Steve Wooledge Marketing Director and Shawn Kung Senior Director, Product Management are briefing the group today and we have a full house 12 members of the "trust" are here to learn more about Aster. Aster has 26 engineers on the team and appears to be very dedicated to driving their technology forward. Aster is a software only RDBMS, they run on a cluster to keep costs lower using commodity hardware with no requirements for additional SAN configuration. Every function of the DB is running in parallel and they have MapReduce features in the product.
Aster's position is that SQL isn't expressive enough to get the job done in today's
highly complicated analytics space, The only way to solve these
problems has been to throw more hardware at the issue which is
expensive and time consuming. The addition of In-Database MapReduce can bridge the
gap and can take over to drive speed.
In-Database MapReduce is one of the lead features that Aster presented today - what the heck is it? How is different than traditional MapReduce? I'll start out by saying
Its a lot like a UDF on steroids.
Aster's Definition - MapReduce is a software framework that enables distributed analytical processing on large data sets on compute clusters.
MapReduce Advantages
* Highly expressive (procedural languages for deep insights)
* Highly scalable performance (horizontal scaling to petabytes)
* Highly fault tolerant (multiple copies, failover & re-deploy)
* Highly economical (cost-effective commodity hardware)
Reprinted with Permission:
A good customer example:
The DW they have at MySpace is powering the music recommendation engine as well as ad hoc analytics100 Nodes with 400TB capacity they are updating in 15 minute batches every hour.The system is taking information from 1000's of servers with 7 billion events per day. At first glance Aster looks first like a data mart but they are actually positioning themselves upstream of conventional data flow. They are out front getting the granular data directly from the application layer which makes them look a lot like an huge ODS. The data's granularity probably differentiates them from a classic ODS but after a lot of discussion we couldn't find the exact label, regardless Aster's value proposition is that they can provide you with highly scalable and fast analytics.
Shawn and Steve did a great job helping me understand the value of MapReduce and the upside of it being In-Database. Aster has a lot of good things going on.
