The MySQL May conference keynote videos and presentations files are all posted so you can download the ones you're interested in now. Embedded below is the video and slide deck for my keynote on Thursday.

The gist of this presentation is that business intelligence and analytics are the #1 IT spending priority, BI technology is becoming a commodity, open source BI and DW tools are maturing, and the supporting stats about open source BI and DW adoption.


If you want to look at the slides at your own pace, they're embedded below:
The open source stats are from a survey on open source BI adoption I've been running for a couple months, sponsored by Infobright and Jaspersoft. You can see a recap of this keynote plus some more stats and short talks by the CEOs of Infobright and Jaspersoft in "The State of Open Source BI and Data Warehousing" webcast at the MySQL web site.

We'll have a paper discussing the results of the adoption survey available for download soon. Look for it some time next month.

Links (includes case studies from Monolith Software and Consorte Media):
Keynote video
Slides (PDF available via Slideshare)

I thought it would be nice to share some data on database size from the open source business intelligence / data warehouse adoption survey we've been running. Database size is a popular topic so some real data on size might be helpful if you're planning a deployment.

The question we asked was "How much raw data (in gigabytes) is being stored or accessed?" The chart below shows the results (with some annotation).



The databases in use are not all open source. This is the size regardless of database type. The restriction is that people are using open source in some part of the data warehouse stack, so an open source BI tool accessing an Oracle database would be included. Even so, the bulk of the respondents are using open source databases like MySQL and Postgres.

The general pattern follows what we see in the commercial data warehouse market, with the bulk of installations (82%) less than a terabyte in size. We do see a lower overall size relative to the completely commercial market - the number there is roughly 65%.

The truth is that for many organization, size is not a critical factor relative to other concerns. At the same time, the query performance is still a challenge for most. The difficulty of getting good query performance is one of the major factors driving people to look at appliances, columnar databases and other data warehouse platforms.

In the open source market there are quite a few options, some of which I listed a while ago. Two notable companies in the MySQL market are Infobright, makers of a columnar storage engine, and Kickfire, a hardware-based MySQL-compatible appliance. Both are aiming at the largest part of the market with products that are aimed at the under 10 terabyte space and with significantly lower costs than one expects in the data warehouse platform market.

I'll be doing a live webcast to preview some of the other data from the survey on Wednesday, April 29 at 10:00 AM Pacific. Also speaking will be Miriam Tuerk, CEO of Infobright, and Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft. After our respective talks we'll be taking questions online.

Also, the survey is running through May, so you can still add your stats to the picture.

I uploaded the slides from last's week's webcast on operational data integration and open source. They're embedded below for online viewing.

This is an overview of the difference between application integration and data integration, the differences in use and requirements for DI between business intelligence and OLTP, some integration architecture discussion, and why open source is an even better fit in the operational DI arena than it is for BI projects.

If you want to download a PDF of the slides or listen to a replay, you can find this talk under "How to Use the Right Tools for Operational Data Integration" on Talend's webcast page. There's no direct link to the presentation page so you have to click through.
More detailed description of the webcast
Data integration tools were once used solely in support of data warehousing, but that has been changing over the past few years. The fastest growing area today for data integration is outside the data warehouse, whether it's one-time data movement for A MySQL upgrade, application consolidation, or real-time data synchronization for master data management projects.

Data integration tools have proven to be faster, more flexible and more cost effective for operational data integration than the common practice of hand-coding or using application integration technologies. The developer focus of these technologies also makes them a prime target for open source commoditization.

During the presentation you will learn about the differences between analytical and operational data integration, technology patterns and options, and recommendations for how to begin using tools for operational data integration.

Key points:

• How to map common project scenarios to integration architectures and tools
• The technology and market changes that favor use of tools for operational data integration
• The differing requirements for operational vs. analytic data integration
• Advantages of open source for data integration tasks embed:

I'm doing a research survey on open source data warehouse and BI adoption that takes about 5 minutes to fill out.There's an almost complete lack of data specific to the business intelligence and data warehouse market - all the open source studies I read are generic and at best they extrapolate what's happening based on the general IT market. I want to change that.

If you have evaluated open source tools in any area of the business intelligence stack - databases, ETL tools, reporting, visualization - please consider filling out the survey whether it passed your evaluation or not, so we can begin to understand where and how people are using open source. It's as important to understand what's wrong with open source tools as what's right.

The results of this research will be summarized in a keynote at the MySQL Conference on April 23 but we'll be extending it throughout this year.

This first survey we're running is about adoption so we can answer some basic questions:
What industries, departments or functional areas are using open source?
What countries are leading the adoption?
What software categories are being used: reporting, OLAP, ETL, data mining, databases?
Why are people choosing or deciding against open source in this segment of the market?

Thanks also to Infobright (open source columnar database) and JasperSoft (open source BI stack) who are kind enough to donate a TomTom One XL portable GPS for a prize drawing after the survey is done. If you complete the survey and provide your information, you'll be entered to win. We'll do the drawing and announce the name at the MySQL conference.

Whether your open source evaluation led you to think of it as the holy grail or the devil's chalice, please take 5 minutes to fill out the survey.

A useful attribute of all open source tools is the ability to download and start evaluating the software immediately to see if it fits the requirements. There is no vendor involvement slowing the process of evaluation.

Bloor research published a report comparing costs of various data integration products but one of the more interesting items isn't about cost - it's the average time required for a company to evaluate various data integration products. Open source is the clear winner here.


Figure: Person-weeks required for evaluation. Source: Bloor Research

When working with proprietary software vendors, trials and proofs of concept require management involvement and multiple levels of approval. The legal department is often involved since there's usually a trial license agreement. The process is not under the developer's control, the schedule is governed by vendor terms and the process requires extra work.

Beyond the ease of evaluation, it's easier to get started with a project. With open source, time spent evaluating tools that might never be used can instead be spent on a proof of concept that is reusable in production.

If the proof of concept fails, the same time has been spent as it would with any other software. If the proof of concept succeeds, it can be moved directly into production without the required up-front commitments that traditional vendors need.

Speed to deliver is one of the open source advantages I described in more detail in the open source data integration paper I wrote for Talend. Also, if you'd like to read the Bloor report you can download a full copy from the Pervasive web site

Below are the slides from the presentation I gave yesterday on open source BI adoption. The talk is a brief overview of the rationale and benefits, some of the situations appropriate for use, and a few thoughts on internal barriers to use.

This is part of a webcast done jointly with Actuate on the Business Intelligence Network. You can listen to the archived presentation as well as seeing Actuate's presentation on BIRT by going to the webcast registration page.

Open source database adoption for BI and data warehousing appears to lag the open source BI and ETL tools. There are lots of reasons for this documented elsewhere, but one reason becoming less valid is performance.

An IDC survey of data warehouse size reported that ~60% of data warehouses are less than a terabyte in size. Several other surveys over the past few years reported similar findings. This tells us that the industry focus on scale-out options is overkill for the majority of people deploying data warehouses. What's needed is cost-effective performance at a scale of less than a terabyte. There are interesting vendors of both close and open source databases and appliances that work well in this size range.

Gartner recently gave some recommendations on open source databases and data warehousing that I think are inappropriate. They suggest MySQL as the only viable option. Part of their rationale is sound: commercial support and company viability. Most of the open source databases are smaller vendors or the projects are community supported rather than commercial, making them less suitable for enterpriuse use.

Where Gartner goes wrong is that  MySQL isn't as good for BI workloads. It's easy to find information on basic MySQL performance, but not for data warehouse workloads. Maybe that's why Gartner overlooked this MySQL performance test. MySQL couldn't complete the 100GB scale tests, and part of the reason is obvious: missing features for large-scale queries.

These are some of the reasons companies have stepped in to offer new storage engines and appliances that are MySQL compatible. Infobright is delivering a MySQL-compatiable BI-focused product - it's hard to get proper scaling and performance with standard MySQL as a data warehouse database. Kickfire offers a different option for performance in an appliance package. Postgres and Ingres offer better features for both querying and managability with data warehouse workloads. EnterpriseDB delivers commercial support for Postgres as well as providing a scale-out option, removing another of the Gartner criticisms.

Jos van Dongen did a small scale TPC-H benchmark with a group of open source databases and one of the major vendors (name withheld since they don't allow third party publication of bechmarks). What's most interesting is how well the (relatively new) MySQL 5.1 release performed. Even more amazing is how well MonetDB and LucidDB performed relative to the others. Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise since we're talking about columnar engines, query workloads and a small scale test. He's got a nice chart showing the BI-related features in these open source databases.

When you grow a dataset to the 10GB and 100GB scales (which Jos is doing), the results will sureley change. The maturity of a database is really seen when you have to do three things: manage larger volumes of data, optimize complex queries on that volume, and deal with concurrrent users querying this data. I suspect there will be a reshuffling of his benchmark results at larger sizes.

Other interesting performance information is the benchmark Josh Berkus wrote about in his blog post on a Postgres benchmark run at Sun, where he notes that Postgres is almost as fast as Oracle on equivalent hardware, at significantly lower cost. (I know this old info for those of you who follow Postgres more closely) While not a DW-specific benchmark, it does demonstrate equivalent performance levels - the key point. A similar benchmark was done with MySQL, DB2, Oracle and Microsoft a few years ago and showed similar results.

Actuate is sponsoring a webcast about open source BI on February 19 at 11:00 Pacific / 2:00 Eastern. My portion of the presentation will cover topics like who (in general) is using open source BI, reasons for doing so, and some of the challenges faced. I'm not completely done yet but the goal is to help people who want to use open source BI better frame the discussion as they look to sell the idea.

For example, several times I've had to get involved with legal departments when buying support or pro versions. Corporate review of contracts is relatively straightforward, but if the legal department has never seen an open source license they can require some help. They're used to seeing standard clauses, and many times these are not present with open source since they don't apply. To a contract lawyer that can be a red flag, so you need to be prepared to help educate them about what is and isn't present in an open source license and explain what's going on. Otherwise you run the risk of having them reject the contract.

Once I'm done, Actuate is going to talk about embedding BI into applications with BIRT and then adding scalability and availability features. I previewed their talk and it will be interesting and much more technical than mine. Worth sticking around for, in other words.

The Data Warehouse Institute conference in Las Vegas is just a few weeks away. While there aren't any presentations directly on open source, the Evaluating ETL Tools and Technology course I'm teaching on Tuesday will have two open source vendors included in the "vendors in action" session.

We're running a "low-cost ETL" theme for the afternoon. The vendors demonstrating their data integration tools will be Microsoft, Pentaho and Talend. This is a rare chance to see all three doing their work side-by-side.

The exhibit hall will have several open source or open source-derived vendors as well. Be sure to check them out if you're going to the event.

It's too bad I missed the October Rules Fest, as it looks terrific and I'm evaluating open source rules engines. From their description:

October Rules Fest is a three day gathering of the best and brightest in the rules engine industry, October 22nd-24th, 2008. This conference on business rules technology features the inventors and scientists behind advanced rulebased technology and leading business rule management systems.

We will be bringing together, for the first time the founders and inventors of rules technologies and methodologies.

They mean what they say, too. Presenters cover the range from academic researchers to folks from Ilog and Fair Isaac to the creators of some of the key algorithms and code behind today's rules engines. Luckily for those of us not there, many of the presentations are posted at the conference site.