… and points beyond

There’s a point where query response time is low enough that it changes the analysis game completely. This is the amount of time that a decision maker is willing to wait to get the next answer. Not the first answer, but the next one, and the next one. Eventually the frustration of waiting is worse [...]

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I wondered if InfoBright would do this. Before going open-source their website described the product as a kind of bulk-storage and not a data warehouse. A place to put data that you need to remain accessible but which you don’t need to query fast or frequently. That was the enterprise story. As an open-source project, [...]

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Over the weekend I have revisited Tableau, enjoyed some success with MonetDB, tried to turn MySQL into a hundred million row data warehouse, been underwhelmed with Firebird, installed Greenplum and spent many frustrated hours with Talend Open Studio, Pentaho Kettle and Jitterbit.
Of course, I could just buy QlikView, but what can be done for less [...]

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In my world, which is corporate software systems, I have a transactional database that is usually in second normal form and has very few aggregates. Building reports directly means joining at least 4 tables, often 8, and sometimes as many as 12. Unfortunately, the new crop of data warehouse vendors have made it very difficult [...]

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Gartner released the updated quadrant for DW DBMS software and appliances. DATAllegro seems too far below Netezza in ability to execute. DATAllegro has large, proven installations. Their recent releases run on Dell blades with EMC storage instead of the customized FPGAs of Netezza. And how is Greenplum rated higher than DATAllego? (via DBMS2)

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What if you could turn on a massively parallel business intelligence database cluster with a few lines of code? What if you could leverage in-house and outsourced resources for computation and storage as needed? What if you could expand your analysis, data mining and text-search effort one node at a time, transparently, instantly?
There’s been a [...]

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The ideas in this paper will be incorporated into the Vertica database product. And unfortunately it won’t be open source. At least that’s what one company employee commented on Slashdot.
In the same way that RAID design options (e.g. 1, 5 and 10) can accommodate multiple drive failures, the Vertica system will distribute the same slice [...]

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Started by a major contributor to the Ingres and Postgres projects, Vertica is implementing a read-optimized database that is an excellent fit for the data warehouse world. Given the founder’s support of open-source, I expect this company will follow the hybrid commercial/FOSS model of MySQL and others. Some core design features include highly compact storage, [...]

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