Aug 23rd, 2010
Avid readers will remember that I have written about EntropySoft a couple of times over the last two years. It is a specialist provider of content connectors, providing normalised access to content repositories. The connectors are optimised for particular purposes, for example Search or Data Loss Prevention.
The company also offers two broader products known respectively [...]
Aug 19th, 2010
I have been doing some thinking about (complex) event processing recently and it seems to me that, with the exception of companies that are very strongly focusing on capital markets (notably Sybase [SAP] and, to a lesser extent, StreamBase), the clear trend in the market is towards merging with other forms of “processing” technology.
You can [...]
Aug 11th, 2010
I will leave it to others to comment on the overall impact that Mark Hurd has had on HP since he became CEO, and the only general remark I will make about his departure is that a drop in the share price of something approaching 10% seems pretty much overdone. What I will discuss is [...]
Jul 9th, 2010
The announcement that EMC is to acquire Greenplum is not altogether a surprise—it was always a possibility that EMC might decide to move into the data warehousing space for itself, given the number of its existing partners in that space—if it chose to do so the main question was who it would choose to acquire. [...]
Jul 9th, 2010
Demand for analytics is exploding. Not surprisingly, there is a surge of new products and technologies designed to support that interest. Some of these new products or technologies are at the platform level and others are more in the way of development tools while some have elements of both.
In the first category are in-database analytics [...]
Jun 30th, 2010
This is the second of two articles about storage optimisation. In the first I discussed how an optimal solution would be one based around discovering (at a detailed level) all of your SAN infrastructure resources (servers, disks and so on) in real-time to create a consolidated view of the entire environment.
Then for the solution to [...]
Jun 28th, 2010
This is the first of two articles about storage optimisation. In this article I will discuss what the issue is and in the second I will consider how vendors are (or, mostly, are not) addressing the real problems that users are facing.
Take a simple scenario in which you have three applications running against three separate [...]
Jun 16th, 2010
I wrote about RainStor back in December, just after they changed their name from Clearpace Software and moved their headquarters to the United States (though development continues primarily in the UK).
As a reminder, RainStor provides a highly compressed (typically 40 times but can be as much as 100 times) file system. A couple of notable [...]
Jun 15th, 2010
Pervasive has just released version 4.4 of its DataRush platform. Which you might think, being a point release, is just more of the same (whatever that same is—I’ll come to that in a moment). However, that would be an incorrect assumption: DataRush 4.4 represents a radical and important new direction.
So, to go back to the [...]
Jun 14th, 2010
There are scads of NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Apache Cassandra. According to Wikipedia there are 44 of them—though that isn’t a very accurate listing because InterSystems Caché, for example, does support SQL. Non-relational would be a more accurate distinction but I think it’s a bit silly to include object-oriented, multi-valued and key-valued databases, [...]
Jun 11th, 2010
It is easy to say what Kapow (the product) is: it’s a web data server that is available either as a product or via software as a service (SaaS). However, that doesn’t tell you what it does or, more especially, what it can be used for. This is because web data services have such broad [...]
May 14th, 2010
SAP has announced its intention to acquire Sybase. Now, there are two major parts to Sybase: its information management products and its mobile computing. There are some other bits, like PowerBuilder, but these are the main two.
In its press release SAP makes much of the complementary nature of Sybase’s mobile computing and, while I am [...]
Feb 19th, 2010
Last week I attended an Informatica analyst event. There was a lot to digest but here are some highlights.
To begin with, the company talked about its acquisition of Siperian. I have already commented on this but one point that emerged at the conference was the way that Informatica describes Siperian as infrastructure MDM as opposed [...]
Feb 17th, 2010
I have been preaching the columnar message for data warehousing for the best part of ten years. That argument has been won. However it is now clear that columns on their own aren’t enough. Yes, they give you a great performance boost; yes, they are better able to support improved compression; and, yes they require [...]
Feb 17th, 2010
You often hear security officers, not to mention vendors, talk about fraud detection and prevention but you seldom (never in my experience) hear anyone talking about Bribery. However, in the wake of BAE Systems settlement with the both the UK and US authorities, it is worth paying a little more attention to it. In particular, [...]
