I’ve been watching some of the news lately from Ingres. While their GPL strategy will inhibit their ISV/OEM adoption (amoung other reasons) they seem to be doing two things very very well:
There has also been murmurs of some new products/strategies, such as a tightly coupled Ingres/Linux that will run on steel or in a VM.
So I ask to those that know… Am I wrong on the future of Ingres?
A while back I had an impromptu collaboration with Chris Harrington to see if any of his XML/A clients could interoperate with Mondrian. Our initial results were encouraging and Chris has taken some time to put Mondrian to task on his XML/A compatibility tests.
His results, well, I’ll let them speak for themselve:
I have a cmd file full of xmla.wsf invocations to test many kinds of Discover calls and a few Execute calls. So I had this as a ready-made compatability test. I just changed the XML/A URL and the catalog name (“FoodMart” instead of “FoodMart 2000”) and ran the script.
All of my XML/A invocations except one worked against Mondrian.
Apparently MSAS is slight more forgiving on some syntax issues (brackets, curly braces and such) but overall Mondrian can actually BE an XMLA provider to clients.
Very encouraging… Considering the economics of inexpensive Lintel servers, bitmap indices and partitioning, and the aggregate table feature in Mondrian: building a reasonable (ActiveInterface.com. Chris provides BI consulting services but also has a couple of cool XMLA clients.
PS – All of this because of investing in the XMLA standard.
Pentaho added a key ingredient (no pun intended) of BI into their platform with the acquisition of Kettle. Unveiled at Linuxworld, Pentaho now has an exceptionally productive, effective, open source ETL (and EII) tool.
Watch this space over the next few weeks as I will be blogging about Kettle (in conjunction with other Pentaho technologies) and how it can be used to build full BI solutions.
What’s the net net?
Kettle is more like an ETL product than an open source project. It’s effective, feature rich (including support for facts and dimension tables), productive, and built by a talented consultant who builds DW/BI solutions on a daily basis.
It’s graphical, user friendly, and is 100% pure Java which makes it exceptionally flexible.
My first time with Kettle I had an “Oracle Table” to “Oracle Table” mapping with a filter in between up and running in LESS THAN 10 MINUTES. Matt Casters has done an excellent job and I’m thrilled he’s joining the Pentaho team!
There’s ZERO installation required, just download, unzip and begin. Download it today and email me: let me know what you think!
Well, after more than a month, the folks at Ingres came back to the community with ABSOLUTELY NO CHANGES in their licensing. Ingres is indeed “viral.”
So, the head fake is complete (ie, biz friendly CA-TOSL to viral GPL), and Ingres Corporation has charted it’s course to irrelevance. Again, this is just one opinionated blogger but I think Ingres won’t gain traction in new markets now (see previous post why GPL is bad for Ingres, not in general, just Ingres)
I’m sad. Ingres is (should I say was?) cool. RIP.
It’s official: I’m joining Pentaho as Director of BI Solutions.
Most of you arrive here because you’re either an Oracle professional, or are interested in Open Source BI.
To the Oracle professionals on the wire; take note. I’m suspending a healthy Oracle consultancy to get into “the big game.” It is really BIG GAME too… Business Intelligence is a HUGE, growing market and bringing open source to bear on real customer problems will be astounding. I can speak your language (we could talk about rollback segments if we WANTED to… not that we would) so if you want to talk to someone who knows both side of the coin (Oracle and Open Source) email me.
To the Open Source readers on the wire; take note. I’m voting for who I think will be the winner of the open source BI game with my own career. I’ve put all the chips on the table and my bet is on Pentaho.
To anyone who reads this blog; stay tuned. I’ll be moving the blog to a non-bayon branded location so that it more accurately reflects me as a voice in open source BI rather than an “oracle guy” blogging about open source BI.
I know everyone at Pentaho, including myself, is excited to help leverage my experience as a practitioner for their customers, partners and community.
I promise to help make Open Source BI a reality by showing you, the DBA/IT/Analyst how to help business users make sense of a sea of data, using the best collection of Open Source BI technologies available.
— Insert Pentaho Tribal War Cry Here —
OK… Since I’m shutting down my consultancy to join Pentaho the least you can do is give ’em two clicks. Just kidding… but really, help let the world know that Open Source BI is something you believe in by voting for Pentaho for SourceForge community awards!
Hot on the heels of the news (here, here) that Mozilla banked 72m USD, Christopher Blizzard responds that it’s not accurate, but not that far off.
I say… good for them…
Even Matt Asay (proponent of ‘fringe, on the cusp open source business models’) blogs Interesting, the return that freedom can bring..
To put that in perspective, I bet that surpasses the annual revenue for JBoss, MySql, SugarCRM, Alfresco, Zimbra, Suse Linux revenues etc. The only open source play I don’t think it tops is Red Hat. I’d love comments on this if you think my guesses are incorrect (all private companies so no way to know for sure).
I think my good friend Russ at Nanoblog might be on to something… The potential is the Crop NOT the Carrot.
Ok… really I have no beef with SugarCRM, just their license. They seem like a good company (revenue and customer focused) and their product appears to be making a good impression with customers. I’ve looked at their demo, and it does look rather functional. OK, that’s out of the way. SugarCRM well funded, eager company, decent product.
However, the fact remains, they are NOT open source (refer here, here, here, here, here) Even recently they signaled to the world what they think “open source is” is in actuality “public source” by releasing SugarCRM under the Microsoft Community License.
Eweek thinks SugarCRM will be alone. I agree… In fact, I encourage SugarCRM to actually standardize on the Microsoft Community License! It meets your needs and actually refers to itself honestly. In other words, if you think of open source like public source (and you do) then just be a community source or public source licensed company. Don’t use the term open source just to get a marketng bump.
A while back I blogged about Ingres going GPL. I wasn’t alone in my disapproval and Ingres thought it should take some time for reflection, consider the needs of the community and partners, and make a decision about interface code being a more biz friendly open source license (ie, non viral GPL).
An updated was promised in a “few days” on February 12th. It’s been almost a month… I echo this again, Ingres has MUCH to learn about being an open source company if they go silent to their community for almost a month. Open Source is interactive, it’s public, it’s democratic, it’s real. Traditional “black hole” corporate decision making is sooooo RDBMS 1990s.
Sigh… I’m available to anyone at Ingres who is actually interested in learning about this whole “open source community” thing and what it means in PRACTICE not just MARKETING MATERIALs. 🙂 Drop me a line (email is in the box on the right) if anyone is listening and is interested in actually engaging a community outside their current customers.
Joseph and Clarise have published two of their three podcasts on Pentaho. If you are a developer considering Open Source BI you should definitely have a listen to the three podcasts. Why? Well, rather than sifting through web pages, design documents, etc to get the gist of Pentaho you can hear it from their top techies mouth. James Dixon (whom I’ve met) is sharp as all get out. Listen to James talk about the core of Pentaho, and the realities of bringing together more than 40 open source projects into a cohesive framework.
Both are about 15 minutes or so. Worthwhile to get the net net:
OSC Podcast Pentaho Overview
OSC Podcast Pentaho Overview Part 2
I’m constantly amazed at how no one calls SugarCRM on their deceptive open source license. Cliffs Notes: They call it open source, but it by no means qualifies as such and OSI will never certify it because doesn’t meet the definition of open source! Apparently, because they’ve got a bunch of money no one made a stink when they switched their license, and went from a legitimate “open source” company to well, shareware type license.
Matt Asay (smart, sharp, open source advocate) thinks it’s copacetic (check out the thread here). Is SugarCRM allowed to change the definition of open source to suit their own business model? Am I the only one willing to say without any standard (OSI) the term open source will become dilluted and viewed with skepticism?
PS – I think I’m just being awnry now… I should lay off it I suppose… Or invite John Roberts to have a beer and see if he can convince this skeptic it’s not shareware.