Comments on: The forcast for databases is partly cloudy

By: Leon

Leon — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 04:40:24 +0000

Gumby, to your point of putting a DW in the cloud not being the smartest thing. The most useful data warehouse I’ve ever had an opportunity to use is Google Analytics and guess what, it is as everything else Google, cloud based.
I’d like to make a prediction, in a couple of years, much of analytical applications will be browser based, and, we will have no clue of where the actual warehouse servers are. In many cases they will not be located on customer premises.

By: Leon

Leon — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 04:30:45 +0000

Rick, compliance is the number one issue that comes up in any Cloud conversation. However, while many people fear that they would not be compliant, these fears are rarely justified. I am very familiar with PCI-DSS requirements for example. There is no place in the PCI-DSS spec where it says that all equipment must be dedicated or have to reside on site.
Cloud Computing is not much different than outsourcing from that point of view.
I know that this s not a compliance issues but from security point of view deploying in the Cloud is actually much more secure than most on-site deployments. Majority of security breaches are perpetrated not by evil hackers but by insiders. By moving systems off-site you greatly reduce the accessibility of critical data to rogue insiders. Anyway, I think this is too big of a subject for a comment. It s time for a new post.

By: Gumby

Gumby — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 01:15:12 +0000

Uhm DB2’s data partitioning isn’t rac nor clustering.

Think XPS shared nothing.

And if you’re going to go on about DB2’s free version don’t forget about Informix, or their free version on the IIUG website. (read the fine print on the t’s and c’s.)

As to putting a DW in the cloud, not really the smartest thing.

Cloud computing is reminiscent of Timenet and mainframe computing where companies couldn’t afford to have IT in house. Seems like everything old is now new.

By: Rick O'Brien

Rick O'Brien — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:34:17 +0000

Sounds wonderful from an application standpoint, and after all, most new development is being done for the web anyway.

A glitch or two might be encountered on the database side when compliance issues come up. Sarbox and its spawn, e-discovery, PIPEDA — all become “cloudy” when you don’t have the data locked down somewhere on a server that you own and keep behind a locked door.

Perhaps some sort of reverse on-line backup could solve the first two, but I don’t see how even big firms like Amazon or Google can expose themselves to the liabilities possible with the last one.

By: Leon

Leon — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:52:42 +0000

Personally, I believe that data warehousing (more on the data mart side) and BI are a good fit for the cloud once you can overcome the trust issue. Scalability is one of the things that will be a challenge. Every public cloud out there is built for horizontal scalability i.e. you scale out by adding more really small inexpensive servers. For databases this is an issue. As you pointed out Oracle RAC for example is not available. In DB2 we have clustering technology specifically designed for warehousing we call Data Partitioning Feature. We are exploring its applicability to cloud deployments.

By: Dan Housman

Dan Housman — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:50:55 +0000

We are working to build some data warehouse applications in the cloud. There was oddly less resistance from security and risk folks with Amazon as a vendor for infrastructure than with the traditional ISP/Hosting folks because there are financial issues with many of the ISP/Hosting facilities that open other risk factors. But the cost model is a very postitive argument. It would be great to get the benchmarks from the cloud computing resources to understand what the real trade-off will be. One side note on things we noted off the bat was that you can’t use Oracle RAC in the cloud configuration which is a bit of a challenge since then you can’t take advantage of all the scalability. But I think they will resolve that with a bit of engineering.

By: Leon

Leon — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 16:31:41 +0000

Yes, you can indeed rent servers by the hour. That is the in my mind the best feature of the cloud, not just price. You only pay for what you use.
Cloud is still more of a curiosity in the enterprise because there is a great uneasiness of taking your data an putting it in some data center that you can’t even visit. However, one area where enterprises are piloting it is for development and test systems. Instead of going an buying gobs of servers to do a stress test you can just ramp up to the capacity that you need (say 20 servers) and when you are done with the test shut them down. You will only pay for the time that you used (e.g. a 5 hour test run) and for the data transfers. I bet it would take 3 months of approvals for the capital budget in most companies and another 6 months for the delivery and set-up of the servers. And, you typically need to do the budget in the previous year. On the cloud, all you can start your test run in a couple of hours after you decide that you need to do it. To me, this flexibility is priceless.

By: Mairhtin O'Feannag

Mairhtin O'Feannag — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:44:01 +0000

This is certainly interesting, and worth looking into. But *bucks? C’MON. J/K.

Let me get this str8 though. You can “rent” the server up-time by the hour? I can really just rent 5 hours of up-time? There must be quite an infrastructure behind the service!

Where does one go (beyond amazon.com) to read more about this service, its options and offerings? I’d really like to know.

I was unable (my system seems a bit persnickity) to view the video, so if this is all covered in the video, pardon my redumdant question(s).

Mairhtin