Richard Hackathorn: January 2009 Archives

Aster Data Systems presented their background and future plans by Steve Wooledge, Director of Marketing and Shawn Kung, Sr. Director of Product Management. The company was founded 2005 by three Stanford doctoral colleagues and were in stealth mode until May 2008. The engineering team is strong with 26 persons, 13 of whom are at the Ph.D.-level. Clients include Akamai, MySpace, Share-This and a few more.

Aster Data Systems focuses on "software-only relational DBMS for frontline data warehousing", striving for "always parallel" processing and for "always on" operations. They argued that their product - Aster nCluster 3.0 - allows smooth incremental scaling to avoid costs in excess capacity.

Steve presented an overview of one of their largest clients - MySpace - having 118M users who generate 7B events in 2-3 TB per day, doing a high-frequency batch load (15 minutes per hour). It takes several thousands servers to support the data flow into the frontline data warehouse, consisting of 100 nodes with 400 TB capacity.

They finally got around to defining Frontline Data Warehouse (FDW). Wow! What a discussion... Aster is essentially arguing to fork the application data inflow, close to the customer-touch applications, as shown below.
As Claudia noted... Is FDW just a BIG operational data store? In addition, there are several intermixed issues. First, what is the scope of the subject areas in the FDW? How does it overlap with the EDW? Second, isn't FDW duplicating the data quality/cleansing processing. And third, the FDW is support rapid feedback back to the applications. This last issue seems to be the business justification for this hybrid approach. 

The unique feature as Aster is their in-database implementation of MapReduce, which is a parallel data flow approach to DBMS. This is a very interesting topic, since it uncovers a paradigm shift beyond SQL. MapReduce allows the application programmer to push their code closer to the data, roughly like a SQL User-Defined Function. But doing so, with widely used languages, like Java, Python and Perl. Thus, very sophisticated analytics can operate directly on the data. A question that bother me was the intellectual property rights surrounding MapReduce? Can anyone comment on this?

I highly recommend to my DW colleagues to read up on MapReduce and, especially, the Clarement Report on Database Research.  

I suggested a marketing slogon "Aster picks up where SQL lets you down". If Aster uses it, they owe me a nickle per usage.

Oh, finally... Watch for an announcement from Aster in a few weeks...

Background and future plans for Corda were presented by Alan Winters, Product Management, Mardell Cheney, CTO, and Greg Turman, Director of Sales. Founded in 1996 and located near Provo UT, they have been able to remain self-funded and profitable in the Enterprise Performance Management Dashboards market with around 1,500 customers.

This is the second BBBT appearance for Corda. In March 2008, Shawn Rogers posted a blog that gives a good overview of products and notes the book The Service Profit Chain by Heskett, Sasser and Schlesinger, 1994. This book provided a key focus for in launching the company.

Alan mentioned an innovative approach called the Corda Commons. It is an open-source agreement with a small number of selected partners, who have the ability to modify and redistributed the product under their brand. My opinion is that this is a useful variation of open-source theme, whereby the innovation of domain-specific knowledge

Corda has several patents in the area of their Data Funnel that takes diverse data sources and provides the integration function for a diverse data consumers. On the surface, these patents seem quite universal and could give Corda some elbow-room in an increasing crowded marketplace.

After an overview of their current product line, we had a great discussion on the missing elements. John suggested visualization of business processes. I suggested that the addition of Web 2.0 collaborative and social networking functionality would cater to the new generation of knowledge workers.

Amid our vigorous discussion, Claudia posted a quick twitter "Just starting the Boulder BI Bra Trust with Corda". LOL for the whole group. Lesson: check your twitters before pushing the Enter key.

Alan and Mardell demonstrated a cooooool iPhone app that connects into Corda CenterView to show coooool dashboards. Will be released with their next 4.0 version.

Overall of the various customers, such as: Amazon, Apple, Arizona State University, Comcast, DoD, and so on. I questioned what was Corda's sweet spot in the marketplace. This was a tough question, since their customer stories are all over the spectrum. It seems that the sweet spot is a company with mature data infrastructure but need performance metrics requiring cross-functional and external data.

There was lots of other discussion, most of which under NDA. Check Corda out. They have a 30-day trial, which I downloaded, installed, and connected to an external MySQL database during this session. Will play with it this afternoon.