Infobright Blog

Every so often, I enjoy spreading a little humor via the blog.  This week, I found discussions really running towards Cloud Computing.  For those unfamiliar with Cloud, here's a simple diagram to help illustrate the point.  All joking aside, Infobright's presence on the cloud is growing ever stronger.  By loading Infobright on an instance (such as many instances on EC2), you can get very efficient, customer-facing service with superior analytic performance.  Happy Friday!

Source: Geek and Poke, http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/

In a recent Software Advice blog (http://bit.ly/hSEFQw), Christopher Baum discusses the potential targets of acquisition by HP.  In fact, they are polling on the site to gauge the likelihood of HP's investment in particular companies.  Since Infobright serves as an extremely powerful analytic database, I took careful notice of the database section of the article. 

Right off the heels of the Vertica announcement, the article completely missed this highly-touted acquisition.  Even if you ignore that big elephant in the room, there's some doubt in the messaging presented by the author regarding the acquisition targets.  Firstly, Mr. Baum assumes that relational databases "are not the future"; he bolsters the argument with, "One of the compelling reasons for relational databases is to reduce storage requirements by minimizing data reducing."  While some databases do have extremely good compression (see: 10:1 compression in Infobright), I feel that relational databases offer much more than 'disk-space reducers'.  While I love the technology, NoSQL variants just aren't made to fulfill several common use cases (including machine-generated data analytics, transactions, etc.).  Secondly, the author hits on 10gen (MongoDB).  I couldn't agree more -- 10Gen is a great company with a good future.  When it comes to document-oriented databases, 10gen is at or near the top.  In many respects, I see NoSQL variants (such as MongoDB) to be very complementary to its relational database cousins.  Each technology brings its best features to the table; it's up to the engineer to best utilize each database to achieve the highest level of performance.  At the end of the day, it's all about the use case (not about the technology!)

That said, I do agree with the author on many levels.  HP's M&A activity will continue, and HP will need to move on one of these key players.  I recommend that you take a look at the blog and submit your vote and your comments.