Bloor IM Blog on IT-Director.com

IBM JSON

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 10 May 2013 08:00:00 +0100

Readers will be aware that there has been some confusion about the support for JSON (JavaScript Object notation) documents in the latest release of DB2. I had originally understood - when I was... [Read More...]

IBM boo-boo on big data

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 06:00:00 +0100

On April 3rd IBM put out a press release called IBM Announces New Innovations to Help Organizations Benefit from the Next Natural Resource: Big Data. It discussed the introduction of the IBM PureData... [Read More...]

If I haven't heard of it it's probably NoSQL!

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:00:00 +0100

There are a huge and ridiculous number of NoSQL databases on the market and the truth is that there is not enough market out there to sustain them all. This means that a bunch of them will eventually... [Read More...]

IBM adds new Netezza model

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:00:00 +0100

IBM has announced a new model in its PureData for Analytics (previously Netezza) range. The previously existing model is now designated the N1001 and the new model the N2001. The big difference... [Read More...]

Greenplum update

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 06:00:00 +0100

It's now a couple of years since EMC acquired Greenplum. I have to say that when the acquisition was first announced I was concerned that EMC might turn out to be too much like HP and that Greenplum... [Read More...]

Federating Big Data

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 06:00:00 +0100

The data federation and virtualisation vendors like Composite Software, Denodo and, to a lesser extent, Informatica, have had it all their own way for some time but now there's a new kid on the... [Read More...]

QlikTech acquires expressor

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 06:00:00 +0100

QlikTech has announced that it is acquiring expressor. In other words, a BI vendor is acquiring an ETL tool. However, this doesn't appear to be a play equivalent to SAS acquiring DataFlux or Business... [Read More...]

HPCC: a Hadoop competitor or a data warehouse in its own right?

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 06:00:00 +0100

Let's start out with some figures comparing HPCC with Hadoop (yes, yes, I know you don't know who/what HPCC is - I'll come to that in a moment). Specifically, let's talk about the TeraSort benchmark,... [Read More...]

What exactly is in-memory?

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 14 May 2012 07:00:00 +0100

In-memory is becoming increasingly popular within the data warehousing community. The cynic in me expects that traditional caching technology will soon be re-branded by marketing as in-memory, which,... [Read More...]

Graph databases and the warehouse

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 14 May 2012 06:00:00 +0100

This is the last in a series of five articles about graph databases. I have previously described what they are, how they relate to NoSQL databases such as Hadoop, and what they are used for. I have... [Read More...]

Service virtualisation

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:00:00 +0100

When you are developing or testing software that will exist within a service oriented architecture (SOA) you may have issues with the stability or availability of the services that you need to... [Read More...]

YarcData

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:00:00 +0100

This is the fourth of my series of articles about graph databases. Now I want to discuss uRiKA from YarcData, which is a spin-off from Cray (Yarc is Cray spelled backwards). As far as I know uRiKA is... [Read More...]

Neo4j

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 11 May 2012 06:00:00 +0100

This is the third in my series of articles about graph databases and here I am going to highlight Neo4j from Neo Technologies but first a further discussion on the use of graph databases versus... [Read More...]

Graph databases and NoSQL

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 04 May 2012 07:00:00 +0100

This is the second of five articles on graph databases and in this article I am going to talk more about graph databases in general and how they differ from other approaches. In particular, to date,... [Read More...]

Teradata and SAS join forces

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 03 May 2012 07:00:00 +0100

Over the years SAS has worked with many data warehousing vendors. In particular, in the recent past it has collaborated with a number of database vendors to support in-database analytics. However, as... [Read More...]

What's a graph?

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 03 May 2012 07:00:00 +0100

This is the first of five articles on graph databases. In this one I will discuss the technology in a general sense and consider why they are potentially the next big thing. In the second article I... [Read More...]

Is YourSQL running too slowly?

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 07:00:00 +0100

Over the last decade or more a great many companies, then start-ups, have based their business on MySQL. And a lot of those companies have now grown up and MySQL is creaking at the seams: either it... [Read More...]

IBM and DB2 version 10

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 07:00:00 +0100

IBM has just announced the general availability of DB2 10 for Linux, UNIX and Windows. As might be expected from a major release, there is a lot in it, though the focus is more on providing... [Read More...]

Banks collaborating! Shock! Horror!

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:00:00 +0100

I have been periodically following the identity resolution market for some time and I have been especially interested in what IBM calls anonymous resolution. This is the ability to pass information... [Read More...]

Cassandra and Hadoop

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:00:00 +0100

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... [Read More...]

Another choice for Hadoop

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:00:00 +0100

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... [Read More...]

Informatica Data Replication

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 06:00:00 +0100

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... [Read More...]