One more IOD mini-post, and then I'm out of time (pun
intended).
It was nice to see the Informix folks again, and for all
their past database innovation I owe them some mention. They introduced object-relational, among
other things, plus "blades" to provide specific performance speed-up
for particular querying tasks, and they even (although I never saw it
implemented) proposed a relational feature that eliminated the sort step.
In today's IBM, their impact is necessarily muffled,
although they still have the same virtues they always had: An indirect channel untouchable by Oracle
that services the prevalent medium-sized businesses of Germany and the new SMBs
of China, among others; mature object-relational and relational technologies with
scalability in certain query types, and with administrative simplicity relative
to the Oracles of the world; and mastery of time-series data. As I understand it, their near-term plans
involve attempting to expand these strengths, e.g., by providing
"edge" Web streaming-data processing for SMBs.
From my viewpoint, fairly or unfairly, the place the general
user public ought to pay attention to Informix is in handling time-series
data. In recent years (again, this is my
imperfect understanding) Informix has expanded its intertemporal
"blade" technology to provide compression of (and hence very rapid
querying of) time-series data via a process very similar to that of storage
companies' dedupe "windows" -- taking a certain time frame, noting
that only changes need to be stored given and original value, and hence
compressing the time series data by (in storage's case, and probably in
Informix's) 70-90%. I should also note that Informix can take advantage of IBM
DB2 BLU Acceleration to further compress and speed querying of
1-to-2-column-per-query time-series data -- it's an earlier version of BLU,
apparently, but one tuned more, and Informix provides a simple "fork"
when it's time to go columnar.
How would I suggest any enterprise -- not just present
Informix customers -- could use this time capability? Well, let's face it, more and more data from
the Web has part of its value as assessing behavior over time -- social network
analysis, buying patterns, sensor data, the buying process. For this type of
analytics, I would argue that neither the streams processor up front (can't
store enough historical data) nor the data warehouse (not optimized for
time-series data) is the best fit.
Rather, I would suggest a "mart" running Informix parallel to
the main data warehouse, storing only time-series data, with a common front-end
for querying -- somewhat akin to what I
have seen called an "operational data store", or ODS (I tend to use the
term ODS for something quite different, but that's a whole other conversation).
This would be of value not merely because it provides better
performance on queries on time-series data.
Let's face it, time-series data has up to now not been considered worthy
of separate consideration by today's enterprises. And yet, our understanding of the customer
should be far more enriched by understanding of customer processes and changing
customers than it has been. Creating
such an Informix ODS would at least start the IT-business-exec conversation.
Just a thought ... and hopefully a timely one :) Ttfn.
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