Recent Blog Posts

Cassandra and Hadoop
I am continuing to investigate Hadoop storage options as I get briefed by more vendors and as new products get released. In this article I want to focus on Cassandra. DataStax is the leading commercial provider for distributions of Cassandra, which...
Philip Howard, Bloor Research | 25th January '12

Another choice for Hadoop
I have written about RainStor previously. Hitherto it has had a single product, what is now known as RainStor Data Retention but it has now announced a second: RainStor Data Analytics for Hadoop. First, a re-iteration of what the basic product does....
Philip Howard, Bloor Research | 19th January '12

Informatica Data Replication
Informatica acquired WisdomForce within the last couple of months. WisdomForce was a pure-play provider of data replication solutions. While little known to the world at large, it had around 100 customers. However, these were not just any customers,...
Philip Howard, Bloor Research | 14th October '11

Hive, DataRush and Hadoop
Hive provides SQL access to big data stored in Hadoop. However, it is extremely limited. For example only equijoins are supported, neither indexes nor temporal types (dates, timestamps etc) are supported, sub-queries in WHERE clauses are not...
Philip Howard, Bloor Research | 8th August '11

Challenging Cloudera
The market around Hadoop has historically been very gentlemanly. In most cases when open source products become popular you end up with multiple competing distributions. Look at Linux for example. However, that has not, until recently, been the case...
Philip Howard, Bloor Research | 29th June '11

The EDW is dead
Often when you see this sort of heading you expect to read something like long live the EDW later in the piece. Not this time. The EDW (enterprise data warehouse) is dead. Period. Like a dodo. Like Monty Python's parrot. This came up last week at...
Philip Howard, Bloor Research | 29th June '11

Connexica CXAIR
CXAIR from Connexica (which was previously Ardentia Search) is a BI tool specifically designed to support queries that span both structured and unstructured data, though it can equally well handle either one or the other on its own. It uses indexing...
Philip Howard, Bloor Research | 16th June '11

"Geolocate" the Cyber Attack
Interviewed on Radio 4, Lt General Harry Raduege, who chairs the Deloitte Centre for Cyber Innovation in Washington DC, spoke about the need to Geolocate the source of cyber attacks. This is probably the first time I have heard this term used...
Natalie Newman, Bloor Research | 3rd June '11

Collaborative SIEM solutions
With Infosec taking place next week my thoughts are naturally turning towards the security market in general and SIEM (security information and event management) in particular. Long-time readers will know that I have two major concerns about the...
Philip Howard, Bloor Research | 19th April '11

Exasol knocks the spots off
As long time readers will know, I don’t hold any particular truck with benchmarks. They are too generic, too easily fiddled and lots of vendors don’t bother with them so they only represent a limited sample of the market. Proofs of...
Philip Howard, Bloor Research | 18th April '11