M-A-O-L

A load of Netezza updates were piling up in my feed reader, so here’s an update just to get them out…

• A partial overview of Netezza database software technology
• A Seriously Happy Customer Exposes a Common Dilemma
• The Netezza and IBM DB2 approaches to compression
• Netezza Migrator™: A Point of Clarification
• Netezza’s silicon balance

The recent releases of SQL Anywhere 12 and SQL Server Compact 4.0 got me thinking about a pet project of mine, basically providing a very cheap SQL persistence layer to fill the gap between Excel / MS Access and the multi-gigabytes typically stored in ‘real’ RDBMS. I’ve been thinking in terms of SQL Clouds such as Microsoft’s SQL Azure or Amazon’s Relational Database Service. But why limit the developer’s freedom with the cloud services, and not just provide a simple integrated SQL store? H2 could be another popular candidate, but limited to Java.

I’ll be looking into that some more… for now, there are 10 Cool New Features In SQL Anywhere 12 and an Introduction to SQL Server Compact 4.0, the Next Gen Embedded Database from Microsoft. And a follow-up on a slightly related topic, (SQL) Azure Appliance, Gartner’s Chris Wolf has a nice write-up of On-Premise Microsoft Azure: An Inevitable Milestone in Azure’s Evolution.

Oracle’s Critical Patch Update July 2010 is out, with two easy to exploit DoS vulnerabilities in the Database network stack (although one on Windows only), and one critical vulnerability in the OLAP component – let’s just hope that this one opens the DB for attack if OLAP is actually linked in… because I guess most people’s Oracle will not have OLAP built in.

There are three more DB vulnerabilities – check the DB matrix in the appendix for details.

As usual our lucky French Eric Maurice gives the full rundown at the Oracle Security Blog.

Microsoft formally announced its Windows Azure Platform Appliance today, as TechCrunchIT reports.

Dell, eBay, Fujitsu, and HP intend to deploy the appliance in their datacenters to offer new cloud services.

While that’s nice to know, I’m much more interested to hear by when we can get our own appliance, and what the configuration sizes and support requirements are going to be.

On a related note, the SQL CAT team released its SQL Azure Customer Best Practices a while ago.

Oracle’s Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Announcement – July 2010 arrived online, and the nice folks at Integrigy already published their standard CPU pre-release analysis.

I’m a bit worried about the number of highly critical Database alerts, four out of six vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable without authentication. Hope that’s just on Windows (as was often the case in the past), or in obscure features or functions that aren’t enabled by default.

SQL legend Mike Stonebraker gave a session on SQL Urban Myths, and how VoltDB works around them. Todd Hoff then took the arguments and described, analyzed and commented on them on great detail. Excellent read for anybody interested in SQL DBs and their future!
Via DBMS2.

I had such a busy day that I didn’t get to post about EMC buying Greenplum. But there’s a good side to the delay too, because now I get to link to all the other folks who were faster than I, and have something to say on the topic.

• EMC To Acquire Greenplum
• EMC is buying Greenplum
• EMC Acquires Data Warehouse Vendor Greenplum; Creates New “Data Computing” Product Division
• Quick thoughts on EMC acquiring Greenplum
• EMC Buys Greenplum – Big Data Realignment Continues
• EMC Picks a Greenplum
• EMC buys Greenplum – But how reliable are analytics without MDM?
• And, finally, Netezza weighing in as well: EMC Swallows a Green Plum?

A good two page primer about DWH projects, start to end: Data Warehousing Architect – A Beginners Guide.

[...] Data warehousing is a process and just not about beautiful dashboards and colorful graphs. There is  nothing called a perfect data warehousing solution that fits all. There are not  right or wrong answers here and this makes the job of the architect all the  more important. I firmly believe a data warehousing technologist is more like  a Psychiatrist, only that we earn a lot lesser

Via Oracle’s ArchBeat.

Oracle is inviting for its Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Launch on 7. July. Charles Phillips, President, and Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Product Development are going to be at the London launch event, and will be broadcasted to local events throughout Europe. I may go to the Zurich launch event.

A slew of updates on Apache Hadoop, nicely compiled by the nice folks at the 451 group:

• Cloudera launched v3 of its Distribution for Hadoop and released v1 of Cloudera Enterprise.
• Karmasphere released new Professional and Analyst Editions of its Hadoop development and deployment studio.
• Talend announced that its Integration Suite now offers native support for Hadoop.
• Yahoo announced the beta release of Hadoop with Security and Oozie, Yahoo’s workflow engine for Hadoop.
• Datameer announced a strategic partnership with Zementis for predictive analytics on Hadoop.
• The Register reported that Twitter is set to open source its MySQL-to-Hadoop tool.
• MicroStrategy announced support for Apache Hadoop as a data source for MicroStrategy 9.
• Appistry announced Hadoop-based strategic alliances Concurrent, Datameer and Kitenga.
• GOTO Metrics released Data Analytics Platform, a Hadoop-based business intelligence platform.

And Monash can tell us a bit more about Cloudera Enterprise. He actually mentions

Financial services uses for Hadoop include: Internal trading rule enforcement/fraud detection, Complex ETL,Portfolio risk assessment (typically overnight).

Which is slightly different from what Teradata’s CTO told me at their CTO Road Show in Zurich last week, where I did raise the question about MapReduce in the financial industry. But then again maybe he was just saying that none of their Finance customers uses Teradata’s new MapReduce engine yet…