Bloor IM Blog on IT-Director.com

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...]

Hive, DataRush and Hadoop

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 06:00:00 +0100

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... [Read More...]

Challenging Cloudera

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:00:00 +0100

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.... [Read More...]

The EDW is dead

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 07:00:00 +0100

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... [Read More...]

Connexica CXAIR

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:00:00 +0100

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... [Read More...]

"Geolocate" the Cyber Attack

rss@it-analysis.com (Natalie Newman, Bloor Research) — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 07:00:00 +0100

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... [Read More...]

Collaborative SIEM solutions

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 06:00:00 +0100

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... [Read More...]

Exasol knocks the spots off

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 06:00:00 +0100

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... [Read More...]

A new take on an old problem

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:00:00 +0100

Those readers with an elephantine memory may recall that I have written about HVR (High Volume Replicator) from HVR Software (previously PSB) twice in the past: in 2004... [Read More...]

Simplifying rules

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 06:00:00 +0100

Rules are a pain. Whether it is data quality rules, correlation rules for SIEM (security information and event management), transformation rules or any other sort of rules, the big problem with rules... [Read More...]

Combining search and BI

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 07:00:00 +0100

The idea behind combining search with business intelligence is that you want the analytic power of the latter but you also want the ease of use and simplicity of search. The question is: how do you... [Read More...]

The lesser-known MDM

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 07:00:00 +0100

Despite recent acquisitions in the MDM market the space is still awash with many smaller players. Not all of these are well known, especially in the UK and Europe, even though they may merit closer... [Read More...]

Process, governance and spreadsheets

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 07:00:00 +0100

Talk to almost anybody about information, data or corporate governance and they will tell you that governance is primarily about people and processes. For example, in data governance it's not... [Read More...]

Accessing archived data

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 07:00:00 +0100

One of the things that concerns companies about archiving, and perhaps puts them off, is how they are going to access the data after it is archived. If the originating application is still in... [Read More...]

How come Syncsort is so fast and what does that mean?

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 07:00:00 +0100

Syncsort has always had a reputation for high performance but historically it paid no attention to marketing and not much to sales so it was only hearsay that suggested it was a product worth looking... [Read More...]

expressor releases Standard Edition

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 07:00:00 +0100

I wrote a little while ago about expressor’s introduction of a Community Edition and the use of semantic types. While I concentrated in that article on the latter, now that the company is... [Read More...]

There are connectors and then there are connectors and then there is so much more

rss@it-analysis.com (Philip Howard, Bloor Research) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 07:00:00 +0100

In the database world there are essentially two types of connectors used by data integration and other suppliers: generic connectors such as ODBC and JDBC and native drivers that have specialised... [Read More...]