Then there is the XML interface with the same blinding speed and a completely different optimum application…

So why does it remain relatively unknown?

Is it the altruistic hardcore open source commitment (didn’t stop Apache)? Lack of a pretty package and slick admin tool (doesn’t seem to be a roadblock for SQLite)? Or perhaps a lack of acceptance of column-oriented databases (but Infobright and Vertica are far less mature, far more complex and are shit-hot right now)?

Go figure … (or comment on what I’m missing)

Seems to me, this is like asking how a mainframe compares to a spiffy new two-way quad-core Linux server.

Like the mainframe, MPP dbms will live on in speciality situations for decades but to mainstream users, any MPP based solution is a legacy app. Even Teradata is reinventing itself as a LINUX platformed marketing solution (and doing a good job) – that tragic Greenplum thing will die on the vine.

Lots of folks are using MPP heavy metal, it is good stuff – no need to tell me … if you’re considering buying a MPP rig, please comment as to why – I’m not tryng to talk you out of it or sell anything, just very curious as to what I am missing.

…an IT leader goes out on a limb to get funding for a shit-hot new enterprise integration platform.

turns out, they were sold a bill of goods – it is a multiple of the expected cost, painful to stand up and nowhere near as agile as the sales weasel promised

…their justification for the purchase fades away. In an effort to rationalize the purchase, every IT and business project is forced to consider this new platform, solutions start to come out of IT instead of out of the business

…the business owners and sponsors of projects of are sold the same bill of goods, suffer the same disappointment …

For most needs, Kettle is faster better and allows faster and more agile development than Informatica. Spend a week with it and you’ll see. (not dismissing the other commercial players, but, realistically, Infa rules the space where Kettle wants and needs to be)

A feature of Kettle in some tactical situations is the fact that Kettle neither needs or wants a monolithic centralized ETL server – if you’ve got a little RAM to dedicate to a JVM, it is off to the races. The other day, I was able to enjoy the benefits of a tools over had coded scripts when pulling data from an ERP, from a MES and from some standalone sensors on robotic welders. There is visibility into the transformation/integration logic and much of the work will be reused in the future. Cool.  A great use of Kettle as it is today

Where Informatica excels and Pentaho doesn’t show for the party (or apparently even know there is a party) is in the monitoring of independent and related processes on a constant basis – The Pentaho crowd will say “oh that’s easy, Kettle captures all of the operation meta data to do it” (it does), but they miss the point!  As simple as it may seem to the Jave devs recording it, using the repository data is daunting to many.  Few of their customers will start from scratch to build the reports and analytic tools to monitor dependencies, jobs and transformations – instead they go to Informatica.

A call to Matt Casters or some clever opensource developer (related or not to the Pentaho crowd) – Build a dashboard and reports (in Pentaho’s framework) that does half of what WorkFlow Manager does and you will soar!!!

Determined to prove his claim, the next evening he drags the dog to the bar, quiets the crowd and encourages the dog to sing.  The dog does sing and the two are promptly thrown out and told to never come back.  The dog was way off key and sounded like shit.

Saw a bit of this when Ora 10g RAC came out … some co-workers were so excited that they could parallelized queries across the interconnects to multiple LINUX boxes that they ignored the fact it was slow and did not work well.

The latest technology this seems to is the new generation of integration tools  – I’ll call them EAI tools though many will take issue with this lable – while I’ve seen tools like WebMethods work to support very specifc solutions, the notion that it is a general purpose enterprise swiss army knife for integration is bunk.  Please comment, especially if you have first hand knowlege of even one deployment that met expectations and was on or under budget!

Jitterbit Community edition is a development snapshot, offering the latest build of Jitterbit as we move towards our next major release. The Jitterbit Community Edition is primarily tested and supported by the open source community and because of its “early release” nature it is NOT recommended for production use. The Community edition of Jitterbit comes with limited installation support from Jitterbit and does not include certification, QA (quality assurance) or support and services for production deployment.
Technicalities aside, this is contrary to the spirit of Open Source Software – it may technically comply with the OSD but …

You don’t see Redhat implying that Fedora is not stable enough for prime-time!

I want to be clear that I respect the company’s right to sell their very high quality software and hope it is successful but InfoWorld should take back thier BOSSIE award (if it was this year) and their use of an org domain is a sham …  Open Source it isn’t.

Twice, I have had clients purchase five-figure subscriptions to open source software based on the results and confidence they acquired through consulting engagements with the community versions – Can’t do this with Jitterbit!

They are just using the label open source for marketing hype and impact leaving Pentaho (Kettle), Jasper (Talend) and SnapLogic in my os integration tool bag.

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!

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

• 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.

Describes the type of Excel or hand-coded integrations often seen in reconciliations and the like.