Edd Dumbill:

Microsoft’s goals go beyond integrating Hadoop into Windows. It intends to contribute the adaptions it makes back to the Apache Hadoop project, so that anybody can run a purely open source Hadoop on Windows.

In the open source world contributions are measured in code or documentation or donations. Less so in interviews or PR announcements.

So far Microsoft doesn’t seem to know this game. But if its intentions are true, the community will help.

Original title and link: Microsoft, Hadoop, and Open Source Contributions (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/01/microsoft-big-data.html

One of the exciting new features in the just-released SQL Azure Q4 2011 Service Release is SQL Azure Federation. In a sentence, SQL Azure Federation enables building elastic and scalable database tiers.

We all know the benefits of sharding so why calling it differently? NIH?

Original title and link: SQL Azure Federation… Aka Sharding (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/12/13/building-large-scale-elastic-database-tiers-with-sql-azure-introducing-federations.aspx

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/

InformationWeek quoting Steve Ballmer:

Nobody plays in big data, really, except Microsoft and Google

[…]

I’ll use the word ‘data’ rather than ‘BI’ because that says I want to use all the world’s information… not just the information that we figured out how to capture inside our corporate system.

[…]

The explosion in the use of data is not always in a traditional BI-ish way, and that’s a big thing for us

But what is behind these words? The InformationWeek article builds around Steve Balmer’s vision that based on the knowledge gained creating and operating Bing and AdCenter, Microsoft is better prepared to handle BigData than EMC, HP, IBM, Oracle, and Teradata. While this can be true, there’s an important difference to draw here: creating and operating internal processes and tools is a different business than developing, selling, and supporting tools for customers. Microsoft has experience in both these fields, but their current products are not yet combining the know-how in these two areas. Meanwhile the companies mentioned above, plus quite a few startups, and open source projects are betting their future on this market alone by staying focused.

Original title and link: Steve Ballmer on Microsoft and Big Data (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/230700013