ParAccel Enters the Analytical Database Race

As I’ve now written more times than I care to admit, specialized analytical databases are very much in style. In addition to my beloved QlikView, market entrants include Alterian, SmartFocus, QD Technology, Vertica, 1010data, Kognitio, Advizor and Polyhedra, not to mention established standbys including Teradata and Sybase IQ. Plus you have to add appliances like Netezza, Calpont, Greenplum and DATAllegro. Many of these run on massively parallel hardware platforms; several use columnar data structures and in-memory data access. It’s all...

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What's New at DataFlux? I Thought You'd Never Ask.

What with it being Valentine’s Day and all, you probably didn’t wake up this morning asking yourself, “I wonder what’s new with DataFlux?” That, my friend, is where you and I differ. Except that I actually asked myself that question a couple of weeks ago, and by now have had time to get an answer. Which turns out to be rather interesting.DataFlux, as anyone still reading this probably knew already, is a developer of data quality software and is owned by SAS. DataFlux’s original core technology was a statistical matching engine that automatically...

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Red Herring CMO Conference: What Do Marketers Really Want?

I’ve spent the last two days at Red Herring Magazine’s CMO8 conference, which was both excellent and a welcome change from my usual focus on the nuts and bolts of marketing systems. Reflecting Red Herring’s own audience, the speakers and audience were largely from technology companies and many presentations were about business-to-business rather than business to consumer marketing. My particular favorites included AMD’s Stephen DiFranco, Ingram Micro’s Carol Kurimsky, and Lenovo’s Deepak Advani. DiFranco discussed how AMD manages to survive...

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