… and points beyond

While I have my head in the clouds, I should mention that Vertica has a cloud solution that they manage for you. Not new, but gives some perspective.
With competitive offerings in the $10-20k per terabyte, this is an attractive offer and a great way to try before you invest when you have that much data.
I [...]

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Infobright 3.0.2 Released

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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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One of the most useful tricks shared at the QlikView conference was from Nik Boman on improving the data extraction from databases.
ODBC is a slow protocol, running orders of magnitude slower than the database or a typical Ethernet connection. Very pricey ETL tools for data warehousing get around this by extracting through multiple connections to [...]

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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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I am glad to hear in a presentation from Vertica, that they will be releasing their product for free use under a certain data set size. I do not know if this is intended to distinguish developers from production systems or so that smaller companies can run the product for free (and help establish 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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