Data warehouse snapshot

This is going to be very concise. By which I mean that so many things have been happening that there isn’t enough space to talk about all these announcements in any detail.

I’ll start off on the sales front. Of course, the companies that you would expect to see gaining sales have been, but it’s also good to hear that some of the smaller companies, like Kognitio, Exasol and Dataupia (in the UK) have been picking up significant new accounts. Also, after a period in which the company went quite quiet, ParAccel has moved into new offices, doubled its workforce, and has a number of ongoing POCs. Greenplum has opened offices in the UK and Vertica now has a foot on the ground in Europe as well.

Illuminate is also doing some interesting things in terms of its sales and support. Which is that it is outsourcing all of it. To be clear, it will appoint third parties in different countries to act as its sales force, though it will keep a sales management role. Similarly, installation and first level support services will be outsourced. This sounds radical but the company has clearly thought about it in some detail and already has some arrangements in place. It will be interesting to see how successful it is.

On a more technical note, Aster Data has announced that it is now (as far as I know and apart from Hadoop) the only company to support MapReduce via cloud-based computing while another cloud supporting vendor, Vertica, has announced support for virtualisation. That is, it will run under VMWare. I am not entirely convinced about this since performance deteriorates but if convenience outweighs performance then I guess this may win friends and influence people.

Netezza and Kalido have announced a partnership. Good move on both sides: it extends the range of data warehouses supported by Kalido, which has historically been rather limited, while making the implementation and setup of Netezza implementations faster and simpler from a software and design point of view.

IBM has announced that it will be introducing an Informix Warehousing Feature that will enable existing Informix users to support operational BI directly from a transactional environment without needing a warehouse. IBM also plans to introduce InfoSphere Warehouse on System z, which adds a number of new facilities to the mainframe’s existing abilities to support DB2 warehousing.

Next there’s Microsoft’s announcements about reference architectures to support various hardware platforms in what it is referring to as the Microsoft SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse (which is arguably more of a mouthful than some of IBM’s product nomenclature) plus, of course, its plans for DATAllegro, now code-named Madison.

Then there’s the release of Sybase IQ 15 (it would have been 13 but that’s unlucky and 14 is apparently unlucky in China). This has been long awaited and merits more detailed analysis but briefly it moves IQ from an architecture in which you had multiple read nodes and one write node to one in which you can have multiple read/write nodes and multiple read nodes. This should significantly improve load speeds and performance. Also, as you would expect from a major architectural release there are a bunch of other enhancements and new features that cover pretty much the whole gamut of things you might expect.

Finally, we have other new releases and announcements coming from Kickfire, ParAccel, illuminate et al in the near future, so there is a lot to look forward to. This reflects the fact that the data warehousing market continues to grow, despite the current economic situation.