451 Research has today published a report looking at the funding being invested in Apache Hadoop- and NoSQL database-related vendors. The full report is available to clients, but non-clients can find a snapshot of the report, along with a graphic representation of the recent up-tick in funding, over at our Too Much Information blog.
Microsoft’s Android revenue. Tizen formation. And more.
# As Microsoft announced its latest Android-related patent agreement with Samsun, Goldman Sachs estimated that the company will make $444m in revenue from Android patent deals for fiscal year 2012.
# LiMo Foundation and The Linux Foundation announced the formation of Tizen to develop a Linux-based device software platform.
# Karmasphere raised $6m in a series B round of funding, led by new investor Presidio Ventures.
# Citrix Systems announced the availability of XenServer 6.
# 10gen announced the general availability of MongoDB Monitoring Service, a free monitoring service for the MongoDB database.
# Percona announced the release of Percona Server version 5.5.15.
# Hortonworks became a Gold sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation.
# The developers behind PhoneGap have applied to contribute their open source mobile development framework to the Apache Software Foundation.
# Piston Cloud Computing is set to launch its PentOS enterprise operating system for the cloud and put OpenStack on a memory stick.
# The Free Software Foundation announced the re-launch of its Free Software Directory.
# Rhomobile announced availability of RhoConnect 3.0.
# Nokia is reportedly working on a new Linux-based operating system for mass market phones called Meltemi.
Red Hat revenue up 28% in Q2. Funding for NoSQL vendors. And more.
# Red Hat reported net income of $40m in the second quarter on revenue up 28% to $281.3m.
# 10gen raised $20m in funding, while DataStax closed an $11m series B round, while also releasing its DataStax Enterprise and Community products. Additionally Neo Technology raised $10.6m series A funding.
# Oracle announced the addition of new extended capabilities in MySQL Enterprise Edition. The move confirmed the adoption of the open core licensing strategy, and was both welcomed and derided.
# BonitaSoft announced an $11m series B funding round.\
# Platfora raised $5.7m in series A funding to accelerate development of its BI and analytics platform for data stored in Hadoop.
# EMC launched its EMC Greenplum Modular Data Computing Appliance, which includes both the Greenplum Database and Greenplum HD (Hadoop), and introduced the Greenplum Analytics Workbench, a test bed cluster for integration testing Apache Hadoop.
# Oracle acquired GoAhead Software, which offers a commercial distribution of OpenSAF.
# Ingres changed its name to Actian and launched its Action Apps and Cloud Action Platform.
# Richard Stallman asked ‘Is Android really free software?’. Predictably enough the answer is ‘no’. Carlo Daffara called FUD.
# LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ HPCC Systems released the source code for its HPCC Systems platform, and introduced a covenant to keep contributed code open source for three years.
# OpenStack released Diablo, the fourth version of its open source cloud software.
# The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announced the release of PostgreSQL 9.1.
# VoltDB announced the general availability of VoltDB version 2.0.
# Samsung is reportedly planning to release its Bada mobile operating system under an open source license.
# Karmasphere updated its Karmasphere Analyst Big Data analytics product with new workflow capabilities for Apache Hadoop.
# The Open Virtualization Alliance now has more than 200 members.
# The Outercurve Foundation announced the acceptance of the GADS open source project into its Data, Language and System Interoperability Gallery.
# Openbravo announced that customer deployments of its ERP product on Amazon have increased over 187% in the last 12 months.
# The Apache Software Foundation confirmed Apache Whirr as a top-level project.
# Qt gained more independence from Nokia.
# SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has been selected for Use with SAP HANA.
# Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 was certified by SAP to run SAP business applications, as well as support for SAP running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2.
# 10gen’s MongoDB was chosen by SAP as a core component of SAP’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering.
# Puppet Labs announced Puppet Enterprise 2.0.
# Microsoft added Casio to its list of Linux-related patent agreement signees.
# Dries Buytaert explained why Acquia acquired Cyrve and GVS and addressed concern that Acquia is sucking up all the Drupal talent.
# Medsphere Systems announced the generally availability of the enhanced OpenVista electronic health record (EHR) platform.
# Stormy Peters asked whether open source is excluding high context cultures.
# OpenIndiana’s fork of OpenSolaris added support for the Illumos kernel.
# Cenatic released the results of its research into public administration involvement in open source communities.
# Spring Roo is shifting to be 100% Apache licensed.
# VLC developers are looking for anyone who has contributed to libVLC so that they can approve the change in licence from GPLv2 to LGPLv2.
# Virtual Bridges joined OpenStack.
# Github now has over one million users.
# Splunk open sourced the code for docs.splunk.com.
I'm the boards of two companies (Pentaho, Revolution Analytics) that are starting to see a lot of customer traction around Big Data. More and more companies in media, pharma, retail and finance are doing advanced analysis, reporting, graphing, etc with massive data sets. It made me wonder what other areas of the technology stack might evolve with the trend towards Big Data. Obviously, there's new middleware layers like Hadoop and Map Reduce, and we're also seeing the emergence of NoSQL data management layers with Cassandra, MongoDB, MemBase and others. But what about programming languages?
OpenGamma CEO and resident genius Kirk Wylie wrote a post recently about why he wants a new programming language.
So why don't I have this language yet? Well, partially because programming language craftsmanship is hard. I'm pretty sure I'm not good enough to do it, which is usually my default criteria for saying something is Really Hard.
But I think as well the k3wl languages coming out are coming out of language requirements of the Top 10% crowd. They're the ones good enough to actually write the languages, and they're going to write a language that makes them happy. But then you end up with Scala, and then you end up with this monstrosity, and then you make me cry. A language in which that thing is even possible will never be a candidate as a Journeyman Programming Language.
You know who's going to do it? Someone like Gosling, who set about with the needs of the journeyman programmer in Java. But the state of the art has moved on, and Java just isn't suitable anymore.
Who I would really like to do it is Anders Hejlsberg. I am a very big fan of C#-the-Language. It's just that .Net-the-Ecosystem is so Microsoft-specific and horrific it'll never catch on in the wider world, no matter what Miguel de Icaza thinks.
This got me thinking about the challenge of the current complexity in Big Data systems. Today, you have to be near genius level to build systems on top of Cassandra, Hadoop and the like today. These are powerful tools, but very low-level, equivalent to programming client server applications in assembly language. When it works it's great, but the effort is significant and it's probably beyond the scope of mainstream IT organizations. (That's one reason that Revolution's R product has appeal, but R is a specialized statistical analysis tool, not a general purpose language.)
Could the Big Data complexity be factored out somehow with a new general purpose programming language? No doubt. Having worked with Anders on the creation of Delphi many years back, this is right up his alley. Or maybe we already have a good starting point with Erlang, Scala and Google's Go. Go is particularly interesting having been designed by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson of Bell Labs / Unix fame.
What's been your experience in programming Big Data systems? What do you think's needed? Let me know in the comments below.
Zack Urlocker is an investor, advisor and board member to several startup software companies in SaaS and Open Source. He was previously the EVP of Products at MySQL responsible for Engineering and Marketing. He built the MySQL Enterprise subscription strategy and product line. MySQL was sold to Sun for $1 billion and is now part of Oracle Corporation. He is also a marathon runner, blues guitarist and fan of Interactive Fiction.
Topics for this podcast:
*Jacobsen v. Katzer and open source impact
*Intel, Nokia team up for MeeGo open source OS
*Open source continues in embedded space
*MongoDB and the advent of the NoSQL databases
*Copyrights, complexities, control and conflict
iTunes or direct download (21:48, 6.07 MB)
The NoSQL event in New York had a number of presentations on non relational technologies including of Hadoop, MongoDB and CouchDB.
Coming historically from a relational background of 20 years with Ingres, Oracle and MySQL I have been moving my focus towards non relational data store. The most obvious and well used today is memcached, a non persistent distributed key/value pair store. There are a number of persistent key/value stores in the marketplace, Tokyo Cabinet, Project Voldemort and Redis to name a few.
My list of data store products helps to identify the complex name space of varying products that now exist. A trend is towards schema less solutions, the ability to better manage dynamically typed/formatted information and the Agile Methodology release approach is simply non achievable in a statically type relational database table/column structure. The impact of constant ALTER TABLE commands in a MySQL database makes your production system unusable.
In a highly distribute online and increasing offline operation, fault tolerance and data synchronization and eventual consistency are required features in complex topologies such as multi-master.
I advise and promote a technology agnostic solution when possible. With the use of an API this is actually achievable, however in order to use a variety of backend data store products, one must consider the design patterns for optimal management. Two factors to support a highly distributed data set are no joins and minimal transactional semantics. The Facebook API is a great example, where there are no joins for their MySQL Relational backend. The movement back to a logical and non-normalized schema, or move towards a totally schemaless solution do require great though in the architectural concepts of your application.
Ultimately feature requirements will dictate the relative strengths and weaknesses of products. Full text search is a good example. CouchDB provides native support via Lucene. Another feature I like of couchDB is its append only data mode. This makes durability easy, and auto-recovery after crash a non issue, another feature a transactional relational database can not achieve.
With a 2 day no:sql(east) conference this month, there is definitely greater interest in this space.