The Future of the Column Oriented Database Market: Q&A with Jeff Vogel

The Future of the Column Oriented Database Market: Q&A with Jeff Vogel

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Jeff Vogel, President and CEO, CalpontWith the busy days that led up to the launch of InfiniDB 2.0, Calpont’s column oriented database software, just hours behind us, our CEO, Jeff Vogel, took a break to share his vision with me of the future of the database market. 

Here’s what he had to say:

Q: How have column oriented databases like InfiniDB changed the data management industry?

Vogel: InfiniDB is helping to change database investment economics because it has eliminated the barriers to data growth.  Right now, there is a growing chasm between the amount of data that needs to be managed and the underlying infrastructure that has to manage it. Companies need to spend a lot of money to get row-based solutions like Oracle to handle that kind of data.  What Oracle can do for a couple of million, we can do for less than 10% and often times with better performance and much higher flexibility. 

Q: Do you expect column oriented databases to gradually (or maybe even quickly) replace standard row-based databases?

Vogel: Some industry analysts have predicted that by 2015, column databases will dominate data warehousing environments.  We know that to be true, of course, but it’s a confirmation of our vision to consistently see it in respected third party research & industry sources.

The fact of the matter is that row-based architectures simply can’t keep up with the ever-growing amount of data that companies need to put to work in next generation analytics applications. Many are already struggling to keep up and are making difficult tradeoffs in their businesses to stay with the legacy row based products.  This is especially true for one our more important vertical markets – online Internet digital ad serving. The future favors column oriented databases.  This innovation has been in the works for some time throughout the industry, waiting for data growth and performance curves to essentially outstrip the legacy systems’ capabilities. You simply can’t beat the performance, at scale, and at a fraction of the traditional legacy cost models. The choice to make the switch to columnar for business analysts and CIO’s is easy and there’s no learning curve and the pay back in ROI is typically counted in months.

Q: Will InfiniDB 2.0 propel more database users to adopt column oriented databases?

Vogel: One of the bigger issues with legacy database architectures is that they’re limited in who can use them because their costs are prohibitive.  With InfiniDB, we’ve taken the complexity out of justifying, deploying and getting it up and running in a matter of a day or less.  We have many customer examples where they’ve gone from evaluation to production in a matter of a week or less.  As a result, we’ll see broader, rapid adoption and use across large and small companies.  With our disruptive license model, we’ll see a natural proliferation of the database also take place in the small medium enterprise and embedded in more applications. 

Q: As more database users adopt column oriented software, how will the field of data management change?

Vogel: The divide between the CMO and the CIO in a company will shrink. And isn’t that a great vision for the enterprise?

Traditionally, the CMO has been concerned with data quality and access. At the same time the CIO is concerned about infrastructure asset costs and architectural synergies with existing approved vendor list relationships and strategies.  Business data growth flexibility requirements put enormous pressure on the infrastructure.  The CIO and CMO are going to need to be in lockstep if we’re to see the type of adoption that I think is possible with these new innovations.  There has to be an agreement on a common data management platform to address both side of the organizational divide.  The CIO is not going to want to put yesterday’s legacy technologies and architectures to work in a model that he/she knows has enormous and unpredictable upside.   Conversely, the CMO is not going to want to be told to wait to get to the data because of infrastructure issues or availability of technical resources.

I’ve said before that the combination of MPP and column oriented databases is a “future proof,”  technology decision, meaning that a program like InfiniDB can accommodate an ever-growing amount of data, change in business requirements and without having to trade off performance to accommodate.  You simply add compute capacity, in real time, to accommodate growth in users and data and repurpose the capacity as workload requirements change over time.  IT doesn’t have to think about the future prospect of underlying barriers associated with proprietary and legacy database appliances.  With InfiniDB, it’s elastically scalable and flexible with the business.

Q: What other changes do you see on the horizon?

Vogel: Our industry is like any other. What’s innovative at one time sooner or later becomes a standard feature. Columnar databases will evolve from a “must have” item to standard IT check off item with every system.   Any informed technologist is not going to start with yesterday’s technology and expect it to go the distance where the underlying variable, data, is undetermined and at a growth scale factor that’s several orders magnitude greater than anything we’ve seen combined in the last 20+ years.

Q: Can InfiniDB 2.0 be evaluated and tested prior to purchase?

Vogel: Absolutely. We encourage technology professionals and users to download a trial version of the Enterprise edition.  You can expect and get out-of-box performance and it’s easy to get started.  We have a ton of documentation on the website to both help and support users along with access to our experts through consultative services.  It doesn’t require additional training or different expertise than what’s already in place.  Using a column oriented database is transparent to the application and tools layer and with our intelligent mapping layer, we’ve taken all of the guesswork out of the process of getting to the value and query performance of the data in rapid fashion.

To learn how much InfiniDB 2.0 can do for you, download a free trial

Learn more about the real time data compression, improved latency and automatic partition drop features of InfiniDB 2.0, Calpont’s newly enhanced column oriented database.

Written By: Nick Ochoa, VP Marketing
Calpont, creator of InfiniDB, an Industry Leading Column Oriented Database