Connect – a Simba Technologies Blog

ODBC is the gateway to the Cloud

It's interesting that it is SQL Azure that is pushing Microsoft to invest more in their ODBC driver and deprecate their OLE DB provider.  We are seeing the same thing in the ODBC SDK business.  We continue to partner with companies who have a Cloud-based or hosted solution and while these are great solutions, their customers still want to connect products like Microsoft Excel to these cloud data sources.  There are really two solutions to do this.  The first is to export the data from the cloud to some sort of delimited text file and then import this text file into Excel.  This is a very cumbersome solution.  The second is to build an ODBC driver that will talk to the web services interface of the cloud data source and allow Excel to connect directly and dynamically.  More and more of the cloud vendors are seeing the power of such an ODBC for cloud or ODBC for web services solution.  We just recently had a customer in Europe that build an ODBC driver using the C# programming language in a week using our SimbaEngine ODBC SDK.  When they showed the solution to their management, they were amazed at how easy it was to build and yet how functional the solution was.

Steve Jobs--Architect of Big Data

The passing of Steve Jobs the day after the iPhone 4S launch under the symbolic guidance of his successor closes off Steve's life in a fitting and tidy manner. The signifcant shifts in industry in the past two decades--computing, publishing, media, mobile--have been touched or, more frequently, been shaped by what Steve has built.

Yesterday night as I was reading and watching various tributes to Jobs, I thought back to a TDWI talk by Donald Farmer earlier this year. (A version of his talk is available here. ) Donald gave a very insightful perspective of our future that is shaped by four forces: search, mobile, apps, and social media. When you stop and think about that, you'll note what many considers Jobs' opus magnum--his iPhone--is the embodiment and intersection of these four. Factoids: two-third of mobile searches on Google originates from an iOS device. Sixteen billion songs downloaded over the ten years that iTunes has reigned works out to about 51 songs downloaded per second. Ground-breaking price-points recreated and redefined the media, gaming and application market. Facebook, Twitter etc needed the vehicle of Jobs' iPhone to make the leap from college curiosity to ubiquity.

And Jobs' influence extends into Big Data. Whether you consider the actual data sources that were fed by iOS directly or indirectly (such as Twitter and Facebook), short product life cycles which challenge supply chains (which Apple's product exemplifies), or just heightened expectations for how to interact and work with machines that compute, Steve is part of this fabric too. Steve and Apple are the ever-present force that pushed industry forward in ways that no one expected.

 

Strata September Playlists

 So I had a few moments yesterday to pull together playlists for the recent Strata event. For whatever reason, Oreilly has not posted much material on the actual Strata Conference (Sept 22 & 23). But the JumpStart (Sept 19) and Summit (20 & 21) are nearly completely online. These are sessions I attended that I felt are eye-opening, new ideas or just well-articulated points of view. Let me know what you think.

Strata JumpStart playlist

Strata Summit playlist

Strata Conference playlist

 

Data Science and Visualization at Strata...

 Data Science

So the second Strata conference has came and gone. (Actually, the event consists of three sub-conferences: JumpStart, Summit and Conference; but I digress...) The general tone of the event is excitment. The presenters--consisting of vendors and practitioneers--were understandably excited and proud about the self-named field of "Data Science". Recent intersecting trends have brought us to our current point in time. Commoditization of computing power, proliferation of sensors, and low cost manufacturing together are ushering in the age of Big Data. It is possible to record just about any data stream that you can imagine and social networks is the obvious prominent driver of much of these development. Oreilly did a great job in bringing together a varied group. In particular, I found Monica Rogati's session on her experience with LinkedIn's exploding user base and TJ Patil's session on Data Science particularly engrossing for their mix of narrative, technology, and war stories. Unfortunatley, only TJ's session is available on Oreilly's channel at YouTube (here).

 Visualization

I stopped by the Tableau booth to check out the capabilities of the free public version of Tableau (available at tableaupublic.com). It is limited to sourcing data from a textfile. I enquired casually about the possibility of connecting to NoSQL databases. Currently, there is no connectivity but there is apparently something in the works. In speaking with DataStax's Ben Coverston, he points out that Cassandra CQL is accessible via JDBC. Cassandra 1.1 is coming out RSN. I'm planning to look into how to hook up Tableau to Cassandra directly. Drop me a line if you're interested in this.

 

Strata 2011

Some of you may know I've been working on a few ideas in the last while. Of late, I've been talking to some of you and attending conferences/webinars. I'm in New York for O'Reilly's Strata this week. Apart from a couple of misdirections, the day has turned out rather well. Day 1 was the so-called Jumpstart day before the Summit and Conference. By that, the organizer meant for day 1 to provide a preamble to the topic at hand: Big Data. I had rather low expectations for day 1 mainly because I couldn't see how much any one speaker could fit into 35 minutes. After all, we managed to fit 14 sessions, two coffee breaks and one lunch into one nine hour day.

But, like a good hors d'oeurve, the day has whetted my appetize for what's to come in the remainder of the week. The wide ranging topics spanned people (e.g., recruiting data scientist and Google's Project Oxygen), methodology (Simon Wardley's "disturbance in the flow", Jennifer Zeszut's agile marketing), process (Michael Hugos on Starbucks' supply chain) and policy (Michael Nelson on organizational transparency). What stood out was that nearly all speakers were presenting their hypothesis with sound data and/or analysis. (This really shouldn't surprise since the conference is about using and working with data.)

It should be a good week.

 

Oracle and Sun - the new IBM of the 60's?

I was reading an interesting article by Larry Barrett about how Oracle's series of acquisitions over the last 5 years including it's recent acquisition of Sun now makes it equivalent to what IBM was in the 1960's.  An interesting perspective and worth the read: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/datbus/article.php/3861176/Oracle-Takes-a-Page-From-IBM.htm

Smartphones and the Apple AppStore

Jenna Wortham wrote an interesting article that Apple's AppStore is changing the game with mobile software.  One interesting quote from her article is "Thanks in large part to the iPhone, introduced in 2007, and the App Store, which opened its doors last year, smartphones have become the Swiss Army knives of the digital age."  I always felt smartphones would be a game changer.  I had an original Palm Treo and stuck with the Treo series because I found the device very usable with the keyboard and touch screen.  I switched from a Treo to the Nokia Communicator because the Treo 680 had very bad battery life.  The Nokia Communicator was an exceptional device using the Symbian operating system.  Last week I got an iPhone and so far my favourite app is Skype.  I can call anywhere in the world for pennies.  I call a lot of people around the world and have found that Skype is very effective.  Being able to run it so easily on my iPhone is great.  You can read Jenna's article in the New York Times at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/technology/06apps.html?_r=2&ref=technology.

Interesting article I read about Google...

Baseline magazine had an interesting article on Google entitled "How Google Works" http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Infrastructure/How-Google-Works-1/?kc=BLBLBEMNL11272009STR1.  This is a basic overview of Google and its technology which is a nice and easy read.  Definitely points out some areas worth looking deeper into like MapReduce and Hadoop.

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 and MDX for Oracle 11g OLAP Option

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 was quite busy for me.  We jointly with Oracle launched our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP and there was great interest.  I will write more about that later.

Larry Ellison's keynote was interesting as always.  This year, his major rant was against IBM.  Larry is offering a $10,000,000 reward to anyone that can make a Oracle database run at least half as fast on an IBM computer as it does on Sun's fastest computer.  Larry did also show off the Fusion apps which looked very nice.  These are expected to be available in early 2010.

We launched our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP on Monday, October 12th. We put out a joint press release with Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/036550.  We also had a session at the end of the day to show off the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP and Excel connecting to Oracle OLAP. It was a fun session to do because people were quite excited to see what we had.  Attendance was quite good - we had over 70 people - considering we were at the end of the day and competing with the OTN party.  In the session, people found it interesting that we were not using a spreadsheet add-in because that is how everyone else connects to Excel.  People were quite impressed with the BI and charting features of Excel as well as how easily you could pull PivotCharts into PowerPoint and have them dynamically update.

We also demoed the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP at the Oracle DEMOgrounds.  Thanks to Bud Endress, Marty Gubar, and Jameson White who did a great job showing everyone what you can now do with Excel and OLAP Option. We were demoing in 2 pods and we had good traffic all throughout the show.  One person who came by explained that up till now, their users pull the data from OLAP into Microsoft Access and from there into Excel.  This, of course, loses all the dimensional characteristics of the data but it shows you how much people want to get data into Excel.  I also had people asking me if this works with other dimensionally aware BI products and the answer is "we are working on that".  In fact, we are making good progress on that front.  We even demoed SAP BusinessObjects Voyager to an Oracle OLAP customer this summer even before we had released version 1 of the product.  The SAP guys involved couldn't believe how easily we connected to Oracle OLAP.

Now I can finally say that the MDX Query Language is a widely used standard that is supported by every major OLAP cube product!

ODBC Driver for Microsoft HealthVault

At Simba, we have a SDK to build a custom ODBC driver.  We have been working with Microsoft HealthVault and decided to use our ODBC SDK to build a custom ODBC driver for Microsoft HealthVault using their webservice API.  For those of you who are not familiar with Microsoft HealthVault, it is a secure online storage for all of your healthcare data.  You can get more information here: http://www.healthvault.com.  This is a very cool concept to be able to store all of your healthcare information in the Cloud and have access to it from wherever you are.  You have total control and privacy and only people you authorize can view your data.

 

HealthVault has a nice webservice API for developers and it was pretty easy to take our ODBC SDK and build an ODBC driver for HealthVault - it took us around two weeks to build this driver.  We found there were a lot of very good use cases for the HealthVault ODBC driver. For example, consider a diabetic person.  This person can buy a blood glucose meter from various companies that will allow them to connect to HealthVault and upload their daily blood glucose levels http://www.healthvault.com/personal/devices.html?type=device. Then, this person can use the HealthVault ODBC driver to pull this information into Excel and chart the data so they can easily see how they are doing. Another example is an athlete who wants to track their heart rate and how much they are running. Again, there are devices that will track this information and allow easy uploads to HealthVault from where they can use the ODBC driver to pull data to Excel and easily track their progress.

 

Simba is supporting Microsoft HealthVault by allowing free usage of our HealthVault ODBC driver for personal use.  You can get more information or download the ODBC driver here: http://www.simba.com/ODBC-Driver-for-HealthVault.htm.

 

Since our ODBC SDK allows any software developer to easily build a custom ODBC and/or JDBC driver for any data source including ISAM, XML, object oriented, SCADA, or cloud data source, it was very easy for us to build the HealthVault ODBC driver.  If you can think of other things we could build an ODBC driver for, we would love to hear from you. (Especially, if you think it cannot be done)

Oracle buys Sun

Wow!  What interesting news this morning about Oracle buying Sun.  Four very interesting things here:

1. Oracle Database Machine

Oracle has already partnered with HP for the Database Machine but now Oracle can deliver this all by themselves.  Here is a way Oracle can be even bigger in the data warehouse appliance space.

2. MySQL

Not sure what this means for MySQL as Oracle already owns the database space.  I assume MySQL will not really be pushed as an enterprise grade offering any more.

3. Solaris

Oracle has been pushing Unbreakable Linux for a few years now so it will be interesting how this fits with Solaris.  How would you merge these two products into one OS?

4. Java

This is very interesting.  IBM, SAP, and Oracle have been focusing on building their stacks on the Java platform.  However, now that Oracle controls Java (I know, Java is open), but now that Oracle is in charge, IBM and SAP become even more dependent on components from a competitor.  Great for Oracle, not so good for IBM and SAP.

I commented a while back on a New York Times article about Microsoft buying SAP (http://blogs.simba.com/simba_technologies_ceo_co/2008/03/if-larry-elliso.html) and now that Oracle has acquired Sun, I think a Microsoft and SAP tie-up is even more important for those two companies to be able to compete with Oracle in the enterprise space.  Don't get me wrong, I think Microsoft and SAP on their own are both competing well in the enterprise space, just combining the two would be even more potent.