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Is Database Software a Commodity Technology?

Posted by Seth Grimes
Sunday, September 30, 2007
11:04 PM

Is database management a mature, commoditized software technology? It depends whom you ask. Start with IE Editor-in-Chief Doug Henschen, who wanted my take last July after he and I each wrote on Oracle 11g. My answer: definitely!, which no doubt confirmed Doug in his intention to later write that Oracle President Charles "Phillips's higher calling was to dispel the idea that database management systems have been commoditized in a mature market."

OK, I admit that the president of Oracle speaks with more authority than I do although he perhaps speaks with more bias as well. I don't have a 47.1% share of the RDBMS market to protect.

Nor is Microsoft's 17.4% RDBMS market share my responsibility. Contrast Phillips with Microsoft Technical Fellow David Campbell, quoted in an interview published in the September issue of Database Trends and Applications magazine. DBTA asked Campbell about factors distinguishing Microsoft SQL Server and its primary competitors. Campbell's response: "For 99 percent of your information-management needs, you can get the job done with SQL Server, DB2, or Oracle." Campbell's conclusion was that "you want to choose the one where your ongoing cost of operations is lowest."

Continue reading "Is Database Software a Commodity Technology?"

Comments

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Friday, September 28, 2007
6:43 AM

Independent consultants (a.k.a. sub-contractors) are often the back-bone of many data management activities, especially database administration, ETL/database development and BI development. Yet, finding good consultants is difficult, and often a hit-or-miss proposition. Here are three myths about independent consultants that you should steer clear of.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, September 27, 2007
3:43 PM

I'm attended a panel discussion here at the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum on the convergence of the three Bs — business intelligence, business process management and business rules — featuring Mike Gilpin (EA and application development), Boris Evelson (BI) and Colin Teubner (BPM). I covered a tiny bit of this topic in slides 22-24 of my presentation this morning, and will be doing a full-length presentation on this same topic at the Business Rules Forum next month in Orlando, so I'm interested to see if the Forrester analysts have the same thoughts on this subject as I do.

They start with the statement that "design for people, build for change" will drive the convergence of the three B's. Interestingly, although a few people in the room stated that they use BPM and BI together, almost no one raised their hand to the combination of BPM and BR — a combination that I feel is critical to process agility. Gilpin went through a few introductory slides, pointing out that almost no business rules are explicitly defined, but are instead buried within processes and enterprise applications. He sees BI as driving effectiveness in businesses, and the combination of BPM and BR as driving efficiency.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, September 27, 2007
9:30 AM

OpenOffice.org has reached a significant anniversary. Earlier this month, OO passed the five-year mark as the only office software on my laptop computers, first installed when I bought a Windows 2000 machine in 2002, reinstalled a couple of months ago on a replacement laptop running Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux. With open-source Apache Tomcat, Cygwin, Firefox, MySQL, Python, R, and Thunderbird to keep OO company, there's been no looking back. Instead, given diverse project-health indicators such as the release of IBM's new Lotus Symphony, the reported assignment of 35 programmers to the project by IBM, and the continued evolution of the NeoOffice native version for MacOS X, I'm looking forward to my next five years of OpenOffice.org.

Posted by Joe Celko
Thursday, September 27, 2007
8:59 AM

The winner of last week's 'Email Address Validation' SQL puzzle is "Guest" (see comments), because he/she bothered to do the research and come up with an answer that is generic enough to port to any SQL dialect with a SIMILAR TO or a regexp() function. So, "Guest" please email me with your snail mail address (and some attempt to validate your SQL mastery/identity) and I'll send you one of my books.

My answer to last week's puzzle is as follows:

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
12:22 PM

Complex Event Processing (CEP) seemed like a no-brainer for broad-market acceptance when I first wrote about a key constituent technology a couple of years back. Relational data warehouses and conventional analytics have not kept up with the explosive growth in real-time data volumes and the perceived demand for real-time analytics. CEP promised to fill the gap: technology developed for the extreme high-volume, low-latency processing demands of capital-market algorithmic trading and communications networks, compatible with emerging service-oriented architectures, applicable to a broad spectrum of security, logistics, and click-stream challenges. Further, CEP is supported by a vibrant, diverse community of academic and industrial researchers. IBM and Oracle and other established companies are doing very significant work, and the field has spawned half-a-dozen start-ups. Yet two years on, CEP is still struggling for market definition outside of capital markets.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
10:26 AM

Analyst Connie Moore offered the opening keynote, entitled "Design for People, Build for Change: Transforming the Nature of Work," at this week's Forrester Technology Leadership Forum. Her focus is on how business and IT have to work together in order to achieve this, but she likes the term "blended business-IT" rather than "business-IT alignment" because she wants them to be seen as a single entity rather than two separate bodies that need to be aligned in some way. I've heard Moore speaking at other conferences and on webinars previously, usually on the topic of BPM, and it's significant that Forrester puts a BPM analyst in the keynote position at this forum: it really drives home that the key focus here is on process.

She posed three questions about this sort of transformation: why now, what underpins this trend, and how will it unfold?

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
3:15 PM

Way back in the '80s (or does it date all the way back to the '70s?), a popular maxim had it that "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM." An IBM salesman probably came up with that one, but in any case it stuck. Reflecting on last week's announcement about the new IBM Lotus Symphony desktop suite, based on OpenOffice.org technology and available as a free download, I'd say it's time for a new maxim: "Nobody ever got fired for perpetuating the Microsoft Office monopoly."

Posted by Tony Byrne
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
1:07 PM

There's a particular Dilbert cartoon making the rounds that pokes good fun at Web 2.0 in general and "folksonomies" in particular.

Surely there is much to satirize here. Cartoonist Scott Adams is particularly adept at surfacing (and pillorying) vague but alluring-sounding words like "folksonomy" and "platform" that, yes, we all over-use. But getting Dilberted also represents a certain coming of age, marking a concept passing from obscurity to early-stage hype, at least among tech and information management types.

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
9:08 AM

Well, it had to happen. Somebody who sells enterprise software had to push back on SaaS. In this case it was Oracle's Larry Ellison. Ellison told financial analysts in a quarterly earnings call last week that Oracle hasn't participated in the software-as-a-service trend because there's no money to be made there.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Monday, September 24, 2007
1:50 PM

I wasn't going to comment on the rumors about Business Objects looking to be acquired, because it seems to be one that resurfaces every few months and yet, everyone seems to keep asking me about it. If the rumor is true, it runs counter to all the positioning the vendor has been doing since Oracle acquired Hyperion. Business Object's positioning has been to emphasize the need for an independent, pure-play vendor that has no allegiance to a particular database or ERP system.

So if they are in the market to be acquired, what does that suggest about their stated strategy: oops, change in direction?

Posted by Mark Smith
Friday, September 21, 2007
8:56 AM

SAP publicly announced the new software as a service (SaaS) business application suite called SAP Business ByDesign, filling a gap in its market offering. Marketed as the big event, SAP is adding another branded application suite to its portfolio that goes beyond the three on-premise suites it already has for large, medium and small businesses. The applications suite focuses on midsized firms with 100 to 500 employees and provides a new area for growth through both direct sales and channel partnerships. Yes, there is more fanfare, but the application suite is not yet ready for primetime.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
3:33 PM

Analyst Michael Smith had a session here at the Gartner BPM Summit on using performance metrics to align business processes with strategy. His area of expertise is performance management, and he's found lately that business process improvement is a growing theme in that sector.

Smith started out by quashing the notion of best-practice business processes: processes are so different between different types of companies that there isn't a single best practice. [I think that there are best practices within industry verticals, but he didn't seem to consider that.] He went on to say that business strategies are, in general, poorly defined, poorly understood and poorly executed, then went on to outline a process for developing a business strategy:

• Define strategic intent
• Define strategic objectives
• Identify performance metrics
• IT strategy and objectives
• Measures of IT performance

Posted by Mark Smith
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
2:47 PM

This week, salesforce.com had its annual conference, Dreamforce 2007, with more than 7,000 attendees and 200 partners. The company highlighted the next steps in its mission to conquer the enterprise applications and platform computing market. Beginning as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider for contact management moving to sales force automation (SFA) and then on to a CRM suite in the last 10 years.

Salesforce.com and its dyanamic CEO & chairman, Marc Bennioff, are at it again. The company is positioned to take on the vast majority of the broader enterprise applications and platform software market. Directly competing with IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP and others, they are challenging the conventional wisdom of the on-premise approach of purchasing, installing and configuring software across large, medium and small sized organizations. In fact, it is taking on the broader platform market opportunity.

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
7:40 AM

Have you seen "Greg the Architect" on YouTube? It just keeps getting funnier. The latest episode is "Off the Grid," which nicely skewers the analysts' Quadrant and Wave reports. Kudos to TIBCO. Enjoy!

Posted by Mark Madsen
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
6:45 AM

None of the shopping sites with which I'm familiar truly take advantage of the presentation opportunities offered by the Web. They still merchandise online in the same way they lay out shelves in a store. So you filter by type of clothing, style, gender and size.

Speaking at the recent TDWI Executive Summit, I talked about Web mashups, BI and the blurring between the two. One of the mashups I showed was ColorPickr, a nifty app that pulls images from photo site Flickr based on your choice of color from a palette.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
3:45 PM

A session presented by analyst Bill Gassman here on day two of the Gartner BPM Summit was on measuring processes in real time, namely business activity monitoring (BAM), and how it needs to be considered up front as processes are being design and implemented.

Gassman started off with a few definitions — BAM, real-time BI, operational BI, and process-driven BI — with some pretty fuzzy distinctions between some of these, especially in these days of converging functionality in the BI products. He then defined the goals of BAM: to monitor key objectives, anticipate operational risks, and reduce latency between events and actions.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
2:05 PM

I'm grateful to Actuate for giving me an preview look at BIRT Exchange, a new community site set to launch next Monday, September 24. Like the sponsoring company, the new site straddles the commercial open and closed source worlds. It will surely benefit BIRT Java programmers whether they use the open-source Eclipse version of BIRT or the closed source Actuate version. But make no mistake: Actuate's motives remain staunchly commercial and the company will retain tight control over BIRT development.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
6:37 AM

My third time today for hearing Janelle Hill speak, but I usually find her to be pretty interesting. This time, her topic is "BPM: A Change from Business as Usual", taking a look at what's really new in BPM, how BPM can change the way a company operates, and some BPM use cases.

She started out with a great chart showing what's new and the implications of each of these points; for example, the fact that processes must be effective and transparent, not just efficient, implies that processes must be explicit and not embedded within applications. In discussing the harmonization of incremental improvement and transformative change, she comes back to the phrase "design for change", which I've heard several times today already; interestingly enough, the subtitle of the Forrester IT Leadership Forum where I'm speaking next week is "Design for People, Build for Change", indicating that the analysts are really setting the focus on this concept. This is, of course, the heart of business agility: if something isn't designed and built with the intention that it would be changed frequently, then you're not going to be changing it much.

Posted by Mark Smith
Monday, September 17, 2007
10:37 PM

Reported over the weekend by Reuters was that Business Objects had hired Goldman Sachs to find a buyer for the billion-dollar-plus business intelligence (BI) provider.

Is Business Objects, which has recently made acquisitions in financial management, data quality, search and other technologies to extend their portfolio of platform and application capabilities, ready to be consolidated? Is this report just more of the continued discussions of market consolidation in BI market and finding the best return for shareholders or just accidental leaks from normal business operations? Will HP, IBM or SAP get more serious about the BI market to compete against Cognos, Microsoft and Oracle? No comment of course from official channels at Business Objects, but clearly something is brewing.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Monday, September 17, 2007
2:16 PM

Scrambling down to the opening of the Gartner BPM Summit in Orlando this morning — I arrived late last night and didn't get enough sleep, much less a chance to register — I struck up a conversation in the elevator with someone who was already wearing a Gartner conference badge and asked him where the registration area was. He pointed me in the right direction, and said that he hoped that the process was faster than last night, saying that he didn't know what they were running on their systems but that it was very slow. I tossed off my usual comment about systems that don't work well — "probably Windows" — then turned to him and saw the Microsoft logo on his shirt. Great, I'm not even at the conference yet, and I've made my first enemy.

The conference kicked off with a welcome from Daryl Plummer, Bill Rosser and Pascal Winckel [all speakers that I reference at this conference are with Gartner unless otherwise noted]. Plummer started off with an audience vote that showed that there are way more business than technical people here, a great (and fairly unusual) thing for a BPM conference. Like most business-focussed conferences, however, the logistics are not blogging-friendly: there's no wifi, only an Internet area where I can plug into a physical cable, and there's no power at the tables to keep my laptop juiced. In fact, when I ran into Jesper Joergensen from BEA at the break, the first thing that he said to me was "uh oh, no wifi — the conference is going to get a bad review!"

Posted by Doug Henschen
Monday, September 17, 2007
11:04 AM

It's pretty clear to me that the business-process- management and operational-performance- management camps are singing from the same hymn book these days. Throw in the business-rule and predictive-analytics camps and you've got a quartet singing in four-part harmony. The question is, when and which vendors will move beyond marketing deals and start putting this stuff together? Could Carl Icahn's interest in BEA spark some serious deal making?

Posted by Joe Celko
Monday, September 17, 2007
7:26 AM

You've probably noticed that many Web sites use the customer's email addresses as an identifier — an email address has a very easy validation. We have all received messages something like this: "Thanks for signing up for 'The Leech Farmer's Monthly' email newsletter! We are sending you a confirmation at your email address with your temporary password."

How many ways can you write CHECK() column constraint to validate an email address? Call the column "email" just so all entries look alike (yes, you really should use "_email" to follow ISO-11179 rules). You are not allowed to do an external function call; it has to be in Standard SQL or a dialect extension.

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Friday, September 14, 2007
6:24 PM

CA, Day, Hummingbird and webMethods are out, and open-source and business process management-oriented alternatives are in. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and BEA remain in the top-right corner. These are just a few of the highlights in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products, released late last month and available here as a free download at Oracle's Web site. Most helpful for would-be portal buyers are the vendor-by-vendor notes on "strengths" and "cautions."

Posted by David Linthicum
Thursday, September 13, 2007
12:11 PM

Let's face it. The government and SaaS have not mixed. This is largely due to three major concerns:

First, governments consider their business processes to be very specialized. Thus, neither packaged applications nor SaaS-delivered applications can meet their expectations.

Second, they see their security needs as going well beyond what SaaS can offer. In some cases there are laws that limit their ability to send information outside the firewall.

Finally, there is a clear control issue around SaaS... they want to hug their servers from time to time.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
11:38 AM

Is your BI deployment departmental or enterprisewide? That alone is a strong indicator of how successful a deployment you will have. Given that about half of BI deployments are departmental, I can't help but think of the "Tragedy of the Commons," which involves a conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good.

This concept has been used to describe a number of social and economic problems in which an individual's gain comes at the expense of the group. Herdsmen, for example, who have to share pasture for sheep, will continue to add sheep to the property when the products from the sheep (wool or meat) exceed the cost in degrading the common pasture. Global warming problems have been explained by the tragedy of the commons in that individual countries and people don't inherently want to cut emissions or drive smaller cars, not wanting to trade national or personal sacrifices for the greater good of the world.

Posted by Mark Madsen
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
4:10 PM

Every TDWI conference leaves me with insight into what to expect during the next year. At last month's World Conference in San Diego we had both the regular conference and a two-day executive summit. The main trends I saw:

Predictive Analytics still hot — Predictive analytics (a.k.a. data mining) seems to be the topic most people are interested in hearing about. A lot of the engineering problems we faced with data mining in the '90s have been solved and cheap computing power makes broader use more feasible. The catch is that it still takes expertise to understand which techniques work best for different problems. Expect a new subclass of BI professionals who know PA tools and techniques, just as we have BI tool and design experts now.

Lots of people talking about data governance — There seem to be two threads driving this:

Posted by Nelson King
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
9:05 AM

Stuff crosses your desk, so to speak. I'm not sure what this means in the Internet age, but simply put, pieces of information come to your attention and usually leave attention quickly. For example, on Wednesday, September 5, there was an e-mail blurb about Microsoft releasing version 1.0 of Silverlight. I don't know how many IT managers and developers are following Silverlight. Perhaps not many. Certainly a 1.0 release of anything, even (or especially) from Microsoft, rarely warrants much attention. I'm not reaching for a megaphone to amp this event, but a little soft-spoken commentary might be useful.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Monday, September 10, 2007
7:24 AM

It's probably true in more ways than one, but the four-letter word I'm thinking of is RISK. The ultimate objective of IT governance is two-fold: enhance business value and reduce business risk from information technology. A recent book I read does a pretty good job of addressing the latter, and goes onto my "Recommended Reading" bookshelf.

As IT continues to grow in strategic importance — and let's face it, IT "arrived" years ago, naysayers be damned — IT is also a source of increasing business risk and disruption. The vulnerability of airlines to any technological malfunction (or, of course, misalignment in the human-computer interface) is a stellar example of the disruptive power of IT.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Friday, September 7, 2007
12:59 PM

The Web Analytics Association (WAA) recently released its definitions of 26 common terms used for reporting and metrics. Those familiar with Web analytics will probably not learn a great deal from reading the standards; they are meant primarily for industry newcomers. However, here's a few ways you can use the document:

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, September 6, 2007
2:25 PM

I had the privilege of attending an eye-opening event in New York recently that featured Citigroup executive Bill Sweeney as a keynote speaker. The Managing Director, Global Risk, Compliance and Technology, Sweeney sees to it that the banking giant meets myriad regulatory requirements around reporting and record-keeping as well as rigorous rules around assigning reserves against market, credit and operational risks. On all these fronts, the biggest challenge, he says, is enterprise information management — getting a handle on the disparate data stores that are growing like weeds within just about every organization.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
3:38 PM

Cognos's planned takeover of performance-management (PM) and OLAP vendor Applix was eminently predictable. BI companies have been hungry for PM capabilities; think of the Actuate-Performancesoft, Business Objects-Cartesis, Oracle-Hyperion, and SAP-OutlookSoft deals. Cognos's step -- preceded by their 2003 Adaytum acquisition -- leaves Information Builders and Microstrategy as the only major BI players without deep, in-house PM solutions and Longview as one of the last remaining independent PM vendors, albeit noting their alliance with Information Builders and others.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
11:22 AM

With all the performance management acquisitions in the spring, Cognos was noticeably quiet. Fueling an already active market, Cognos announced this morning its intent to acquire Applix, makers of TM1 OLAP, planning, and performance management solutions.

While Applix may have ranked at the bottom of IDC’s BI market share report, the vendor has been one of the fastest growing and has a stronger position in the performance management market segment. The acquisition will almost double Cognos’ number of performance management customers.

TM1 in fact used to be the underlying engine for Hyperion Planning, prior to Essbase. TM1 gives Cognos an in-memory OLAP engine with write-back and an open API, things Cognos PowerPlay lacked. In addition to the sweet purchase price — the deal brings Applix share holders ($339 million or about 5 times sales) — the good news for Applix customers is that they will no longer have to turn to another BI vendor for relational and production reporting.