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07/17/08--01:22: Sun vs Open Source (chan 2246796)

As you might know, there’s not a lot of OS database modelling stuff out there, but for MySQL databases, it was easy: we all used DBDesigner. It was open source, did forward and reverse engineering and could do schema and model comparisons. Basically all the functionality that you want but which you can usually only get at a very hefty price point. Now MySQL started to develop a successor to DBDesigner and released the MySQL Workbench. So far, so good you might say, but hold on. Forward and...


08/03/08--12:31: Performance Management, Vacation style (chan 2246796)

The past few weeks were dedicated to my racing bike, lying in the sun, spending time with my family, sleeping in, do some sight seeing and cultural trips and being with friends. Well, those were my initial plans about a month ago. And though I did all of these things, most of my time was spent on getting my new Linux server up and running, trying to get Ubuntu running on my tablet laptop as well, building my new website, writing a couple of articles for database magazine (not finished yet,...


10/11/08--04:51: Until 'Madison' arrives, Microsoft SQL Server runs faster on Linux (chan 2246796)

Visitors of the latest BI summit of the Seattle based software giant were awed by a first demo of project Madison, which is basically a Windows/SQL Server based version of the recently acquired appliance vendor Datallegro. Microsoft showed how a 150 TB (yes, that's Tera, not Giga) database could perform on a 24 node MPP system. Unfortunately, the announced release date is 'first half of 2010', so considering who is telling this we shouldn't expect anything capable of putting into production...


10/16/08--03:43: Bye bye Google Apps (chan 2246796)

Last summer I decided to give up my locally managed Email service and switch to a Premier Edition Google apps account. Sounded great, 25GB of mail storage and guaranteed uptime of 99,9% in any given month!. Well, last night around 19:15 I got this nice '502' error     At 20:00 I started to get a little worried but hey, 0.1% downtime translates to 0.72 hours each month which was roughly within limits. At 23:00 however I wanted action and I tried to find out how to get support. Of...


11/07/08--01:52: Where are the open source analytical databases? (chan 2246796)

Over the last few months several announcements have been made by different vendors having blended open source BI solutions with high speed analytical databases. Though this might seem good news at first, it also shows something else. Why would companies like Jaspersoft and Pentaho join forces with proprietary vendors like Vertica and Paraccel? Simple: there isn't a viable OS alternative available. Scaling efficiently beyond the 1 TB range with a product like MonetDB, LucidDB or even Infobright...


01/15/09--10:53: Who's going to buy SPSS? (chan 2246796)

2009 will be a turning point for the so called 'business analytics' market. While ETL, reporting and OLAP have become more of a commodity and merely belong to the basic set of tools needed for doing business, organizations can still beat the competition with the smart use of advanced analytics. Now most large BI vendors offer a full suite of analytical capabilities (some more mature than others with SAS of course as the leader of the pack) but the industry giants SAP/Business Objects and...


02/08/09--02:37: Open Source Data Warehousing? (chan 2246796)

The economic downturn is causing an increasing interest in using open source (OS) solutions for BI. One of my previous blogposts already raised the issue of the missing pieces in open source analytical databases, but nevertheless more and more companies are using OS databases for data warehouse purposes. In fact, recent Gartner research indicated that almost 18% of the surveyed organizations are using MySQL as a data warehouse database. This is a bit strange, because when we look at all the...


07/26/09--03:52: Open Source & Dutch Politics (chan 2246796)

No, this isn't about the Dutch government and their efforts to promote Open Source & Open Standards, but during the trip back home from our holiday destination the following analogy occurred to me. In the Netherlands, we have a very fragmented multi-party political system. This means that after each election, a coalition needs to be formed because it's impossible for a single party to get a majority of the votes. In that sense, our political system is a bit different from the one in...


08/02/09--02:03: Hardware adventures (chan 2246796)

I've been assembling computers for over 10 years now, and even built PC based rack mounted servers for a company I was involved in. The advantages of building your own machines are of course the lower costs and the freedom to select and mix the best/cheapest/fastest components available (these requirements rarely go together btw). Besides, it's fun! Having a fast computer around also allows you to validate any benchmark or vendor claim you can find on the Internet, and especially ETL or...


10/05/09--03:54: Pentaho, quo vadis? (chan 2246796)

The acquisition Today Pentaho announced the acquisition of parts of the LucidEra BI solution (formerly called 'ClearView') to replace the current OLAP client JPivot. For the past couple of years JPivot has been the ugly duck in the Pentaho BI solution but although there are better/prettier open source OLAP clients available (e.g. JPalo) it was never replaced by something better, nor has there been done much work to improve JPivot. But don't get me wrong: JPivot has a lot of nice features and is...