Thursday, April 26, 2007

Joins over histograms

Here's an awesome paper from Alberto Dell'Era and Wolfgang Breitling looking at "the formula used by the Cost Based Optimizer to estimate the cardinality of a [single-column] equijoin, when both the columns referenced in the join predicate have histograms collected."

Awesome because of the thought given to the presentation, and the care taken to test the results. Alberto has followed the lead taken by Jonathan Lewis's CBO book to carefully deconstruct and reverse engineer the algorithms used - with one or two surprising results.

Well worth a read...

Friday, April 13, 2007

Iona picks up LogicBlaze and its open source SOA platform

The team at LogicBlaze has been putting together open source systems including Apache ActiveMQ (a JMS implementation), Apache ServiceMix (an ESB) and LogicBlaze FUSE (their own SOA platform).

Iona and LogicBlaze have been working together for a while, so there shouldn't be too many integration problems.

I wish the team, especially James Strachan and Robert Davies, former founders of (and my colleagues at) SpiritSoft, good luck in their new home. It's interesting that Iona - which contributed several to the Spiritsoft team around the turn of the millenium - should be their next resting place.

Friday, April 06, 2007

WebMethods sells itself to Software AG

I said a couple of months ago that webMethods needed to shake up a bit. Well, now they've sold out to Software AG - originally best known in the 1980s for its Adabas database and Natural reporting, more recently a player in the XML / SOA world with Tamino and EntireX.

WebMethods was founded in 1996 and its IPO in 200 marked a high point of the EAI boom; an offer price of $35.00 turned into an opening of $195 and a first day close of $212. The price reached over $300 quite quickly, but since then has trended fairly steadily down to today's sub $10. Not a good investment overall!

Software AG wants this to be "a major step in [their] plans to more than double revenue to EUR 1 billion (USD $1.3 billion)." WebMethods' $200 odd million of annual revenue is a big - if barely profitable - step in that direction.

An article at Barrons notes that the share price is now trading above the offer - a sign that some in the market are expecting a higher bid (the analyst doesn't think they will be in luck).

The deal has pushed up Tibco's price too - on hopes that they will be the next target, perhaps.