Wolfgang Gruener reporting on a new patent filed by IBM:

Instead of traditional disk-based queries and an approach that slows performance via memory latencies and processors waiting for data to be fetched from the memory, IBM envisions in-GPU-memory tables as technology that could, in addition to disk tables, significantly accelerate database processing. According to a patent filed by the company, “GPU enabled programs are well suited to problems that involve data-parallel computations where the same program is executed on different data with high arithmetic intensity.”

Amazon has made a move in the GPU-world by offering Cluster GPU instances which can be used for quite a few interesting scenarios.

Original title and link: GPU-Accelerated Databases (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ibm-patent-gpu-accelerated-database-cuda,13866.html

In an otherwise generic but interesting post about Hadoop and its integration with data analytics and data warehouse solutions, Jessica Twentyman writes:

It’s still a niche technology, but Hadoop’s profile received a serious boost over that past year, thanks in part to start-up companies such as Cloudera and MapR that offer commercially licensed and supported distributions of Hadoop. Its growing popularity is also the result of serious interest shown by EDW vendors like EMC, IBM and Teradata. EMC bought Hadoop specialist Greenplum in June 2010; Teradata announced its acquisition of Aster Data in March 2011; and IBM announced its own Hadoop offering, Infosphere, in May 2011.

Unfortunately she got this all wrong. It is the open source community, developers, data scientists, and Cloudera that help popularize Hadoop.

These data analytics and data warehouse vendors are just capitalizing on Hadoop delivering results. They haven’t been knocking at doors asking: “Have you heard of Hadoop? Do you want to try it?”. They’ve run into Hadoop in most of the places they went and that made them realize it is a business opportunity.

So, I’ll say it again: Hadoop is popular thanks to the open source community, developers, data scientists and Cloudera.

Original title and link: Hadoop: It’s Still a Niche Technology (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.co.uk/feature/Hadoop-for-big-data-puts-architects-on-journey-of-discovery

IBM jumps in the “big data” rush as it announced two major acquisitions in two days. On Wednesday, Big Blue announced that it will acquire security intelligence analytics company i2 […] The second major buy was revealed earlier today. IBM announced the deal to acquire Algorithmics, a risk analytics software and advisory service

The higher on the data stack your business is the more challenges it faces but the higher the reward. The good news is that the well established data companies have started the hunting acquisition season.

Original title and link: BigData Market: IBM Acquires Two Analytics Companies (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/09/01/ibm-is-on-an-acquisition-spree-for-big-data-software/

I assume people on both sides of data warehouses (users and providers) are asking the same question. IBM Netezza and Cloudera seem to agree on the answer:

IBM Netezza had worked with Cloudera to put together a compelling demo to highlight the value of our combined solution of CDH/Hadoop and Netezza.  Through an interesting use case, the demo showed how businesses could have their “hot” data (most recent data) residing in Netezza, “warm” data (longer time range data) residing in HDFS, while leveraging the Cloudera Connector for Netezza and Oozie (workflow engine part of CDH) to provide deeper insights to business executives.

I would have liked to know more details about the use case though. Just categorizing data in “hot” and “warm” is not enough to understand the advantages of each piece.

Original title and link: Hadoop and IBM Netezza: Compete or Co-Exist? (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2011/06/reflections-from-enzee-universe-2011/

If you are waiting for a financial services version of the powerful artificial intelligence system that won a game of Jeopardy against two of the highest winning champions of all time — Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings — don’t hold your breath … yet. Unfortunately for the Wall Street techno-geeks and quants looking for another tool to add to their algorithmic arsenal, IBM isn’t working on a financial services version of Watson at this time, according to Dr. David Ferrucci […]

Hopefully money will not change this decision too soon.

Original title and link: What’s Next for IBM Watson? (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/trading-technology/230700015

The pitch:

The IBM® Netezza High Capacity Appliance extends IBM Netezza’s family of data warehouse appliances to new extremes of data capacity, scaling to multiple petabytes of user data. This will enable organizations to meet a variety of analytical and historical data storage requirements with a single cost-effective appliance.

The reason for posting about it is this price information from the ZDNet announcement :

The big pitch for Netezza is the price per user per terabyte^[1]. Mills said the Netezza appliance will run about $2,500 per user per terabye compared to an average of $10,000.

Original title and link: IBM Launches First Netezza Appliance (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/ibm-launches-new-netezza-appliance-eyes-big-data/51135

The echo chamber is reacting:

Specifically, for a data processing and analytics project to qualify as Big Data, it must encompass not just internal corporate data, but also third-party data that resides outside the firewall, according to Ballmer. He said IBM and Oracle limit their Big Data approaches to internal data, thus they are not in fact Big Data by his definition.

[…]

IBM, Oracle and now Microsoft are jockeying to position each of their approaches to Big Data as the industry standard, and Ballmer is clearly trying to steer the Big Data conversation towards Microsoft’s strengths and away from its weaknesses. That means talking up Microsoft’s ability to integrate third-party data with relatively large volumes of corporate data inside Microsoft’s SQL Server R2 Parallel Data Warehouse and away from its lack of petabyte-scale data processing power.

I guess there will be no end to the Oracle-IBM-Microsoft triangle love, so I’ll stop here until real facts are added to the story.

Original title and link: Oracle and IBM May Not Know Big Data, but Neither Does Ballmer (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://wikibon.org/blog/oracle-and-ibm-may-not-know-big-data-but-neither-does-ballmer/

The company also cemented its commitment to the Hadoop open source data analytics tool, identifying it as “the cornerstone of [IBM’s] big data strategy” in a statement.

IBM is the latest in a line of enterprises to stress their commitment to Hadoop. Enterprise storage vendor EMC put a tweaked Hadoop distribution at the heart of a recently updated range of data analytics Greenplum appliances, while business intelligence company Jaspersoft announced plans to better integrate its products with Hadoop in February.

Sometimes I don’t get the meaning of the words commitment and investment. But this makes me believe others are having the same understanding problem.

Original title and link: IBM Hadoop Commitment (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

via: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/mapping-babel-10017967/ibm-drops-100m-on-big-data-research-10022520/