s “Future Design Hurdles to Tackle in the MySQL Server” presentation at the recent MySQL Conference and Expo. (Courtesy of this blog post, which is also worth reading.)

• pgpool-II - "middleware that works between PostgreSQL servers and a PostgreSQL database client" to provide connection pooling, replication and parallel query functionality, among others.

• KickFire: MySQL Data Box for the Rest of Us by Jason Perlow

• A Flash overview of the KickFire appliance - A good high level overview, but the narrator is a bit overzealous.