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Merv Adrian

Hello and welcome to my BeyeNETWORK blog! I will use this blog to share my thoughts and observations on new analytic business applications and data management : vendor briefings, case studies, events and other activities that stimulate ideas will be the source. I believe the emergence of this new class of application, and new emerging data management tools, herald a next step in the maturity of information technology, and I'm excited to be present for its emergence. I hope my blog entries will stimulate ideas that will serve both the vendors creating these new solutions and the companies that will improve their business prospects as a result of applying them. Please share your thoughts and input on the topics.

About the author >

Merv, Principal at IT Market Strategy, has spent 3 decades in the information technology industry. As Senior Vice President at Forrester Research, he was responsible for all of Forrester’s technology research for several years, before returning to his roots as an analyst covering the software industry and launching Forrester’s well-regarded practice in Analyst Relations. Prior to his Forrester role, Merv was Vice President and Research Manager with responsibility for the West Coast staff at Giga Information Group. Merv focused on facilitating collaborative research among analysts, and served as executive editor of the monthly Research Digest and weekly GigaFlash. He chaired the GigaWorld conference (and later Forrester IT Forum) for several years, and led the jam band, a popular part of those events, as a guitarist and singer.

Prior to becoming a technology analyst, Merv was Senior Director, Strategic Marketing at Sybase, where he also worked as director of marketing for data warehousing and director of analyst relations. Prior to Sybase, Merv served as a marketing manager at Information Builders, where he founded and edited a technical journal and a marketing quarterly, subsequently becoming involved in corporate and product marketing and launching a formal AR role.

Before entering the IT industry, Merv spent a decade building systems in the securities, banking and transportation industries in New York, including several years as a manager of end user computing at Shearson Lehman Brothers and a stint as a statistical analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His early analysis of the micro-to-mainframe market and its impact on decision support, The Workstation Data Link, was published by McGraw-Hill in 1988.

Merv was a member of the Advisory Board of the International Data Warehouse Association in its formative years, and served as editor of the NY PC User Group Newsletter in the mid-‘80s. He holds a B.S. in business administration (finance) from CUNY’s Baruch College.

DynamoDB is the New Lucid - A BI Database to Watch

Lucid DB (aka "the best database for BI you don't know about") has a commercial version on the way at last. Nick Goodman, a longtime user active in the Eigenbase and other related open source communities, has stepped in. Nick has a consulting practice that builds BI implementations (many using Lucid and Pentaho), and he's now spun out a firm called Dynamo Business Intelligence to issue and support a product to be called DynamoDB. He often  found his BI clients asking what to use for a database - the default was MySQL, but he loves Lucid's features and performance, and so it seemed like time. Nick's blog can be found here.

It's early days. "We're still figuring a lot of the go to market," Nick told me last week. He's the fulltime principal - and funder. But he starts with a strong base:

 We have something that's already largely complete. We will continue in a 100% open source model, and with Julian Hyde and John Sichi (his comments here) in related projects like Eigenbase."

Nick envisions a typical annual subscription model, based on offering support, QA and regular new builds. He doesn't expect to add "inside sales"; he's hoping for a  largely self-service process. His site should be ready in a few weeks, but meanwhile "hopefully the people who download  soon will know how to slurp out data from MySQL or Oracle, etc. and use the product." As he gets it ready for market as DynamoDB, his team is working on surrounding the Lucid product with more friendly features including a UI-based admin capability for things like backup - command line is great for some, but hardly a general purpose feature. He highlights key product capabilities including the column store, bit map indexes, and java-based plugins as particularly suitable for the projects he's been involved in. Users of BI tools - open and closed - will find the transparent remote JDBC data access to have value as well, of course.

There's more detail in the blogs I've provided links to; read them. You might also want to check out the estimable Matthew Aslett of the 451 group, who does the story justice along with another interesting development about Calpont. I'll be watching this story; Lucid DynamoDB deserves to be mentioned anytime MySQL is when BI is on the table, and hopefully it will be very soon.


Posted November 13, 2009 9:06 AM
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