Larry Ellison did not speak at the O'Reilly MySQL event.  While the
Register was correct to say "Oracle executives are fanning out to woo
open sourcers," in its sharp-tongued review, Larry was not among them.  Perhaps he saw
what was coming. Neither the audience nor the event tweetstream was
friendly. Twitter descriptions suggested that the MySQL crowd was
sitting on its hands as Edward Screven, Oracle Chief Architect, took
the stage (click to see the speech)  to address the future of MySQL
under Oracle.

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In July 2009, IBM announced the Smart Analytics System 7600, a
workload-optimized, pre-integrated bundle of hardware and software
targeted at the business analytics market. Included in that package are
an IBM POWER 550 running AIX, storage, plus InfoSphere Warehouse
Enterprise Edition (which consists of DB2, Warehouse design and
management tools + Cubing, Data Mining and Text Analytics services), and
Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, configured and tuned, and "health
check" features. Accommodations are made if the customer already has
licensed some of the software and wants to use it on the platform; in
this sense, the software is described as "optional." This month, IBM
broadened the story and upped the ante, making Smart Analytics System a
key weapon in its widening battle with Oracle.

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You can set performance records in a virtualized environment -
that's the message of the new 1 Tb TPC-H benchmark record (scroll down to see
the 1Tb results) just released by ParAccel and VMware. Running on VMware's vSphere 4, the ParAccel
Analytic Database (PADB) delivered a one-two punch: not only the top
performance number for a 1 terabyte (TB) benchmark, but the top price-performance number as well. The results
in a nutshell: 1,316,882 Composite Queries per Hour (QphH), a
price/performance of 70 cents/QphH, and a data load rate of over 3.5 TBs
per hour. ParAccel moved quickly to promote the result; oddly, VMware
seems to have been asleep at the switch, with no promotion on its site
as the release hit the wires, and a bland quote from a partner exec in
the release itself.

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When I last spoke to business analytics vendor Tableau Software in April 2009, the company had run off a string of
uninterrupted growth. In a  challenging 2009, Tableau continued to grow,
and in our most recent conversation the team was upbeat. Q1 was looking
very good, and the company has over 4000 named accounts now. Its
revenue  growth was about 50% overall at the end of the year, and direct
sales are growing faster than indirect as its sales model shifts with
increased visibility. Tableau is among the leaders of the new advanced
visualization players, and the battle is heating up.Release
5.0 came at midyear 2009, delivering more visualizations, improved
dashboard interactivity, and scalability and performance features. In
July, a user conference in Seattle drew a record crowd, and over the
remainder of the year, the marketing team kept up a steady stream of
press releases about awards and customer success. Tableau's marketing
has executed better than many larger firms it competes with,
establishing its visibility with focused, aggressive communications. At
yearend, the Enterprise Irregulars featured advanced
visualization in Nenshad Barodiwalla's piece on key BI trends for 2010,
calling Tableau out as one of several visionary vendors.

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