Intelligent Enterprise

THE INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE WEBLOG

Blog Entries by Date

Waiting for Answers From Oracle

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
12:33 PM

As I wrote last week, the information available on the HP Oracle Database Machine and HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server is incomplete. Pertinent questions are on the table, but I've been unsuccessful, thus far, in getting answers. Maybe the right people are taking a few well-deserved days off after Oracle Open World or maybe they're observing Rosh Hashanah. Nonetheless, I've not heard back on requests made Friday and again yesterday. I have, however, talked to HP about the fit between this new product and Neoview.

To review, the key questions about the HP-Oracle offering get into the nuts and bolts of the hardware. Is it shared-nothing architecture through and through, and, if not, how does the optimizer negotiate between the two sides of the devise (database and storage)? Second, if it's built on "industry standard" hardware, just how does it put query processing power "on each and every disk," as suggested by Larry Ellison? Netezza, for example, gains its performance by putting query processing power on a Field Programmable Gate Array on each and every disk, but that's proprietary hardware.

Continue reading "Waiting for Answers From Oracle "

Comments

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
9:41 AM

As I "pen" my 51st blog for IntelligentEnterprise.com, I'd like to take a different slant on the usual blog: What I, as a writer, expect from you, our reader. The continuing, unprecedented economic turbulence that is roiling us all provides a relevant backdrop to this note...

As a biz-tech writer with an established biz-tech publication, I am constantly striving to determine where lies that intersecting subset of what interests me, what interests you, and what passes by our beloved editor. Data structures and distributed operating systems? Interesting stuff for me, but likely much too theoretical for you. Social Web sites used for social purposes? Might be an essential part of your day, but leave me largely disinterested or wary even. Humor from the inimitable P. G. Wodehouse? Could have us both in tears of mirth (unless, of course, skewed – and skewered – stories of Edwardian England bore you), but will surely have Doug Henschen reaching for his editor's scissors.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, September 29, 2008
12:33 PM

A question I posed to a LinkedIn group — Is Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) a BI Application? — sparked interesting discussion. I noted and asked, "BAM involves dashboards and analyses for business processes, and BI isn't typically very processy. If not BI, who 'owns' BAM?" There have been 9 responses to date, including two from Howard Dresner, who has done as much as anyone to shape current-day BI. The responses speak to growing interest in operational BI, and they hint at the impact that complex event processing (CEP) will have on enterprise analytics.

BAM displays operational performance indicators in numerical and graphical form, often backed by rules-based alerting capabilities. BAM monitors execution of business processes and is part of operational-performance management solutions. It can be incorporated in line-of-business and operational interfaces, for instance for contact-center management, and in automated control systems. As the speed-of-business accelerates, BAM is more important than ever.

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, September 29, 2008
9:10 AM

I got so many letters (isn't that a quaint way to say "email messages?") about the Hy Minsky posting that I wanted to pass along a fairly readable paper he wrote that spells out his Financial Instability Hypothesis.

Back to the topic. I listened carefully for the better part of two-and-a-half hours last week to Thomas Kurian, Sr. VP of Oracle, present the entire product set and positioning of Oracle's Fusion Middleware. He didn't crack any jokes and more or less stuck to the slide deck; nevertheless it was amazingly interesting. I liked almost everything I heard, especially the parts that were user-centric, such as unified metadata, common business semantics with shared logical models, single development environment, etc.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Friday, September 26, 2008
5:04 PM

This is my first time attending Oracle Open World. I met it with a degree of trepidation when a colleague told me 60,000 people attend. 60,000??! The official count was 43,000, but still, that’s more than twice the size of my home town and 10 to 20 times the size of the typical BI conferences I attend.

So I was a little worried about the BI sessions and customers getting lost beneath the weight of the larger lines of Oracle's businesses (mainly the database and operational apps) — let alone how do that many people move among venues?

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, September 26, 2008
10:46 AM

The whole concept of the data warehouse appliances has gone from "an interesting niche in the market to something that's smack dab in the middle of the mainstream market." That's how Jim Baum, president and COO of Netezza, sized up the importance of this week's announcement of the HP Oracle Database Machine. That's the big picture, but having interviewed Netezza and Teradata executives thus far, it's clear that they, along with analysts and potential customers, are still struggling to size up the actual product. I'm still gathering opinions, but here's a short list of questions raised thus far:

Posted by Curt Monash
Thursday, September 25, 2008
1:49 AM

Oracle, in partnership with HP, has announced a new data warehouse appliance product line, cleverly branded "Exadata." The basic idea seems to be that database processing is split among two sets of servers:

• (The new stuff) A set of back-end servers — the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers — that gets data off of disk and does some preliminary query processing.
• (The old stuff) A conventional Oracle RAC cluster on the front-end.

Numbers are being thrown around suggesting that, unlike prior Oracle offerings, the Exadata-based appliance at least has scalability and price/performance worth comparing to Teradata — hey, Exa is bigger than Tera! — Netezza, et al.

Posted by Curt Monash
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
12:54 PM

Omer Trajman of column-store DBMS vendor Vertica put up a must-read blog spelling out detailed compression numbers, based on actual field experience (which I'd guess is from a combination of production systems and POCs):

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
11:14 AM

Could technology have saved Wall Street from its current financial crisis? That's something I've been thinking about over the last few days as I've scramble to move at least some of my money into FDIC-insured accounts at multiple institutions. From my perspective, the Fannies, Freddies, Lehmans and AIGs of this world no doubt had plenty of risk analysis, predictive analytics, and business rules technology to see and avoid the risk. They just ignored the danger signs or, worse, used the technology to paper over the risks.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
9:11 AM

It was with some measure of satisfaction that I saw Justin Cutroni's blog on Google Analytics compliance with Web Analytics Association (WAA) metrics standards. Cutroni works for EpikOne, a Google Analytics Authorized Partner.

You see, I'm asking all of the vendors I'm evaluating in Web Analytics Report to explain how they comply with the standards. The timing of this blog was perhaps no coincidence, as I've been working with Cutroni on updating my evaluation of Google Analytics.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, September 22, 2008
11:14 AM

Lyzasoft, Inc. calls its Lyza software a "powerful desktop analytics solution." According to the company, Lyza "enables analysts to synthesize, explore, and visualize data, then to publish compelling presentations and dashboards." Lyza seems worth considering as a personal data-integration tool, but it appears to fall short of greater claims.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Friday, September 19, 2008
11:32 AM

Readers of the Web Analytics Report know that there are many steps to creating a successful Web analytics initiative — such as developing a strong organization, and creating processes to ensure that analytics get integrated into the mainstream of a company's operations.

If you're a Web analytics manager for a large organization, one of the biggest challenges you likely face in creating enterprisewide standards is at the very heart of Web analytics: data collection.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, September 18, 2008
7:09 AM

Richard Brown of Thomson Reuters delivered an illuminating talk, "News, Blogs, and Full-Tick Logs: Innovative Approaches to Quantitative and Event-Driven Trading," Tuesday at Gartner's Event Processing Summit. The summit and the Event Processing Technical Society symposium now underway feature many such use cases, descriptions of low-latency transformation and analysis of high-volume data and event streams as applied to diverse business problems. Brown's case study, which looked at exploiting information from unstructured sources to support financial-market trading, was of particular interest (to me) due to its combination of events, text sources, and sentiment analysis.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
4:12 PM

"If your Web site sucks, it's your own fault." That's the tough love Avinash Kaushik shared today here at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference in New York in a presentation entiled "Web Analytics 2.0: Rethinking Decision Making in a '2.0' World." Kaushik offered a bunch of great advice on how to better measure site performance and he also listed a handful of free tools. "So there can be no more excuses" like not having enough data, not having the right data or not having enough money for Web analytics, he concluded.

Posted by Shawn Shell
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
8:51 AM

In case you didn't read the blog entry about CMIS by Kas Thomas, Microsoft, EMC, and IBM recently announce that they, along with other vendors like Open Text and Alfresco, have submitted a new content integration standard to OASIS. This new standard should enable disparate content management solutions to exchange content in a more standardized way. Presumably, this standard will enable organizations with multiple content repositories manage and present (to various applications) those repositories as a virtual content store. If history is to teach us anything about Microsoft's behavior, it would seem logical that Redmond will likely release a SharePoint "accelerator" to take advantage of this new standard.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
2:12 PM

Today I'm at the Gartner Event Processing Summit in Stamford, Conn., and much of the buzz here is about what's going down on Wall Street. That's no surprise given that about 70 percent of the attendees here are from financial institutions. There have been plenty of jokes about not being able to buy paper clips, let alone enterprise technology. That said, I did see at least some tire kicking in the exhibit hall, and among the 15 vendors exhibiting at this smallish, 150-attendee hotel event, almost every one of them seemed to be showing off a dashboard-style interface.

As Gartner analyst Roy Schulte's observes in this week's in-depth Q&A interview, dashboards showing current (or at least near-real-time) business metrics have never been hotter. We're seeing these types of interfaces from BI vendors, BAM vendors and complex-event-processing (CEP) vendors alike. It's a healthy sign of a meeting of the minds between business and IT.

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, September 15, 2008
5:29 PM

When it comes to analytics, Wall Street is clearly the leader. The best of the best head there after school to grab six-figure starting salaries. Some even see seven figures, based on their performance. They are the rara avises, the crθme-de-la-crθme, and whenever we speak about "Competing on Analytics," it goes without saying that Wall Street analytics represent the exemplar of what is possible for an analytic culture.

So why is Wall Street melting down?

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, September 15, 2008
2:08 PM

There's more to/about the Infobright open-source announcement than I covered in my Intelligent Enterprise article. I have thoughts to share on Infobright's architecture and limitations of the release. There's more to say about the MySQL data-warehousing context and then there's the puzzle of the significantly delayed MySQL 5.1 general availability (GA) release.

Posted by Curt Monash
Monday, September 15, 2008
11:16 AM

Infobright announced today that it's going full-bore into open source – specifically in the MySQL ecosystem — with the licensing approach, pricing, distribution strategy, and VC money from Sun that such a move naturally entails. I think this is a great idea, for a number of reasons:

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Friday, September 12, 2008
9:58 AM

Is software as a service a viable option for process improvement projects? Michele Cantera covered some of the same material here at this week's Gartner BPM Summit in Washington DC, as the SaaS and BPM session in February, but there was some new information as well. For example, based on 2007 estimates, she segmented the BPM SaaS adopters into four categories:

• Pragmatists, forming 49% of the market, are replacing departmental on-premise applications but don't have an enterprise-wide scope.
• Beginners, 40% of the market, are replacing low-end software tools with simple utility applications. These are often small or medium businesses who don't want to grow an IT department.
• Masters, 10% of the market, are weaving SaaS applications into their enterprise-wide application portfolio.
• Visionaries, a mere 1%, are actively replacing on-premise applications with SaaS wherever possible.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, September 11, 2008
2:40 PM

Advanced visualization isn't easy to get right. Simply put, our ability to generate and crunch data, and the palette of visualization options available to us, have outstripped our ability to choose charts and options that are appropriate for our data and effectively communicate important interrelationships. Nonetheless, we all know that visualization done right can really boost BI's value.

The visualization approaches taken by leading BI companies vary significantly. Some have built out their capabilities nicely — notably MicroStrategy and SAS — while others continue to promote more-of-the-same-but-glitzier graphs and charts. In a worst-case scenario, we even have a major analytics vendor that’s fumbled its latest visualization launch.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, September 11, 2008
10:45 AM

At yesterday's lunch presentation at the Gartner BPM Summit in Washington DC, Alan Trefler (CEO of Pegasystems) discussed how it's necessary — and possible — to put business process management right in the hands of the business users and let them do it themselves. There will be some IT architectural oversight and support, of course, but you just have to convince the users, Tom Sawyer-like, that they really want to paint this fence.

Posted by Kas Thomas
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
1:13 PM

It's often said that the great thing about industry standards is that there are so many of them. Now we have one more.

Today, three of the biggest behemoths of content management (namely IBM, Microsoft, and EMC) announced a new standard... one that, if it does indeed become an accepted standard, is supposed do for the content-management world what ODBC and SQL did for the database world. (We've heard that one before, but keep reading anyway.)

Posted by Curt Monash
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
12:16 PM

I talk with lots of vendors of MPP data warehouse DBMS. I've now heard enough different approaches to MPP architecture that I think it might be interesting to contrast some of the alternatives. The base-case MPP DBMS architecture is one in which there are two kinds of nodes:

A boss node, whose jobs include:
- Receiving and parsing queries
- Optimizing queries, determining execution plans, and sending execution plans to the nodes
- Receiving result sets and sending them back to the querier
Worker nodes, which do their part of the query execution job and eventually ship data back to the head

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
11:29 AM

Peter Dadam of University of Ulm helped wrap up last week's BPM 2008: Milan conference with a keynote on the future of BPM: Flying with the Eagles, or Scratchin' with the Chickens? He went through some of his history in getting into research (in the IBM DB2 area), with a conclusion that when you ask current users about what they want, they tend to use the current technology as a given, and only request workarounds within the constraints of the existing solution. The role of research is, in part, to disseminate knowledge about what is possible: the new paradigm for the future. Anyone who has worked on the bleeding edge of innovation recognizes this, and realizes that you first have to educate the market on what's possible before you can begin to start developing the use cases for it.

He discussed the nature of university research versus industrial research, where the pendulum has swung from research being done in universities, to the more significant research efforts being done (or being perceived as being done) in industrial research centers, to the closing of many industrial research labs and a refocusing on pragmatic, product-oriented research by the rest. This puts the universities back in the position of being able to offer more visionary research, but there is a risk of just being the research tail that the industry dog wags.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
8:55 AM

"Better, easier, lower-cost" and "more flexible." These were the adjectives respondents to a recent InformationWeek / IntelligentEnterprise survey used most often when asked "what's at the top of your business intelligence wish list?" The survey was conducted this summer and is behind this week's in-depth feature "Special Report: BI Gets Smart," as well as a full report with the complete survey results. The words "better, lower-cost," and "more flexible" applied to a range of wishes, but here are the top "must haves":

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, September 5, 2008
10:43 AM

Yesterday I got a call from my friend Paul Steep at Scotia Capital regarding this announcement from ECM vendor Open Text. Yes, you guessed it, Open Text is acquring again. Just as I predicted in July the firm has announced its intentions to buy Captaris.

At first glance it appears to be a good deal for Open Text, as it provides them with capture technology (image and text recognition, a' la Kofax) that they previously lacked. Captaris themselves acquired Oce Document Technology (ODT) a German-based forms recognition firm in January 2008 and absorbed its DOKuStar product range.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Friday, September 5, 2008
10:09 AM

I've been excited about attending this weeks' BPM 2008: Milan conference for months since it's focused on the research that's happening in the field of BPM, rather than the usual vendor and analyst conference that I attend. As a prelude to the conference, there was a full-day workshops on various BPM topics, and I attended a session on BPM and Social Software.

The workshop was chaired by Selmin Nurcan of the University of Paris and Rainer Schmidt of Aalen University, and will consist of discussion of the various research papers contributed by the attendees — in fact, I seem to be one of the few people in the (small) audience who has not contributed a paper.

Before we got into the individual papers, Rainer Schmidt gave an overview of the issues in BPM and social software. I gave a presentation two years ago at the BPMG conference in London on BPM and Web 2.0 (the terms Enterprise 2.0 and social software were just starting to be used back then) that covers some of the same subject matter.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
4:13 PM

For all the coverage of the Chrome Web browser announcement, little note has been taken of Google's choice of the ultra-liberal BSD open-source license. The BSD choice accentuates that Chrome will be more (and very likely less) than a conventional Web browser. Chrome will contribute Web rendering to an increasingly comprehensive enterprise software platform and may (further) tie non-Google application developers to the Google stack.

Posted by Kas Thomas
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
3:34 PM

It's too soon to know what to make of Google's new Chrome browser (I've only been hammering on it a short time), but I have to admit I was disappointed (if unsurprised) by the two-dimensional, low-tech-feeling, all too familiar baby-blue "skin" of the UI. (Can you imagine Adobe perpetrating such an eyesore?) Likewise, it's perhaps telling that the early documentation came in the form of a comic book. Welcome, once again, to Google Beta-ware.

Some random impressions:

Posted by Joe Celko
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
3:10 PM

I discussed a number of ways to split commissions among multiple salespeople in this article, but can you come up with other ways to keep track of the commission amounts? I'll give you a hint; ask yourself, "what is the simplest fact in this problem?"

One way of spotting a design problem is when you have to use a VIEW or CTE over and over to answer basic questions. This implies that the schema has spread information over many tables that should be in one table or that it has aggregated data in one row that should be split out into multiple rows.

Posted by Neil Raden
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
1:26 PM

When you sign up for a Webinar, or even just register to download a white paper, you can be sure that you will shortly get a follow-up phone call. The caller almost never has any inkling what you or their client does, so the questions are sometimes amusing, other times pretty dumb. I haven't gotten so old and cranky yet that this ruins my day, but I got a call last week that was notable.

After the brief introduction, the question was, "I want to ask some questions about your database."

"Excuse me," I said, "I'm an analyst."

"A what?"

Posted by Mark Madsen
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
9:30 AM

The people who say that open source has no impact or visibility in the data warehouse market were shown to be wrong at the TDWI conference in San Diego. We saw a continued rise in open source data warehousing products this summer. Jaspersoft, Talend, Ingres and newcomer Kickfire all had booths at this event. That's a big change from no presence roughly 18 months ago.

What's notable about this is that we aren't talking about just BI tools. This combination of vendors provides complete coverage of the standard data warehouse technology stack, from platform to BI. If you wanted to, you could acquire a complete open source BI solution at this event.