The reaction to the hype of Hadoop is starting to get interesting … Computerworld has a great new article on what the big DB vendors are saying about the mass movement into Hadoop and its complimentary technologies. Very interesting read.
I was reading up on the Oracle Magazine – the Ask Tom section in the November/December issue (posted here) has a quick summary of some of the new features in 11g. Two of them really caught my attention as they look really promising in dealing with some of the day-to-day scenarios we tend to tackle in warehousing.
I’ve recently been taking a look at Vertica, a relatively new player in the analytics DBMS world (of which there are now several contenders including some known names like Netezza and Greenplum). Vertica’s flagship product is a MPP database solution that apparently has some huge scalability potential (we keep reading about handfuls of nodes for now, but the research suggests it can scale much further and is rather straightforward to do so).
I was browsing the MySQL 5.1 documentation and noticed this statement on the main page:
Rob Preston’s little article on BI infancy is fantastic quick read on the state of BI in the real-world (forget all the cute things you hear from BI vendors), with pointers to some excellent studies and other articles. I love the quote from Randy Mott, HP’s CIO (they got a huge DW): “There was no lack of data. But there was a lack of consistent, timely data spanning different parts of the business.” Keywords: Timely and Consistent – how true! And that comes from a place that more than likely spent millions on their BI infrastructure.
Our latest white paper is out – get the PDF version here. We’ve titled it “The $1500 Oracle Data Warehouse” – cutesy title, but I hope will catch some attention. Although the full warehouse costs just a tad more than that (hey, some one’s gotta pay the developers and BI folks! 
), the point should be clear enough … there are ways to get a solid prototype data warehouse for those who need to prove the value of Business Intelligence to upper management, especially management in smaller companies who may have heard some Oracle (or general DW) horror stories.
I love simple tools – just love ‘em. I love when smart people build easy to use, intuitive tools for the good of mankind (ok, maybe not all of mankind). I’m no web developer – no problem admitting that (hey, I’m a DB guy) – and I don’t do “Web 2.0″ (aside from collecting and reporting on all the events which come from those slick apps). So when I see great front-end products which make my life easier, I want to publicly thank folks, especially when they are kind enough to contribute their work to the open source world.
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