Simba Technologies' CEO Corner

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.