[xquery-talk] Linkedin humor for the weekend (2)

[daniela florescu]

And this is yet another public and very honest answer when I commented that a “third party” doing a benchmark
should not, in theory, have a business relationship with ANY of the vendors. Otherwise, not credible, so waste of time.


==============================================

Daniela - the fact that we are partnered with MarkLogic and Couchbase (so that we can better serve our clients who use those platforms) has no bearing on our ability to conduct benchmarks with independence.


==========


I guess it’s not clear to everyone what a “third party benchmark” usually means in Computer Science :-))


Have a great weekend everyone, best
Dana

[Michael Kay]

All benchmarks are biased. They are less likely to be biased by business relationships than by skills imbalances. You can’t conduct an unbiased benchmark between two products unless you have the same skill and knowledge level in both, and that’s pretty difficult to achieve.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

Post by daniela florescu
And this is yet another public and very honest answer when I commented that a “third party” doing a benchmark
should not, in theory, have a business relationship with ANY of the vendors. Otherwise, not credible, so waste of time.
==============================================
Daniela - the fact that we are partnered with MarkLogic and Couchbase (so that we can better serve our clients who use those platforms) has no bearing on our ability to conduct benchmarks with independence.
==========
I guess it’s not clear to everyone what a “third party benchmark” usually means in Computer Science :-))
Have a great weekend everyone, best
Dana
_______________________________________________
http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk

[daniela florescu]

Michael,

If this field ever wants to reach a certain level of maturity, it has to start obeying some
grown-up rules, not running around like kinder-garden kids screaming at each other :
“my grand’ma is smaller then your grand’ma..”

That how it all looks to me from the outside now (e.g. NoSQL X scales to the level of the 
 universe

and not a bit less..! :-)

And building reliable benchmarks, is one of the grown-up rules of an industry — if nothing else, but to
understand, in a very unclear/nascent market, what is the usage pattern for which each product has been created
and optimized for.

I agree with you, building benchmarks is very difficult, indeed.

That’s why you need a REAL third party.

That’s why all the vendors AND their customers have to cooperate, etc.

That’s why you need some good will and transparency.

I hope one day they’ll be mature enough to do that.

Have a great weekend,
Dana

Post by Michael Kay
All benchmarks are biased. They are less likely to be biased by business relationships than by skills imbalances. You can’t conduct an unbiased benchmark between two products unless you have the same skill and knowledge level in both, and that’s pretty difficult to achieve.
Michael Kay
Saxonica

Post by daniela florescu
And this is yet another public and very honest answer when I commented that a “third party” doing a benchmark
should not, in theory, have a business relationship with ANY of the vendors. Otherwise, not credible, so waste of time.
==============================================
Daniela - the fact that we are partnered with MarkLogic and Couchbase (so that we can better serve our clients who use those platforms) has no bearing on our ability to conduct benchmarks with independence.
==========
I guess it’s not clear to everyone what a “third party benchmark” usually means in Computer Science :-))
Have a great weekend everyone, best
Dana
_______________________________________________
http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk

[Ihe Onwuka]

Post by daniela florescu
Michael,
If this field ever wants to reach a certain level of maturity, it has to start obeying some
“my grand’ma is smaller then your grand’ma..”

Away from the technical arena what I see in day to day life is the
juvenilisation of adults. Middle-aged and elderly people putting their feet
on seats on buses and trains (where did they learn that from). The middle
aged woman who won Britain's Got Talent by swapping her dogs behind the
camera and claiming she didn't think she was doing anything wrong (no I
didn't watch it but it was on the news).

Times have changed, not for the better, there is a laissez faire attitude
to cheats and cheating to the extent the person that blows the whistle is
more likely than the cheat to come under attack.

[daniela florescu]

Post by Ihe Onwuka
Times have changed, not for the better,

Times have changed as result of economical pressure from VC, investors, banks, your rich friends,
your successful neighbors, your spouse who wants to buy yacht, who knows !??? etc.

Everybody is pushing to make money, more of it, faster, more of it, faster….. until it reaches
a certain level of generalized hysteria when people don’t even understand that what they do is
….. not OK and not normal.

And startups are not immune to that. Silicone Valley startups are the flagship for that attitude.

In fact, database startups are the MOST vulnerable to that, given that their technology can help
OTHER companies make more money, faster, more of it, faster, more of it, faster…..

A little bit like in this extreme story:
https://medium.com/bad-words/the-asshole-factory-71ff808d887c

Can I personally stop it ? Can I personally change anything ? Nope.

But as Goya used to say “The sleep of the reason produces monsters”.

Have a great weekend everybody
Dana











_______________________________________________
tal

[Michael Kay]

Post by daniela florescu
In fact, database startups are the MOST vulnerable to that, given that their technology can help
OTHER companies make more money, faster, more of it, faster, more of it, faster…..

Agreed, the database software industry is about the most vicious example of naked aggressive capitalism that I have seen anywhere.

But I don’t think it has got worse since Oracle started trying to wipe out their competitors in the mid 80s. It has always been that bad.

Michael Kay
Saxonica


_______________________________________________
***@x-query.com
http://x-query.

[daniela florescu]

Post by Michael Kay
Agreed, the database software industry is about the most vicious example of naked aggressive capitalism that I have seen anywhere.
But I don’t think it has got worse since Oracle started trying to wipe out their competitors in the mid 80s. It has always been that bad.

Michael,

believe it or not, I think it got worse since the days of Larry Ellison (as bas and aggressive as it was… :-)

The first generation of databases grew organically, with their customer base … they were busy fighting SPLITTING an exiting market
which was naturally growing. Those databases were DB2(IBM), Oracle, SQL Sever. None of them had a VC behind it….

The new generation of databases (Cloudera, DataStax, Mongo. CouchDB. MarkLogic…etc) are NOT growing organically.

They are all financed by Venture Capitalists. They all took between 100M and 200M, sometimes more, investment money from VCs.
(And I can tell you, lending money from VCs is worse then lending money from the mafia….. if you don’t give it back… they’ll find you ….)

A VC naturally wants his investment returned 50X (or whatever X they want) in a fixed amount of time (2-5 years, or whatever). This is how VC world works.

So…. this new generation of databases, being financed by VCs, CANNOT grow naturally and organically with the market…..

Their growth speed is imposed by the VCs, and not by the market growth.

They have to pull customers out of their a..s. They have to create artificial customers.

They have to go to each other’s throat for the meager number of customers.

Hence the general hysteria.

===========

Hence all the horrible things that happens right now in the “database” industry, marketing screams all over the place, idiotic marketing messages
(scale to the level of the “universe”..), bogus benchmarks, query languages that don’t NEED a specification, proprietary syntaxes to cover an existing standard
— because a standard would reduce the value of the company— bullying every single blogger in the industry to say what you want, physically
abusing people who dare to say something else, bribing of officials of all kinds…..

Gold rush, here we come again.

Science ( temporarely I hope ), left this field.

How good a product is irrelevant right now. You can see that by watching the amount of money spent by this generation of databases in marketing and sales vs. engineering.
Usually it’s 10X. This was not true for Oracle, even if they did spend a large amount on sales.

My hope is that when the database bubble will crash, soon, VCs will finally get disappointed, and finally move away to another field, like locusts, so
we can come back and bring some scientific interest into this field.

But, yeah, I’ve never seen ANYTHING like what’s going on right now with the database companies in Sillicon Valley…..

Best
Dana












_______________________________________________
***@x-query.com
http://x-query.

[Pavel Velikhov]

Daniela,

Its even worse than what you describe, because the vendors have to LIE about the properties of their systems, because they don’t have
time to build reliable systems with all the guarantees that the marketing wants.

Examples from the “database” world:

- Cassandra for most of their life had DIRTY_WRITES as the highest isolation level. They lost data left and right, new releases would boast new features that were ALL unreliable. When confronted with tests, they accepted some into the test harness, but continued making claims that were so easy to break. And then they wrote a driver for Spark - which was completely broken. That said, at first they claimed to be a universal system with all sorts of workloads. Then, as they stopped scaling beyond simple INSERT/SELECT use-cases, they claimed that’s what the initial design was about.

- Elastic Search loses data left and right, had a bug in their consensus mechanism for a long time, claim to have included Jepsen tests in their harness, but didn’t really fix the bugs that Jepsen reported. Documentation for this project is a must read on how not to document your system.

- Mongo was breaking left and right on pretty simple queries. Also have a data loss problem. And a bunch of other problems. But we already have our favourite punch lines about Mongo :)

Examples from the “Hadoop” world:

- My favourite here is using Hadoop for simple massively parallel workloads, where it performed hundreds of times slower than scripts. With GNU_Parallel out there 90% of current Hadoop jobs can be done faster, will run faster and require much less monitoring than a hadoop cluster.

So hope the marketing bubble bursts soon and hope that high quality systems will reemerge.

Post by daniela florescu

Post by Michael Kay
Agreed, the database software industry is about the most vicious example of naked aggressive capitalism that I have seen anywhere.
But I don’t think it has got worse since Oracle started trying to wipe out their competitors in the mid 80s. It has always been that bad.

Michael,
believe it or not, I think it got worse since the days of Larry Ellison (as bas and aggressive as it was… :-)
The first generation of databases grew organically, with their customer base … they were busy fighting SPLITTING an exiting market
which was naturally growing. Those databases were DB2(IBM), Oracle, SQL Sever. None of them had a VC behind it….
The new generation of databases (Cloudera, DataStax, Mongo. CouchDB. MarkLogic…etc) are NOT growing organically.
They are all financed by Venture Capitalists. They all took between 100M and 200M, sometimes more, investment money from VCs.
(And I can tell you, lending money from VCs is worse then lending money from the mafia….. if you don’t give it back… they’ll find you ….)
A VC naturally wants his investment returned 50X (or whatever X they want) in a fixed amount of time (2-5 years, or whatever). This is how VC world works.
So…. this new generation of databases, being financed by VCs, CANNOT grow naturally and organically with the market…..
Their growth speed is imposed by the VCs, and not by the market growth.
They have to pull customers out of their a..s. They have to create artificial customers.
They have to go to each other’s throat for the meager number of customers.
Hence the general hysteria.
===========
Hence all the horrible things that happens right now in the “database” industry, marketing screams all over the place, idiotic marketing messages
(scale to the level of the “universe”..), bogus benchmarks, query languages that don’t NEED a specification, proprietary syntaxes to cover an existing standard
— because a standard would reduce the value of the company— bullying every single blogger in the industry to say what you want, physically
abusing people who dare to say something else, bribing of officials of all kinds…..
Gold rush, here we come again.
Science ( temporarely I hope ), left this field.
How good a product is irrelevant right now. You can see that by watching the amount of money spent by this generation of databases in marketing and sales vs. engineering.
Usually it’s 10X. This was not true for Oracle, even if they did spend a large amount on sales.
My hope is that when the database bubble will crash, soon, VCs will finally get disappointed, and finally move away to another field, like locusts, so
we can come back and bring some scientific interest into this field.
But, yeah, I’ve never seen ANYTHING like what’s going on right now with the database companies in Sillicon Valley…..
Best
Dana
_______________________________________________
http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk

С уважением,
Павел Велихов
***@gmail.com


_______________________________________________
***@x-query.com
http://x-query.com/mai

[daniela florescu]

Yes, Pavel, I know that. And you know that. And a bunch of real database people know that. There are plenty of us.

However, our voice gets lost ( and as Ihe said, we are more likely for us to be treated as crazy nuts then anything else….)
in face of the hundreds of millions of dollars that are being poured into marketing of those products.

One of my favorite is CouchDb marketing slogan: "N1QL is the FIRST TIME in history when people can query the STRUCTURE
of the data.”

And yeah, MarkLogic’s CEO’s statement that MarkLogic invented a solution for solving heterogeneous data problem is another favorite of
mine too.

How does THAT look for you, after the past 25 years of semi-structured databases ?

I cannot do anything else then being stunned by how gullible and uneducated people are….

And wait for the bubble to pass…

BTW, an interesting related read:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-has-become-wmd-philippe-collard?trk=hp-feed-article-title

Best
Dana

Post by Pavel Velikhov
Daniela,
Its even worse than what you describe, because the vendors have to LIE about the properties of their systems, because they don’t have
time to build reliable systems with all the guarantees that the marketing wants.
- Cassandra for most of their life had DIRTY_WRITES as the highest isolation level. They lost data left and right, new releases would boast new features that were ALL unreliable. When confronted with tests, they accepted some into the test harness, but continued making claims that were so easy to break. And then they wrote a driver for Spark - which was completely broken. That said, at first they claimed to be a universal system with all sorts of workloads. Then, as they stopped scaling beyond simple INSERT/SELECT use-cases, they claimed that’s what the initial design was about.
- Elastic Search loses data left and right, had a bug in their consensus mechanism for a long time, claim to have included Jepsen tests in their harness, but didn’t really fix the bugs that Jepsen reported. Documentation for this project is a must read on how not to document your system.
- Mongo was breaking left and right on pretty simple queries. Also have a data loss problem. And a bunch of other problems. But we already have our favourite punch lines about Mongo :)
- My favourite here is using Hadoop for simple massively parallel workloads, where it performed hundreds of times slower than scripts. With GNU_Parallel out there 90% of current Hadoop jobs can be done faster, will run faster and require much less monitoring than a hadoop cluster.
So hope the marketing bubble bursts soon and hope that high quality systems will reemerge.

Post by daniela florescu

Post by Michael Kay
Agreed, the database software industry is about the most vicious example of naked aggressive capitalism that I have seen anywhere.
But I don’t think it has got worse since Oracle started trying to wipe out their competitors in the mid 80s. It has always been that bad.

Michael,
believe it or not, I think it got worse since the days of Larry Ellison (as bas and aggressive as it was… :-)
The first generation of databases grew organically, with their customer base … they were busy fighting SPLITTING an exiting market
which was naturally growing. Those databases were DB2(IBM), Oracle, SQL Sever. None of them had a VC behind it….
The new generation of databases (Cloudera, DataStax, Mongo. CouchDB. MarkLogic…etc) are NOT growing organically.
They are all financed by Venture Capitalists. They all took between 100M and 200M, sometimes more, investment money from VCs.
(And I can tell you, lending money from VCs is worse then lending money from the mafia….. if you don’t give it back… they’ll find you ….)
A VC naturally wants his investment returned 50X (or whatever X they want) in a fixed amount of time (2-5 years, or whatever). This is how VC world works.
So…. this new generation of databases, being financed by VCs, CANNOT grow naturally and organically with the market…..
Their growth speed is imposed by the VCs, and not by the market growth.
They have to pull customers out of their a..s. They have to create artificial customers.
They have to go to each other’s throat for the meager number of customers.
Hence the general hysteria.
===========
Hence all the horrible things that happens right now in the “database” industry, marketing screams all over the place, idiotic marketing messages
(scale to the level of the “universe”..), bogus benchmarks, query languages that don’t NEED a specification, proprietary syntaxes to cover an existing standard
— because a standard would reduce the value of the company— bullying every single blogger in the industry to say what you want, physically
abusing people who dare to say something else, bribing of officials of all kinds…..
Gold rush, here we come again.
Science ( temporarely I hope ), left this field.
How good a product is irrelevant right now. You can see that by watching the amount of money spent by this generation of databases in marketing and sales vs. engineering.
Usually it’s 10X. This was not true for Oracle, even if they did spend a large amount on sales.
My hope is that when the database bubble will crash, soon, VCs will finally get disappointed, and finally move away to another field, like locusts, so
we can come back and bring some scientific interest into this field.
But, yeah, I’ve never seen ANYTHING like what’s going on right now with the database companies in Sillicon Valley…..
Best
Dana
_______________________________________________
http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk

С уважением,
Павел Велихов
_______________________________________________
http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk

_______________________________________________
***@x-query.com
http://x-query.com/mailman/listin

[Ihe Onwuka]

Post by daniela florescu
Yes, Pavel, I know that. And you know that. And a bunch of real database
people know that. There are plenty of us.
However, our voice gets lost ( and as Ihe said, we are more likely for us
to be treated as crazy nuts then anything else
.)
in face of the hundreds of millions of dollars that are being poured into
marketing of those products.
One of my favorite is CouchDb marketing slogan: "N1QL is the FIRST TIME
in history when people can query the STRUCTURE
of the data.”
And yeah, MarkLogic’s CEO’s statement that MarkLogic invented a solution
for solving heterogeneous data problem is another favorite of
mine too.
How does THAT look for you, after the past 25 years of semi-structured databases ?
I cannot do anything else then being stunned by how gullible and
uneducated people are
.
And wait for the bubble to pass

I was drawn to this article because I've been approached twice by

recruiters from the company that it is about.

http://kellblog.com/2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hurt/

*Since it is quite long I have excerpted the relevant bit below.*

*"To which for several years I had to say “it’s all bullshit, it’s all
bullshit, it’s a barter transaction and they’re double counting, and it’s
all bullshit.”*
*It turns out being a naysayer isn’t fun work: for three years you sound
like a whining, doubting-Thomas constantly on the back foot, constantly
playing defense and then one day
<http://www.forbes.com/global/2000/0306/0305024a.html> you’re proven right
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A6157-2002Jan6>.
But there’s no joy in it. And the naysaying doesn’t help sell newspapers
so you don’t get much press coverage. And, in the end, all people remember
is that “MicroStrategy was pretty cool back in the day” and “Dave’s a
grump.”*

[Pavel Velikhov]

Found this wonderful law that explains the futility of arguing against bull****:

"The amount of energy necessary to refute bull**** is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” ~ Alberto Brandolini

Have a nice day! :)

Post by daniela florescu
Yes, Pavel, I know that. And you know that. And a bunch of real database people know that. There are plenty of us.
However, our voice gets lost ( and as Ihe said, we are more likely for us to be treated as crazy nuts then anything else
.)
in face of the hundreds of millions of dollars that are being poured into marketing of those products.
One of my favorite is CouchDb marketing slogan: "N1QL is the FIRST TIME in history when people can query the STRUCTURE
of the data.”
And yeah, MarkLogic’s CEO’s statement that MarkLogic invented a solution for solving heterogeneous data problem is another favorite of
mine too.
How does THAT look for you, after the past 25 years of semi-structured databases ?
I cannot do anything else then being stunned by how gullible and uneducated people are
.
And wait for the bubble to pass

I was drawn to this article because I've been approached twice by recruiters from the company that it is about.
http://kellblog.com/2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hurt/ <http://kellblog.com/2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hurt/>
Since it is quite long I have excerpted the relevant bit below.
"To which for several years I had to say “it’s all bullshit, it’s all bullshit, it’s a barter transaction and they’re double counting, and it’s all bullshit.”
It turns out being a naysayer isn’t fun work: for three years you sound like a whining, doubting-Thomas constantly on the back foot, constantly playing defense and then one day <http://www.forbes.com/global/2000/0306/0305024a.html> you’re proven right <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A6157-2002Jan6>. But there’s no joy in it. And the naysaying doesn’t help sell newspapers so you don’t get much press coverage. And, in the end, all people remember is that “MicroStrategy was pretty cool back in the day” and “Dave’s a grump.”

С уважеМОеЌ,
Павел ВелОхПв
***@gmail.com

[Ihe Onwuka]

Remember Ingres. Here is the story of what Oracle did to them.

http://kellblog.com/2006/04/08/ingres-can-you-ever-go-back/

Undoubtedly you can parse the engineering considerations better than I (see
At a product level) but pay attention to what is said in "At the business
level" and in particular the reference to failing to understand the tornado.

Post by daniela florescu
Michael,
believe it or not, I think it got worse since the days of Larry Ellison
(as bas and aggressive as it was
 :-)
The first generation of databases grew organically, with their customer
base 
 they were busy fighting SPLITTING an exiting market
which was naturally growing. Those databases were DB2(IBM), Oracle, SQL
Sever. None of them had a VC behind it
.
The new generation of databases (Cloudera, DataStax, Mongo. CouchDB.
MarkLogic
etc) are NOT growing organically.
They are all financed by Venture Capitalists. They all took between 100M
and 200M, sometimes more, investment money from VCs.
(And I can tell you, lending money from VCs is worse then lending money
from the mafia
.. if you don’t give it back
 they’ll find you 
.)
A VC naturally wants his investment returned 50X (or whatever X they want)
in a fixed amount of time (2-5 years, or whatever). This is how VC world
works.
So
. this new generation of databases, being financed by VCs, CANNOT grow
naturally and organically with the market
..
Their growth speed is imposed by the VCs, and not by the market growth.
They have to pull customers out of their a..s. They have to create artificial customers.
They have to go to each other’s throat for the meager number of customers.
Hence the general hysteria.
===========
Hence all the horrible things that happens right now in the “database”
industry, marketing screams all over the place, idiotic marketing messages
(scale to the level of the “universe”..), bogus benchmarks, query
languages that don’t NEED a specification, proprietary syntaxes to cover an
existing standard
— because a standard would reduce the value of the company— bullying every
single blogger in the industry to say what you want, physically
abusing people who dare to say something else, bribing of officials of all
kinds
..
Gold rush, here we come again.
Science ( temporarely I hope ), left this field.
How good a product is irrelevant right now. You can see that by watching
the amount of money spent by this generation of databases in marketing and
sales vs. engineering.
Usually it’s 10X. This was not true for Oracle, even if they did spend a
large amount on sales.
My hope is that when the database bubble will crash, soon, VCs will
finally get disappointed, and finally move away to another field, like
locusts, so
we can come back and bring some scientific interest into this field.
But, yeah, I’ve never seen ANYTHING like what’s going on right now with
the database companies in Sillicon Valley
..
Best
Dana

[daniela florescu]

First, the fact that there EXISTS a “Technical level” section in this blog is fundamental.
(and yes, I am a fan of Kellogg’s blogs, too, even if I don’t agree with him always).

First, at that time, technical considerations STILL EXISTED.

E.g. could one of you tell me the technical detail implementations between CouchDB and MongoDB !?

Huh !? They are both just quickly put together hacks, without any architecture
.and no-one, including their own engineers and their
own customers CARES or even KNOWS about the technical details. Tons of my database friends went to work for Mongo and then left in 2-3 months
screaming 
.

(I wonder if you ask the average MongoDb “database” developer what a page locking is if you even get an answer
:-)

===========

Second, yes, sure business wars always existed and will always exist. And it’s a good thing.

Trust me, working at Oracle for 8 years, I’ve seen my share of “business wars” and related strategies
...


But when Kellogg cites Geoffrey Moore’s “tornado’.

"The tornado refers to Geoffrey Moore’s <http://www.tcg-advisors.com/who/moore.htm> metaphor for the hypergrowth phase of a high-tech, infrastructure market.”

I agree that during such a “tornado”
 the best is to acquire as many customers as possible.

But Moore refers to a REAL customer growth tornado, not an current ARTIFICIAL growth that is 100% due to the pressure from VCs
— they need to reimburse the money back to the pension funds they took it from in a fixed interval of X years.

I am 100% convinced that this “database bubble” is artificially inflated by VCs billions poured in. More and more articles by Forbes show that —
enterprises play with the new solutions, but few actually deploy those solutions.

This is not only, as it was in the 80 and 90, only a matter of who has the best sales team, and gets the EXISTING projects. (and yes, Oracle did..)

This artificial bubble pushes vendors to become idiot zombies: create “customers" out thin air, bullshiting the few who are open to buy new things into
believing in aliens, and completely treat them like idiots by ignoring the state of the art.

This is not a case of Moore’s tornado.

One more day passed
 one more day closer to the death of this database bubble
 :-)

Have a great day,
Dana

Post by Ihe Onwuka
Remember Ingres. Here is the story of what Oracle did to them.
http://kellblog.com/2006/04/08/ingres-can-you-ever-go-back/ <http://kellblog.com/2006/04/08/ingres-can-you-ever-go-back/>
Undoubtedly you can parse the engineering considerations better than I (see At a product level) but pay attention to what is said in "At the business level" and in particular the reference to failing to understand the tornado.
Michael,
believe it or not, I think it got worse since the days of Larry Ellison (as bas and aggressive as it was
 :-)
The first generation of databases grew organically, with their customer base 
 they were busy fighting SPLITTING an exiting market
which was naturally growing. Those databases were DB2(IBM), Oracle, SQL Sever. None of them had a VC behind it
.
The new generation of databases (Cloudera, DataStax, Mongo. CouchDB. MarkLogic
etc) are NOT growing organically.
They are all financed by Venture Capitalists. They all took between 100M and 200M, sometimes more, investment money from VCs.
(And I can tell you, lending money from VCs is worse then lending money from the mafia
.. if you don’t give it back
 they’ll find you 
.)
A VC naturally wants his investment returned 50X (or whatever X they want) in a fixed amount of time (2-5 years, or whatever). This is how VC world works.
So
. this new generation of databases, being financed by VCs, CANNOT grow naturally and organically with the market
..
Their growth speed is imposed by the VCs, and not by the market growth.
They have to pull customers out of their a..s. They have to create artificial customers.
They have to go to each other’s throat for the meager number of customers.
Hence the general hysteria.
===========
Hence all the horrible things that happens right now in the “database” industry, marketing screams all over the place, idiotic marketing messages
(scale to the level of the “universe”..), bogus benchmarks, query languages that don’t NEED a specification, proprietary syntaxes to cover an existing standard
— because a standard would reduce the value of the company— bullying every single blogger in the industry to say what you want, physically
abusing people who dare to say something else, bribing of officials of all kinds
..
Gold rush, here we come again.
Science ( temporarely I hope ), left this field.
How good a product is irrelevant right now. You can see that by watching the amount of money spent by this generation of databases in marketing and sales vs. engineering.
Usually it’s 10X. This was not true for Oracle, even if they did spend a large amount on sales.
My hope is that when the database bubble will crash, soon, VCs will finally get disappointed, and finally move away to another field, like locusts, so
we can come back and bring some scientific interest into this field.
But, yeah, I’ve never seen ANYTHING like what’s going on right now with the database companies in Sillicon Valley
..
Best
Dana

[daniela florescu]

And all this comes from a person like me. I spent my ENTIRE CAREER working to see the back of the
relational databases
NoSQL if you want.

However, this can NOT be done by replacing the relational databases with a pile of bul***t.

They can only be replaced with something scientifically solid.

That’s why I am so virulent against stupidities in the NoSQL world: the more they say such stupidities, the more
they delay the replacement of relational databases with something better.


Best regards
Dana

Post by daniela florescu
First, the fact that there EXISTS a “Technical level” section in this blog is fundamental.
(and yes, I am a fan of Kellogg’s blogs, too, even if I don’t agree with him always).
First, at that time, technical considerations STILL EXISTED.
E.g. could one of you tell me the technical detail implementations between CouchDB and MongoDB !?
Huh !? They are both just quickly put together hacks, without any architecture
.and no-one, including their own engineers and their
own customers CARES or even KNOWS about the technical details. Tons of my database friends went to work for Mongo and then left in 2-3 months
screaming 
.
(I wonder if you ask the average MongoDb “database” developer what a page locking is if you even get an answer
:-)
===========
Second, yes, sure business wars always existed and will always exist. And it’s a good thing.
Trust me, working at Oracle for 8 years, I’ve seen my share of “business wars” and related strategies
...
But when Kellogg cites Geoffrey Moore’s “tornado’.
"The tornado refers to Geoffrey Moore’s <http://www.tcg-advisors.com/who/moore.htm> metaphor for the hypergrowth phase of a high-tech, infrastructure market.”
I agree that during such a “tornado”
 the best is to acquire as many customers as possible.
But Moore refers to a REAL customer growth tornado, not an current ARTIFICIAL growth that is 100% due to the pressure from VCs
— they need to reimburse the money back to the pension funds they took it from in a fixed interval of X years.
I am 100% convinced that this “database bubble” is artificially inflated by VCs billions poured in. More and more articles by Forbes show that —
enterprises play with the new solutions, but few actually deploy those solutions.
This is not only, as it was in the 80 and 90, only a matter of who has the best sales team, and gets the EXISTING projects. (and yes, Oracle did..)
This artificial bubble pushes vendors to become idiot zombies: create “customers" out thin air, bullshiting the few who are open to buy new things into
believing in aliens, and completely treat them like idiots by ignoring the state of the art.
This is not a case of Moore’s tornado.
One more day passed
 one more day closer to the death of this database bubble
 :-)
Have a great day,
Dana

Post by Ihe Onwuka
Remember Ingres. Here is the story of what Oracle did to them.
http://kellblog.com/2006/04/08/ingres-can-you-ever-go-back/ <http://kellblog.com/2006/04/08/ingres-can-you-ever-go-back/>
Undoubtedly you can parse the engineering considerations better than I (see At a product level) but pay attention to what is said in "At the business level" and in particular the reference to failing to understand the tornado.
Michael,
believe it or not, I think it got worse since the days of Larry Ellison (as bas and aggressive as it was
 :-)
The first generation of databases grew organically, with their customer base 
 they were busy fighting SPLITTING an exiting market
which was naturally growing. Those databases were DB2(IBM), Oracle, SQL Sever. None of them had a VC behind it
.
The new generation of databases (Cloudera, DataStax, Mongo. CouchDB. MarkLogic
etc) are NOT growing organically.
They are all financed by Venture Capitalists. They all took between 100M and 200M, sometimes more, investment money from VCs.
(And I can tell you, lending money from VCs is worse then lending money from the mafia
.. if you don’t give it back
 they’ll find you 
.)
A VC naturally wants his investment returned 50X (or whatever X they want) in a fixed amount of time (2-5 years, or whatever). This is how VC world works.
So
. this new generation of databases, being financed by VCs, CANNOT grow naturally and organically with the market
..
Their growth speed is imposed by the VCs, and not by the market growth.
They have to pull customers out of their a..s. They have to create artificial customers.
They have to go to each other’s throat for the meager number of customers.
Hence the general hysteria.
===========
Hence all the horrible things that happens right now in the “database” industry, marketing screams all over the place, idiotic marketing messages
(scale to the level of the “universe”..), bogus benchmarks, query languages that don’t NEED a specification, proprietary syntaxes to cover an existing standard
— because a standard would reduce the value of the company— bullying every single blogger in the industry to say what you want, physically
abusing people who dare to say something else, bribing of officials of all kinds
..
Gold rush, here we come again.
Science ( temporarely I hope ), left this field.
How good a product is irrelevant right now. You can see that by watching the amount of money spent by this generation of databases in marketing and sales vs. engineering.
Usually it’s 10X. This was not true for Oracle, even if they did spend a large amount on sales.
My hope is that when the database bubble will crash, soon, VCs will finally get disappointed, and finally move away to another field, like locusts, so
we can come back and bring some scientific interest into this field.
But, yeah, I’ve never seen ANYTHING like what’s going on right now with the database companies in Sillicon Valley
..
Best
Dana