February 2008 Archives

Kim Stanick VP Marketing and Barry Zane CTO of Paracell are briefing the group today. The underlying theme is "its about time". I agree it is all about the time, time is what drives the need for analytics and time is critical to the value of analytics. The days of waiting 60 hours for a query result are well past us now. ParAccel is addressing the issue and sees the value in solving the time problem. ParAccel bring the following architectural highlights to the time problem.

• Fully Transactional DBMS
• Columnar Orientation
• Adaptive compression
• Shared-nothing, MPP design
• Parallel Loader
• High Availability w/performance
• CPU-based optimization
• tightly-coupled grid protocol

Interesting news from the briefing include their recent success with TPC-H benchmarks. Hitting the top of the list in runs for 100GB, 300GB and 1TB this past October. The interesting part for me isn't just the speed but the cost factor, further proof that appliances can impact your analytics from a hard cost perspective. The result of the benchmark puts the scaled queries per hour cost at $4.57 with the ParAccel solution versus the previous records from other companies that cost between $25 to as high as $60 per query hour.

Another great session today with a large turn out from the Boulder BI Brain Trust members.In attendance Ron Powell, Claudia Imhoff, Hans Hultgren, Richard Hackathorn, Lowell Fryman, Holli Arnett, Mike Brooks, Joyce Montanari, Lu Kroeger, John Myers, Steve Dine.

Bob Eve Vice President Marketing and David Besemer CTO at Composite visited the Brain Trust today to talk about the world of Data Integration and how their company brings value to the marketplace. For those of you not up to speed on Composite they integrate data between the top layer of Dashboards, reporting and applications and the data layer.  Composite creates a Virtual data layer for the top layer to utilize. A core value to the solution according to David is the "easy stuff should be easy and the hard stuff should be possible".

What I like best about the Composite story is that its elegant and simple. They hang their hat on the important and simple things. Query optimization gives you the data fast, they have the right type of security in place, caching, clustering technology, management tools, strong and simple design platform and it works with just about every technology.

I like to distill things down to a basic value proposition. So here goes, if you use ETL to move what you need around to applications, reporting systems and struggle with timeliness issues and the costs involved. Composite can provide you access to the same data easier faster and has a much lower TCO. While providing real-time on demand data integration.

I appreciate the time Bob and David spent today, I have walked away with a much deeper knowledge of the company and the value they bring to the market. For more information on their solutions check out Composite Software.

Tags: Composite Software, Data Integration,

Sybase brought a lot of information to the table last week.  One of the key elements was the recognition that not all solutions can be solved by their leading Sybase IQ package.  It was refreshing to hear a vendor talk about a flagship product may not be suited to all solutions.  As I'm sure that all things look like a nail to a hammer.  Sybase packages their Adaptive Server Engine (ASE) for the OLTP market and the IQ engine for the analytical market and actually says so.

 

Similar to Shawn, I liked the bleeding edge aspects of the IQ real-time analytics solution.  The ability to link complex event processing (CEP) systems directly with an in-memory database has tremendous upside for applications with extreme low latency technical issues to resolve.