Archive for July, 2008

Experts???

July 20, 2008 at 4:33 am · Filed under Data Integration, Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , ,

I was just looking over reviews of Integration tools by Gartner ans Forrester … pretty scary.

Two faults with the Gartner report:

The exclusion of open source contenders Pentaho and Jasper – Gartner does qualify that they only analyze tools from companies with minimum revenue or minimum number of production customers – While Pentaho may not yet have 300 subscribers to the commercial version (I have worked for two companies that do or .67% of the threshold), I’d bet just about anything that there were way over 300 customers supported by the community in 2007 when the Gartner report came out.

The other flaw with the Pentaho report is in their naming of the report – they review monolithic ENTERPRISE data integration tools with ENTERPRISE criteria but title their report Magic Quandrant for Data Integration Tools, 2007.

The Forrester Wave™ Evaluation of the Enterprise ETL Market is more appropriately named but kinda scary … I don’t know much about Forrester, but recognizing OWB as an option is a joke and Pervasive is given some credit – while pretty powerful, Pervasive is just a mash of some small scale tools – last time I used it, it requires multiple different scripting languages depending on the part of the suite you were in!

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Impressed!

July 9, 2008 at 1:29 am · Filed under misc ·Tagged , , ,

I do not normally get too excited or geeked-out over equipment but today I helped a client install Coraid LINUX and setup a SAN for her data – she does statistical work and needs to store and access billions of records in pretty simple tables for analysis.

WOW! Coraid is cool.  My client will likely buy one of their appliances but we went to prove it out with the open-source package (designed for there appliances and so only for x86_64).  If I can install and configure this, you can rest assured it is not overly complex.

Not as fast as a SAN but still pretty fast.  Imagine adding unlimited usable TBs (nfs) for just over 2x the  street price of a reasonable SATA drive …

http://support.coraid.com/support/cln/faq.html

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Raising the Odds

July 7, 2008 at 3:17 am · Filed under Uncategorized

A few characteristics are key to succeeding with tactical data integrations -

  • They are concise – the purpose and business value can be summarized in a few lines
  • They are quick – at Business Informatics, we avoid efforts that are expected to take over four weeks, from commission to delivery of a tested solution
  • They provide immeadeate value – returns expected from future efficieincy and cost avoidance can be very real, but our tactics and methodology drive towards tangible returns shortly after deployment
  • They are not tool specific – if you hear there is only one tool that can be used for a task, chances are, someone wants to exercise a specific technology.  We always define the problem and design the solution before considering the tool-kit.

Enterprise IT and monster projects are approrpriate to address certian challenges and will always be necesary – We generally avoid these situations.

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