Intelligent Enterprise

For all the coverage of the Chrome Web browser announcement, little note has been taken of Google's choice of the ultra-liberal BSD open-source license. The BSD choice accentuates that Chrome will be more (and very likely less) than a conventional Web browser. Chrome will contribute Web rendering to an increasingly comprehensive enterprise software platform and may (further) tie non-Google application developers to the Google stack.

It's too soon to know what to make of Google's new Chrome browser (I've only been hammering on it a short time), but I have to admit I was disappointed (if unsurprised) by the two-dimensional, low-tech-feeling, all too familiar baby-blue "skin" of the UI. (Can you imagine Adobe perpetrating such an eyesore?) Likewise, it's perhaps telling that the early documentation came in the form of a comic book. Welcome, once again, to Google Beta-ware.

Some random impressions:

I discussed a number of ways to split commissions among multiple salespeople in this article, but can you come up with other ways to keep track of the commission amounts? I'll give you a hint; ask yourself, "what is the simplest fact in this problem?"

One way of spotting a design problem is when you have to use a VIEW or CTE over and over to answer basic questions. This implies that the schema has spread information over many tables that should be in one table or that it has aggregated data in one row that should be split out into multiple rows.

When you sign up for a Webinar, or even just register to download a white paper, you can be sure that you will shortly get a follow-up phone call. The caller almost never has any inkling what you or their client does, so the questions are sometimes amusing, other times pretty dumb. I haven't gotten so old and cranky yet that this ruins my day, but I got a call last week that was notable.

After the brief introduction, the question was, "I want to ask some questions about your database."

"Excuse me," I said, "I'm an analyst."

"A what?"

The people who say that open source has no impact or visibility in the data warehouse market were shown to be wrong at the TDWI conference in San Diego. We saw a continued rise in open source data warehousing products this summer. Jaspersoft, Talend, Ingres and newcomer Kickfire all had booths at this event. That's a big change from no presence roughly 18 months ago.

What's notable about this is that we aren't talking about just BI tools. This combination of vendors provides complete coverage of the standard data warehouse technology stack, from platform to BI. If you wanted to, you could acquire a complete open source BI solution at this event.

I spend a lot of time on teaching materials on text analytics: articles, presentations, and courses. I've gotten positive feedback about my introductory materials, which I designed for practitioners (like myself) rather than for academics or researchers. There are great resources out there — technical papers and white papers, case studies, software, etc. — but you have to get the basics down first.

There's been a lot of buzz lately about Google's MapReduce framework for speeding up the processing of large datasets. It makes you wonder, did Google just dream this up in last couple years while all of the database vendors were sleeping? Or, paraphrasing Isaac Newton, were they standing on the shoulders of giants?

The answer is, both.

Greenplum and Aster Data have both just announced the integration of MapReduce into their SQL MPP data warehouse products. So why do I think this could be a big deal? The short answer is "Because MapReduce offers dramatic performance gains in analytic application areas that still need great performance speed-up." The long answer goes something like this.

The core ideas of MapReduce are:

Back from sunny San Diego, place of TDWI's annual world conference.

I kicked off my week with a birds-of-a-feather networking event. The most popular table? The business-IT partnership, which also happens to be one of the top barriers/enablers to BI success (according to research from my book). The different perspectives — and just how polar opposites they could be — bordered on amusing.

Last week, European Web analytics vendor Nedstat announced a new feature called "Live Segmentation," which enables you to develop customized behavioral analysis across unaggregated Web data.

This is a big step for Nedstat. Readers of the Web Analytics Report know that this missing capability was somewhat of a downside to an offering that competes in Europe with the likes of Omniture, and WebTrends — two vendors already providing a "data warehouse"-type of feature that enables deeper and more customizable analysis.

Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research, says that Yahoo "will be launching a new generation of search in two to three months... Search is going to move in a completely new direction." The initiative, one would infer from today's Financial Express interview of Raghavan, will build on Yahoo's BOSS (build your own search software) platform, which implements a "self-service Web services model for developers and start-ups."

David Raab is a great fan and former reseller of QlikTech's QlikView. His recent lengthy post about the product (I hesitate to call it "detailed" only because he rightly observes that QlikTech is in fact stingy with technical detail) is positive enough to have been recommended by the company itself. Specifically, it was cited in the comment thread to my recent post on QlikTech, where David himself also addressed some of my questions.

But of course, no technology is perfect, not even one as great as David thinks QlikView is.

At the TDWI Summit this week, I had the opportunity to talk about Web Analytics with enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) execs. I came away concluding that the worlds of enterprise data and Web metrics still remain far apart.

I've argued before that the separation is partly technical and partly cultural. BI managers are wary of the firehouse of Web traffic data, and most Web managers just don't think much about non-Web data stores and the value of Web site metrics to the broader enterprise.

If there's one central theme in my DBMS2 blog, it's that modern database management system alternatives should in many cases be used instead of the traditional market leaders. So it was only a matter of time before somebody sponsored a white paper on that subject. The paper, sponsored by EnterpriseDB (disclosure noted), is now posted along with my other recent white papers. Its conclusion — summarizing what kinds of database management system you should use in which circumstances — is reproduced below.

Many new applications are built on existing databases, adding new features to already-operating systems. But others are built in connection with truly new databases. And in the latter cases, it's rare that a market-leading product is the best choice. Mid-range DBMS (for OLTP) or specialty data warehousing systems (for analytics) are usually just as capable, and much more cost-effective. Exceptions arise mainly in three kinds of cases:

The recently released Forrester Wave for Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms assesses 12 BI vendors/tools. The report does not include Excel as one of the 12 solutions, which led me to ponder: Can we consider Excel a BI tool in its own right?

The Forrester report (The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2008 - free copy courtesy of SAS) specifies that, to qualify for the survey, the vendor (and tool) must provide:

Talend announced an open source data quality offering today. The company has been moving very quickly to fill out all of the basic components needed for a complete data integration suite. In June the company delivered Talend Open Profiler for data profiling, and the Open Studio ETL tool contains changed data capture (CDC) features. While not a full suite yet, these are a big expansion of functionality in short time. Unfortunately you'll have to wait a few weeks. Data Quality won't be ready for download until September.

"Gaining traction" is a good description of Kognitio's Data as a Service message. I spoke to company execs at this week's Data Warehousing Institute Conference, and I reviewed results of a survey they released at TDWI. Signs are that Kognitio's DaaS positioning is helping the company define itself and carve a niche in the crowded and dynamic data warehousing-analytics market. That positioning may need tighter focus, but focus will surely come as the company signs some of the prospects it has gained since its February North American launch.