SQLstream delivers instant data stream analysis of Mozilla 3.5 downloads

Here are a couple of posts that describe the download monitor/dashboard which is giving up-to-the-second statistics for downloads by country of the latest Mozilla release 3.5 (just about to top 5.5 million downloads since yesterday's launch). The dashboard has been put together with the help of my friends at SQLstream. Just don't try looking at this with Internet Explorer, as it doesn't support HTML5.

Julian Hyde on Open Source OLAP. And stuff.: SQLstream powers ... By Julian Hyde SQLstream gathers data from Mozilla's download centers around the world, assigns each record a latitude and longitude, and summarizes the information in a continuously executing SQL query. Data is read with sub-second latencies, ... Julian Hyde on Open Source OLAP.... - http://julianhyde.blogspot.com/

SQLstream the Sequel - RealTime Intelligence for Mozilla BI in Action
From ebizQ Presents BI in Action Virtual Conference ...

Tibco RV in a box - would appliances help streaming SQL?

Several others have posted on the new Tibco Messaging Appliance - apparently it's Tibco Rendezvous (RV) in a box OEM'd from Solace Systems. Paul Vincent ponders at the Tibco CEP blog:

It’s quite feasible that the same approach could be used for “basic” complex event processing operations, especially those that don’t require history (or much persistence)

Paul is certainly right that CEP and event/data stream processing engines could benefit from the appliance approach. However I think that it is precisely those applications that require history that could most benefit. A high-speed streaming engine with a co-located database (running with much of the data in cache) gives the perfect environment for answering a wider range of "right-time" BI requirements; the engine can control exactly what needs to be retained and for how long to provide the appropriate time-series data to support whatever aggregated outputs are desired. The database acts as a memory extender (allowing infrequently accessed data to be paged out), as a source of replay / recovery data, and as a history for newly defined streaming queries. The latter is most important - if you want a 1 hour moving average, most streaming queries won't give you the right answer until the end of the first hour.

Analytics as a Service

With all this talk of SQLstream's recent v2.0 launch, I was interested to read Tim Bass's CEP blog posting on Analytics-as-a-Service. He calls it A3S - and rightly avoids calling it AaaS; apart from the fact the X-as-a-Service is almost as cliched as XYZ 2.0 (and equally meaningless), careless use of that sequence of As and Ss could cause spam filters round the world to get over-excited.

If we must have the as-a-service tag, I'd like to trademark BI-as-a-service: BIAS. Apart from being a proper acronym, it also gets across that BI often gives you the answers you think you want - not necessarily the ones you really need.

SQLstream launches v2.0 of its Event Stream Processing engine

As well as working as a freelance Oracle consultant, I have spent most of the last year working with SQLstream Inc on their Event Stream Processing engine, version 2.0 of which has now been launched.

My initial point of contact was Julian Hyde, with whom I worked in the Oracle CASE / Oracle Designer team in the early 90s. He went out to Oracle HQ and worked on bit-mapped indexes, then spent time at Broadbase before becoming best known as the founder-architect for the Mondrian OLAP server.

Event Stream Processing (ESP) is a development of what we might have called Active Database a few years ago. Rather than running queries against stored data as in an RDBMS, we register active queries which can be used to filter data arriving from any kind of stream. These active queries behave just like topic subscriptions in a message bus - except that unlike typical JMS implementations, the SQLstream query engine can do more than just filter. SQL queries against the data-in-flight can also:

• join data between multiple streams, or between streams and tables
• aggregate data within a stream to give rolling or periodic aggregates based on time or row counts
• apply built-in and user-defined functions to columns within the stream's rows
• build a network of streams and views to support complex transformation and routing requirements
  

Queries are defined using SQL:2003 with minimal extensions (there are some SQL examples on the web site); so developers used to working with an RDBMS will find it easy to grok the relational messaging approach. Unlike a typical message bus, most transformation and routing takes place entirely inside the SQLstream environment, rather than being delegated to external applications.

My experience working at JMS vendor SpiritSoft convinced me of the value of asynchronous message-based techniques, which in the last 10 years have spread out from high-end financial systems to ESB implementations all over the place. Since the early 80s we have seen how the RDBMS swept all other forms of structured data storage away. Now SQLstream's relational messaging approach removes the impedance mismatch between how we store data, and how we process it on the wire. In principle, this architecture can subsume both message-oriented (ESB style) and data-oriented (ETL style) integration architectures.

It should be said that "other ESP engines are available". Oracle itself has two projects on the go: its own CQL which I believe is still internal, and Oracle CEP (the rebranded BEA WebLogic Event Server - which itself is (or was) based on the open source Esper project). These two development threads will no doubt combine at some point (perhaps they already have?). IBM also has two or three independent CEP (complex event processing) projects on the go.

I think the same thing will happen to ESP / CEP as happened to ETL/EAI tools in the last ten or fifteen years. For sure, the database/application server vendors (especially Oracle and IBM) will sell plenty of this software within their respective client bases. An Oracle CEP system that was (or could be) tightly integrated with the RDBMS itself - maybe executing PL/SQL as well as Java functions - would be an easy sell. However multi-vendor sites will be interested in an agnostic / vendor-independent tool as a basis for their integration efforts. Just as Informatica has carved out a place for itself in competition with Oracle's ODI and OWB and IBM's DataStage, so SQLstream and other ESP vendors can fight for the common ground. It will be very interesting to see how it all turns out.

See the SQLstream product page for background, plus posts from Julian Hyde, CTO of SQLstream and Nicholas Goodman, Director of BI Solutions at Pentaho.

PS: here's another post from David Raab.

Could open source BI close out incumbents?

Bloor's Philip Howard writes in The Register that Jaspersoft 2.0 is now a serious threat to mainstream BI (and ETL) vendors; a full enterprise license for $35k will knock spots off most of the competition.

Perhaps that helps to explain why the fizz has gone out of Cognos's recent results.

And it doesn't help that according to a survey sponsored by Sybase and reported by CBR, only 13% of UK BI projects work as expected. So naturally "31% of firms surveyed, particularly small and medium sized businesses, [are] keeping an especially close eye on keeping costs down to a manageable level."

Open Source BI and ETL - picking up pace?

A couple of recent stories to ponder on: SnapLogic raises $2.5M (admittedly from its founder's very own VC boutique) to build its LAMP based data services, while according to CBR, Ingres is preparing a Jaspersoft based BI/ETL appliance.

Meanwhile Pentaho has released its Data Integration 2.5 (formerly known as Kettle) and is showing at ODTUG what it calls "the world's most popular open source BI suite".

Open source BI vendors get busy

A useful article from Computer Business Review. Has anyone got any experience with Pentaho or Jaspersoft data integration tools being used in anger that they'd like to share?

Data warehouse appliance pros and cons

Andy Hayler writes here about the marketing hype surrounding data warehouse appliances like Netezza, and warns that buyers should not just consider the 20% of a project budget that is typically spent on hardware and software. The other 80% goes on - well, people like us.

However the economic case for the Netezza model can still be made - rather easily. I’m aware of a POC where the capital costs of a 50TB Netezza solution are considerably less than the business is being charged back each year just for the cpus and discs supporting the equivalent Oracle DW. The clincher is that Netezza doesn’t require the same level of DBA expertise - it just hasn’t got any tuning knobs for us to fiddle with. Oh, and critical queries run up to 150 times faster ...

If these appliances result in a hefty capital saving and a substantial reduction in DBA/performance tuning overheads, then they will certainly continue to gain market share.