Oracle and Open Source: An Analyst Slurps from the Empyrean Spring
March 27, 2011
Analysts. One has to love them. Most ignore the injunction, “drink deep or taste not the empyrean spring.” And why not? I just read “Salesforce.com (CRM) And Oracle (ORCL) Benefit From Open Source and Cloud Computing Based Applications That Will Lead To Higher Software Profits In H2 2011: An Exclusive Interview With Brad Zelnick Of Macquarie Group.” That is a title that will keep the Google modified algorithm hopping. Also, the url is probably going to be dead by the time you read this article. Such is the way of the kill switch, SEO choked Internet.
The key point in this write up is the analyst’s view of Oracle. The passage I noted was this one:
One of our top picks in 2011 is Oracle Corp. (ORCL) To some extent, it’s a consensus buy-rated stock, but sometimes consensus actually gets it right. Oracle is clearly one of the greatest technology companies of all time. They are an execution machine, and they’ve got a captive installed base of customers that continue to come back year after year to purchase more and more capacity. Investors don’t necessarily give Oracle enough credit for its innovation and the amount of money invested in R&D, which in recent years has resulted in an appliance strategy that we think is game changing. Oracle has a near monopoly in certain areas of traditional database technology and even middleware. I would suggest that customers don’t want to spend a dollar more with Oracle than they have to unless there’s something truly unique and truly advantaged in terms of technology, and that’s the way we view Exadata. We believe it has a value proposition that’s compelling not just in competing with appliance-based data warehousing alternatives from the likes of Teradata (TDC) or now IBM’s (IBM) Netezza or EMC’s (EMC) Greenplum, but also for consolidating transaction-processing workloads and basically delivering superior performance at a much lower total cost. It’s so compelling that we’re hearing anecdotal evidence of customers that in the past might have come to Oracle to negotiate an enterprise deal every few years, but that are now returning to the table to take advantage of Exadata. With an average price point of about $1 million per box – if we multiply that out by what we believe the pipeline could be, we think this can be a meaningful contributor to growth for Oracle into the second half of their fiscal 2011.
On the surface, the explanation is reasonable. I like the “greatest” which adds some special zest to a former Bear, Stearns’ vineyard worker. But even more notable is “an execution machine” with “a captive base of customers.” I pretty much agree. Where this empyrean influenced thinking leads, however, is interesting. Somehow Oracle and captive does not map to Oracle and open source. My hunch is that because Oracle bought some open source goodness, that is enough for our empyrean guzzling analyst.
Oracle is a proprietary outfit. Its search is proprietary, and, in my opinion, its tie up with Amazon is proprietary. And I think anything Oracle does with open source is going to go along the “captive” and proprietary route that makes Mr. Ellison a champ among champs.
Does this matter? Not to an investment type. Does it matter to open source? Yep.
Stephen E Arnold, March 27, 2011
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How to for Oracle Text Search
March 25, 2011
“Using Oracle Text Search” provides some quite useful information for Oracle licensees using Oracle’s text search system. The write up provides, in our opinion, a distillation of two years of hands on work with Oracle Text Search. The write up includes a number quite useful code snippets. These are quite useful and include brief descriptions of the snippet functions. We found the script for index creation among the most useful in the write up. There is a ready-to-edit script to create an index over more than one column in an Oracle database. The author has delivered on his promised to make it easy to adjust certain search criteria, including score values for sorting. If you are an Oracle database and Text user, this is worth tucking in your “hints” folder. Good work.
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2011
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Does a Viral Video about Data Management Require a Paid Bitpipe Promotion?
March 21, 2011
The answer is, “Military intelligence.” A viral video, to me, is a YouTube link that some person calls to my attention. The viral videos are oddities, and I see comments about American Idol flub, angst ridden teens, or exploding diet cola containers. But Bitpipe? Back up. Read the Bitpipe page here. You see a plug for Netezza, recently acquired by IBM. You see the IBM logo. You see a register and log in screen to learn about a “viral video” that criticizes Oracle.
Bitpipe charges to post and promote white papers. I did a test for a client years ago. My recollection is that the service, founded by some former Thomson Reuters engineers, charged big money for Bitpipe’s marketing service. My test generated quite a number of inquiries, but after filtering them, I found that few were substantive. Information about Bitpipe’s business is here.
I am not concerned with Bitpipe. What interests me is that IBM, which is having engineers comment on Reddit just like college students, is now paying big bucks to inform people Netezza has a viral video. I just looked at my iPad. Yep. A link to popular YouTube videos. I just looked at Daily Rotation. Yep, an option to see a list of hot user generated videos. Guess what? No Netezza. Ergo. IBM and Netezza are trying to market and sound really cool at the same time.
Next will be a print ad in the Wall Street Journal with execs in zoot suits explaining the benefits of Netezza’s system and its somewhat confused options for search and content processing. First, the game show and Watson. Then Reddit posts about inventing the computer. And now a viral video promoted on a service that only an information technology student in an engineering school can love at term paper time. I there a viral video news release winging its way to me now? I hope not. For fun, run a query for “viral video” on Bitpipe.
Stephen E Arnold, March 21, 2011
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IBM Watsonizes Big Data, We Think
March 17, 2011
A headline passed our radar “IBM Launches Big Data “Boot Camps” from eWeek.com. We were a big surprised because IBM has been in the big data game for years. Plus IBM owns Cognos, SPSS, and big daddy database DB2 that slices and dices.
But information technology workers have been drafted and are being shipped off to boot camps to learn about Big Data issues. IBM, the commanding officer behind this deployment, is sending recruiters out to IBM partners, colleges, and clients to educate them about IBM business analytics and information management software.
Big data is a new term being thrown around in the IT world. It is described as:
The term Big Data typically refers to datasets that grow so large that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools. Difficulties include capture, storage, search, sharing, analytics, and visualizing. As the world becomes increasingly instrumented, with sensors collecting data from all manner of sources, the Big Data phenomenon will continue to grow.
The boot camps were by the same outfit that brought American TV couch potatoes IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy. Companies are searching for new technology like Watson and the number crunching tools offered by IBM. We think the boot camps help educate—maybe sell—decision makers about a trend that has been beaten to death since MapReduce was first revealed by the Google and then morphed into Hadoop years ago.
IBM’s foot soldiers will learn about big data management and certain big data number crunching skills, data management planning/governance (what is governance anyway?), and software designed specifically for big data. Maybe Hadoop? Technology from Digital Reasoning?
IBM said the main focus would be on colleges and future students, but they will still depend on their partners and clients to expand the boot camp initiative.
I mentioned Watson earlier and how IBM is using his invention as a way to push analytics. Since Watson is so smart, why not ask him the correct way to approach big data? (I hope this is not too “snarky” so we get an AOL type request to be friendly to a $100 billion in revenue outfit that can crush a goose like a tiny insect.) Integration of these different IBM “moving parts” is too big a job for the goslings in Harrod’s Creek.
Whitney Grace, March 30, 2011
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Aster Data Snagged by Teradata
March 13, 2011
The food chain is a metaphor that can be applied to the business world without much imagination. The Register’s story, “Teradata Snaps Up Aster Data for $263m” demonstrates how the larger predator eats the smaller. Teradata learned that it needed a company that would rein in its clustered parallel database. Aster Data Systems was sniffed out and after a swift, painless hunt involving $263 million, Teradata swallowed its prey.
Aster Data’s nCluster software is a hybrid row and column database that runs on parallel clusters. They also have a patent-pending SQL-MapReduce product that is a hybrid of normal data warehousing of structured data and organizer of unstructured data. (For some insight into Aster Data’s approach, you can read the September 22, 2010, interview with Quentin Gallivan in the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak subsite here.
The Register story stated:
“Aster Data has been peddling its big data analytics software on Dell’s cloudy PowerEdge-C boxes as an appliance. Teradata also uses Dell iron to build its flagship Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) clustered appliances, so Aster and Teradata already have that in common.”
The tie up should prove interesting for two reasons. First, Teradata has some traditional data management technology and methods. Aster Data is one of the new breed of data management companies. Second, large firms are slow to change so working out the social aspects may require some cycles as well. But the deal looks like a good one and is another indication that data management is a hot sector.
Whitney Grace, March 13, 2011
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Database Tussles: MapReduce and Parallel DBMSs
March 10, 2011
We don’t want to take sides in this fight. The points raised in “MapReduce and Parallel DMBSs: Friends or Foes?” will find plenty of experts who want to support their favorite. The authors of this paper are well known among the database elite. Not surprisingly, the article does a very good job of reviewing the strengths of each approach. The information in the discussion of each approach is quite useful, but for me, the most interesting segment of the write up was the discussion of “Architectural Differences”. I made sure I had a copy of this segment of the analysis because clear explanations of complex data management architectures are tough to locate.
For me, I found the conclusion somewhat obvious but reassuring to both sides in this battle which occupies some:
Most of the architectural differences discussed here are the result of the different focuses of the two classes of system. Parallel DBMSs excel at efficient querying of large data sets; MR-style systems excel at complex analytics and ETL tasks. Neither is good at what the other does well. Hence, the two technologies are complementary, and we expect MR-style systems performing ETL to live directly upstream from DBMSs. Many complex analytical problems require the capabilities provided by both systems. This requirement motivates the need for interfaces between MR systems and DBMSs that allow each system to do what it is good at. The result is a much more efficient overall system than if one tries to do the entire application in either system. That is, “smart software” is always a good idea.
Very useful write up.
Stephen E Arnold, March 10, 2011
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The Need for Granular Search
February 25, 2011
Companies that use taxonomies for their business to business (B2B) sites could be in big trouble. That is, if we can believe results of a survey conducted by e-commerce application provider Endeca.
As reported in “The Evolution of E-Commerce,” the survey showed that people who shop B2B sites now expect the same personalized experience that shoppers of B2C (business to consumer) sites expect. Neither wants to sort through generalized search results like those returned by taxonomies.
The solution? According to John Andrews with Endeca:
“Websites … need to make use of much more granular approaches to tagging content in order maximize the Web customer experience. That will require in many cases new content management systems that make managing the relationship between all those tags a lot simpler. The increased nuances of e-commerce is going to push more companies to embrace a SaaS model rather than try to build it themselves.”
We tend to agree that there are better ways of structuring an e-commerce site than using taxonomies. We also agree that it makes sense for most companies to outsource the development of a content management system rather than tackling this in-house.
We have no problem with Endeca, but we feel that some of their competitors, such as Mark Logic, should also be considered.
Companies that use taxonomies for their business to business (B2B) sites could be in big trouble. That is, if we can believe results of a survey conducted by e-commerce application provider Endeca.
As reported in “The Evolution of E-Commerce,” the survey showed that people who shop B2B sites now expect the same personalized experience that shoppers of B2C (business to consumer) sites expect. Neither wants to sort through generalized search results like those returned by taxonomies.
The solution? According to John Andrews with Endeca:
“Websites … need to make use of much more granular approaches to tagging content in order maximize the Web customer experience. That will require in many cases new content management systems that make managing the relationship between all those tags a lot simpler. The increased nuances of e-commerce is going to push more companies to embrace a SaaS model rather than try to build it themselves.”
We tend to agree that there are better ways of structuring an e-commerce site than using taxonomies. We also agree that it makes sense for most companies to outsource the development of a content management system rather than tackling this in-house.
We have no problem with Endeca, but we feel that some of their competitors, such as Mark Logic, should also be considered.
Robin Broyles, February 25, 2011
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Oracle Data to Plain Old Text
February 21, 2011
Attention Oracle DBAs: World Online Review USA has posted this solution to the request “Explain the concept of data migration from Oracle to Text?”
“1. In sql enter the command SQL>spool Then enter the required select statement.The entire output is transferred into the specified file.The file’s default extension is LST.Then enter SQL>spool off
“2. You can also transfer the contents using utl_file utility. “
Cynthia Murrell February 21, 2011
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Teradata Crows; Risky Bets Are No Shows
February 19, 2011
Yowza. Point your browser at “Independent Analyst Firm Declares Teradata ‘the Most Scalable, Flexible, Cloud-Capable EDW Solution in Today’s Market”. I am not sure traditional databases or data warehouses are going to do the job for the type of big data we consider. If you are a Fortune 1000 company, you will want to buy a brand name. Teradata is the champ, according to an “independent analyst firm.” Okay, maybe. What is more interesting is that the nifty graphic showing the big dogs in big data has a couple of interesting categories; namely, Risky Bets and Contenders. Why does this interest me? There are no entries listed. I can name some new contenders. I can also name some risky bets. In fact, some of those contenders would, in my judgment, rank ahead of the big dogs in the mid tier consulting firm’s listing. Why are there any companies in the Risky Bets and Contenders? Let’s speculate.
- No one at the consulting firm knows anything about this sector so the notion of identifying Risky Bets and Contenders does not come up as a consideration.
- The smaller companies, the open source outfits, and the companies operating outside the US are “off the radar” because the likelihood of getting these outfits to become clients and consumers of the consulting firm’s reports is low. I too would chase those most likely to be prospects and skip the small fish.
- The whole set of categories is ill conceived. Why not lump everyone into the achievement culture ranking of “Great”, “Even Greater,” and “The Bestest Ever.”
No complaints about Teradata or even the companies that bring up the dull normal ranking of “Strong Performers.” I love this consulting stuff. It makes real news and gives anyone in the magic whatever cause to celebrate. But I still wonder why there are no Risky Bets.
Stephen E Arnold, February 19, 2011
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IBM and Big Data
February 18, 2011
Infoworld’s “A conversation with IBM’s Mr. Big Data” reveals the inner thoughts of Rod Smith, IBM’s Vice President of Emerging Internet Technologies. He declares that IBM is hip to Big Data, one of this year’s hot topics. Oh, really?
Actually, IBM has known about big data, and has been developing ways to manage it, all along.
It appears that quickly extracting data the customer can use is as much an art as a science:
“So there’s combining data, there’s sifting through the data, working with a very broad array, depending on where the customer wants to go. So it will build up the analytics more interpreted — rather than fixed, which costs a lot to change. . . . So it’s much more of a collaboration with a line of business to determine what they’re after, because they don’t know until they see something.
Smith also observes that the benefits of being able to mine big data apply to a variety of businesses, and predicts continuing growth in the field. Yep, us too. We saw Big Data as an issue a number of years ago, but when IBM “sees” a trend, it is really real, not just real.
Cynthia Murrell February 18, 2011
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