Would you pay $99,000 for a starter pack?

WebMethods has launched a starter pack for Infravio X-Registry, which combines a UDDI registry, a JAXR repository, and what they coyly describe as integrated governance [which] ensures that these policies can be effectively applied across design-time, run-time and change-time environments.

For the bargain basement price of just $99,000 you get to minimize the upfront cost of initial adoption. Or to put it another way, you get 2 cpus, 5 named users and a UDDI registry that will allow you to define just 25 web services.

Why on earth would anyone want to pay that much to adopt a vendor-ized version of open standard technologies? Now if they had said this was a free community edition, they might be in with a chance of luring unsuspecting punters in and hitting them with the upgrade later. But this way round? Seems daft to me...

Informatica buys Itemfield, gets a sprinkle of Gartner's magic dust

Informatica has agreed to buy Itemfield - an Isreali outfit specialising in integration of unstructured and semi-structured data. That adds a useful extra string to their bow.

Coincidentally Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools has recently materialised. Informatica gets a positive write up - its stands alone with IBM in the leaders quadrant, head and shoulders above the pack (including Oracle).

Sadly my former Constellar colleagues at DataMirror don't even get on the map - DM just gets a rather dismissive one line mention for Transformation Server in the also-rans section. Is DataMirror under-marketing its product range - including Constellar Hub, or is Gartner just not too impressed with it?

Problems with Statspack

Everyone's talking about it - statspack isn't perfect. Driven from Jonathan Lewis to Doug Burns to Daniel Fink's OptimalDBA I thought it was worth pointing out that as a snapshot technique, your knowledge of the value of the increment is uncertain.

Suppose snapshot N of metric has value s(N)
lets call the increment N to N+1 x(N)

All we can say for sure is:
A) if f(N+1) <>= f(N+1)
B) if f(N+1) >= f(N) then x(N) >= f(N+1) - f(N)

In normal use (when the shared pool is stable), we only see the case B, and we replace the >= with =. But if your shared pool is being trashed (see earlier posts) then remember uncertainty, and consider building case (A) into your reports.