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Growing up as an engineer and as a programmer I was reminded every step along the way that resources—computing as well as memory—are scarce. The programs were designed on these constraints. Then the cloud revolution happened and we told people not to worry about scarce computing. We saw rise of MapReduce, Hadoop, and countless other NoSQL technology. Software was the new hardware. We owe it to all the software development, especially computing frameworks, that allowed developers to leverage the cloud—computational elasticity—without having to understand the complexity underneath it. What has changed in the last two to three years is a) the underlying file systems and computational frameworks have matured b) adoption of Big Data is driving the demand for scale out and responsive I/Os in the cloud. Three years back, I wrote a post, The Future Of The BI In Cloud  where I had highlighted two challenges of using cloud as a natural platform for Big Data. The first one was to create a lar...

Two years back I wrote that the primary challenge with NoSQL is that it's not SQL . SQL has played a huge rule in making relational databases popular for the last forty years or so. Whenever the developers wanted to design an(y) application they put an RDBMS underneath and used SQL from all possible layers. Over a period of time, the RDBMS grew in functions and features such as binary storage, faster access, clusters, sophisticated access control etc. and the applications reaped these benefits. The traditional RDBMS became a non-fit for cloud-scale applications that fundamentally required scale at whole different level. Traditional RDBMS could not support this scale and even if they could it became prohibitively expensive for the developers to use it. Traditional RDBMS also became too restrictive due to their strict upfront schema requirements that are not suitable for modern large scale consumer web and mobile applications. Due to these two primary reasons and a lot more other rea...

Being at Under The Radar (UTR), watching disruptive companies present and network with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and venture capitalists is an annual tradition that I don't miss. I have blogged about disruptive start-ups that I saw in the previous years. The biggest exit out of UTR, that I have witnessed so far, is Salesforce.com's $212 million acquisition of Heroku . This post is about one of the disruptive start-ups that I saw at UTR this year - NimbusDB . I met with Barry Morris, the CEO and Founder of NimbusDB at a reception the night before. I had long conversation with him around the issues with legacy databases, NoSQL, and of course NimbusDB. I must say that, after long time, I have seen a company applying all the right design principles to solve a chronic problem - how can you make SQL databases scale so that they don't suck. One of the main issues with the legacy relational databases is that they were never designed to scale out to begin with. A range of No...

The Dealmaker Media has published a list of their favorite Cloud, SaaS, and Tech bloggers . Once again I am happy to report that I made the cut. I am also glad to see my fellow bloggers Krishnan and Zoli on this list who are the driving force behind Cloudave . I was on a similar list of top cloud, virtualization, and SaaS bloggers that they had published in the past. Under The Radar is one of the best conferences that I go to. This is the best place for disruptive start-ups to pitch an get noticed. They make a great attempt to connect entrepreneurs with investors and blogger like me. I have blogged about the disruptive early stage cloud computing start-ups as well as the disruptive start-ups in the categories of NoSQL and virtualization . Most of these start-ups have either had a good exit or have been doing well. The best example so far is Heroku's $212M exit . I met the Heroku founders at Under The Radar a couple of years back. I am looking forward to soaking up even more in...

Check out the Part 1 if you haven’t already read it to better understand the context and my disclaimer. This is the Part 2 covering the assertions from 6 to 10. Assertion 6: Appliances should be "software only." “In my 40 years of experience as a computer science professional in the DBMS field, I have yet to see a specialized hardware architecture—a so-called database machine—that wins.” This is a black swan effect ; just because someone hasn’t seen an event occur in his or her lifetime, it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. This statement could also be re-written as “In my 40 years of experience, I have yet to see a social network that is used by 500 million people.” You get the point. I am the first one who would vote in favor of commodity hardware against a specialized hardware, but there are very specific reasons why the specialized hardware makes sense in some cases. “In other words, one can buy general purpose CPU cycles from the major chip vendors or specialized CPU c...

I have tremendous respect for Michael Stonebraker. He is an apt visionary. What I like the most about him is his drive and passion to commercialize the academic concepts. ACM recently published his article “ My Top 10 Assertions About Data Warehouses ." If you haven’t read it, I would encourage you to read it. I agree with some of his assertions and disagree with a few. I am grounded in reality, but I do have a progressive viewpoint on this topic. This is my attempt to bring an alternate perspective to the rapidly changing BI world that I am seeing. I hope the readers take it as constructive criticism. This post has been sitting in my draft folder for a while. I finally managed to publish it. This is Part 1 covering the assertions 1 to 5. The Part 2 with the rest of the assertions will follow in a few days. “Please note that I have a financial interest in several database companies, and may be biased in a number of different ways.” I appreciate Stonebraker’s disclaimer. I do belie...

Actual numbers vary based on whom you ask, but the general consensus is that the Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics in the cloud is a fast growing market. IDC expects a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.4% through 2013. This growth is primarily driven by two kinds of SaaS applications. The first kind is a purpose-specific analytics-driven application for business processes such as financial planning, cost optimization, inventory analysis etc. The second kind is a self-service horizontal analytics application/tool that allows the customers and ISVs to analyze data and create, embed, and share analysis and visualizations. The category that is still nascent and would require significant work is the traditional general-purpose BI on large data warehouses (DW) in the cloud. For the most enterprises, not only all the DW are on-premise, but the majority of the business systems that feed data into these DW are on-premise as well. If these enterprises were to adopt BI in the clou...

It was great to be back at Under The Radar this year. I wrote about disruptive cloud computing start-ups that I saw at Under The Radar last year. Since then the cloud computing has gained significant momentum. This was evident from talking to the entrepreneurs who pitched their start-ups this year. At the conference there was no discussion on what is cloud computing and why anyone should use it. It was all about how and not why. We have crossed the chasm. The companies who presented want to solve the “cloud scale” problems as it relates to database, infrastructure, development, management etc. This year, I have decided to break down my impressions into more than one post. NoSQL has seen staggering innovation in the last year. Here are the two companies in the NoSQL category that I liked at Under The Radar: Northscale was in stealth mode for a while and officially launched four weeks back. Their product is essentially a commercial version of memcached that sits in front of an RDBMS ...

I do recognize the thrust behind the NoSQL movement. While some are announcing an end of era for MySQL and memcached others are questioning the arguments behind Cassandra’s OLTP claims and scalability and universal applicability of NoSQL . It is great to see innovative data persistence and access solutions that challenges the long lasting legacy of RDBMS.  Competition between HBase and Cassandra is heating up. Amazon now supports a variety of consistency models on EC2 . However none of the NoSQL solutions solve a fundamental underlying problem – a developer upfront has to pick persistence, consistency, and access options for an application. I would argue that RDBMS has been popular for the last 30 years because of ubiquitous SQL. Whenever the developers wanted to design an application they put an RDBMS underneath and used SQL from all possible layers. Over a period of time the RDBMS grew in functions and features such as binary storage, faster access, clusters etc. and the ...