Entries from September 2012 ↓

The Data Day, Two days: September 27/28 2012

Quantcast launches HDFS alternative. Glassbeam eyes funding. And more.

And that’s the Data Day, today.

NoSQL LinkedIn Skills Index – rebooted

I decided to reboot our analysis of NoSQL skills, according to LinkedIn search results.

There are two main reasons for doing so: the first iteration did not take in enough of the various NoSQL projects; and I have – with help – worked my way around the eccentricities of LinkedIn search to produce a more accurate result for Apache Cassandra.

The analysis therefore now incorporates a wider spectrum of NoSQL projects, the top ten most popular of which are displayed below. The chart illustrates the number of LinkedIn member profiles mentioning each of the NoSQL projects:

new-nosql-sept

The main change from the previous results is the promotion of Apache Cassandra, thanks to our better search string, while MarkLogic is the first of our new additions to make the top ten.

What hasn’t changed is the dominance of MongoDB, which is way-ahead of all the others. While I am not breaking out growth percentages versus previous counts due to the reboot, it is fair to say that MongoDB is outpacing many of its rivals. Neo4j and DynamoDB are also growing particularly well.

In fact, as can be seen from the chart below, MongoDB accounts for 43% of all mentions of NoSQL technologies in LinkedIn profiles, according to our sample.

nosql-all

The Data Day, Two days: September 25/26 2012

Total Data analysis. Tokutek gets flash. And more.

And that’s the Data Day, today.

The Data Day, Two days: September 21/24 2012

Alpine Data bags EMC. Infobright delivers appliance. And more.

And that’s the Data Day, today.

The Data Day, Two days: September 19/20 2012

Pervasive considers its options. SnapLogic raises funding. And more.

And that’s the Data Day, today.

What if all transactions required strict global consistency?

My mum recently moved house. Being the dutiful son that I am I agreed to help her pack up her old house, drive to her new place and help unpack when we got there.

As it happens the most arduous part of the day did not involve packing, driving or unpacking but waiting: waiting for the various solicitors involved to confirm that the appropriate funds had been deposited in the appropriate bank accounts before the estate agents could hand over the keys.

It took hours, and was a reminder that while we might think of bank transfers as being instantaneous, there can be considerable delays involved in confirming that the correct amount has been debited from one bank account and credited to another.

I was reminded of the delays involved in this process the other delay while reading ODBMS Industry Watch’s interview with Basho CTO Justin Sheehy in which he compares financial transactions with the eventually consistent approach to database transactions.

“Traditional accounting is done in an eventually-consistent way and if you send me a payment from your bank to mine then that transaction will be resolved in an eventually consistent way. That is, your bank account and mine will not have a jointly-atomic change in value, but instead yours will have a debit and mine will have a credit, each of which will be applied to our respective accounts.”

The suggestion that bank transactions are not immediately consistent appears counter-intuitive. Comparing what happens in a transaction with a jointly atomic change in value, like buying a house, with what happens in normal transactions, like buying your groceries, we can see that for normal transactions this statement is true.

We don’t need to wait for the funds to be transferred from our accounts to a retailer before we can walk out the store. If we did we’d all waste a lot of time waiting around.

This highlights a couple of things that are true for both database transactions and financial transactions:

  • that eventual consistency doesn’t mean a lack of consistency
  • that different transactions have different consistency requirements
  • that if all transactions required strict global consistency we’d spend a lot of time waiting for those transactions to complete.
  • The Data Day, Two days: September 17/18 2012

    Google’s Spanner. Acunu. OpTier. Opera. MarkLogic. And more.

    And that’s the Data Day, today.

    The Data Day, Two days: September 13/14 2012

    Oracle Endeca. Microstrategy. Who’s Really Using Big Data? And more

    And that’s the Data Day, today.

    The Data Day, Two days: September 11/12 2012

    Adaptive Planning Acquires myDIALS. SpagoBI targets in-memory. And more.

    And that’s the Data Day, today.

    Forthcoming webinar: the business advantage of Hadoop

    Later this month I’ll be taking part in a webinar with Cloudera CEO Mike Olson and Cloudera customers RIM and YP (formerly AT&T Interactive) to discuss the business advantages of Apache Hadoop and lessons learned from real-world deployments.

    Specifically we’ll be discussing

    • Why Cloudera customers have chosen CDH to get started with Hadoop
    • The business value resulting from analyzing new data sources in new ways
    • How Hadoop will change these Customers’ business and industry over the next 3-5 years

    Mike and I will be discussing our perspectives on big data and the role of Hadoop in enabling new analytic opportunities. Mostly though the webinar presents a chance to hear from real-life Hadoop users about why they chose Hadoop and how their business has benefitted from that decision.

    It promises to be a fascinating discussion, through which attendees will also learn about how Apache Hadoop can be used to:

    • Manage large and complex data with lower operating expenses and storage costs for an increased ROI
    • Increase business productivity with less downtime, higher data reliability, and faster time to recovery
    • Accelerate business processes and improve decision-making capabilities by extracting value from big data faster and more easily

    The webinar takes place Wednesday, September 26, 2012 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PT. For more details and to register, click here.