Author Archive
Intel Xeon 7500 video interview: Scale up, scale out
by Adam Ferrari
Following up on my post Test driving a pre-release of the first supercomputer in a box, here are more of my reactions to the new Intel Xeon 7500. It comes from the Intel launch event, and I cover additional test results and use cases.
Adam Ferrari
Test driving a pre-release of the first supercomputer in a box
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
I’ve spent the last week testing pre-release hardware for Intel’s Xeon 7500 series of processors, and yesterday evening at their New York City launch event. (Full disclosure – Intel is an investor in Endeca, but they have not had any input into this post.) In many ways the 7500, better known by its code [...]
The hyping of the NoSQL foo
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
Last week I discussed my impressions of the NoSQL movement, and because it’s such a fast-moving topic, I wanted to round up some interesting developments since then.
My main point in my last post was that NoSQL technology should not be defined diffusely as any of the new generation of databases. NoSQL is primarily motivated [...]
Let’s not let “NoSQL” go the way of “Web 2.0”
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
I get asked all the time whether Endeca should be considered a “NoSQL” database. It’s a totally reasonable question. After all, our core engine shares some attributes of a NoSQL system – it’s a persistent data store, has a non-relational data model, and has convenient APIs for developing web applications. And it works at [...]
What do cars, snacks, 401ks, and spies have in common?
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
I’ve had a couple of busy weeks of customer interactions, and although the travel is not something that my family is particularly happy about, listening to technology leaders on the front lines is amazingly energizing on a professional level. In this recent series of meetings I saw a large auto maker in Europe, a [...]
For Search and interactive BI, what’s the new disk?
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
Since the recent New England Database Summit at MIT I’ve been thinking a lot about Storage Class Memory (SCM) – technologies like Flash and PCM that are vying to become the next persistent storage technology of choice. Buzz on this definitely picked up substantially last year with product announcements from many of the data [...]
A moment of discovery
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
Here’s a fun anecdote that I just have to share. I spent Tuesday in Toronto with some of our clients, so the timing worked out nicely for me to present an info session at the University of Waterloo for students considering joining Endeca. (Very cool to see a full crowd, and my thanks to [...]
How similar are faceted search and OLAP? See CIO Mag: 20 to Watch in 2010
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
Endeca received a nice spot in CIO magazine’s new list, “Twenty companies to watch in 2010.” Compared with much of the coverage we get in the press, which tends to focus on one of our core market solutions such as Retail or Manufacturing, I was pleased with the breadth that CIO was able to [...]
Monash, are there really only three kinds of data?
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
Is my data structured, unstructured, or semi-structured? Curt Monash provided yet another take on this never-ending data management question in a blog post earlier this week. This topic has generated tons of discussion over time, but despite this, common perceptions out there seem fairly straightforward. Basically, common wisdom holds that:
Structured data is the stuff [...]
MapReduce just semi-good for semi-structured data
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
Sybase recently announced that it’s become the latest analytical database vendor to hop onto the MapReduce (MR) bandwagon. This trend has been ramping throughout the past year+, ignited by early innovators like Aster and Greenplum, followed fairly quickly by others such as Netezza and (somewhat surprisingly) Vertica.
One local outcome for yours truly has been [...]
