Open-source analytics options grow

IDG News Service - The options for open-source data warehousing and analytics grew on Tuesday, with a number of announcements from Infobright, Jaspersoft and Ingres.

Infobright unveiled the 4.0 version of its analytic database, placing special emphasis on the release's ability to crunch machine-generated data from sensors, telecom infrastructure and other sources in "near-real time."

A technology called DomainExpert reduces query times, optimizing performance by "adding intelligence about a particular data domain -- such as web, financial services or telecom," according to Infobright.

Another new feature, called Rough Query, allows users to dig through especially large data sets faster. "Rather than execute a long-running query to find a specific answer, Rough Query enables a user to narrow down the results in an iterative manner, with sub-second response time, before the full query is run," the company said.

Other new capabilities in Infobright 4.0 include a connector to the Hadoop framework for large-scale data processing and a system for loading big data sets rapidly. The latter feature can load data at up to 2TB per hour, according to Infobright.

The release will go into general availability within 30 days, Infobright said.

"To me, Rough Query is the most impressive part" of Infobright's announcement, analyst Curt Monash of Monash Research wrote in a blog post Tuesday. Such a tool is ideal for what Monash calls "investigative analytics," he added.

Some of the other aspects of the release, though, represent "mainly catch-up toward Infobright's larger and more expensive peers," he added.

Also Tuesday, Ingres and Jaspersoft announced a partnership that sees Ingres' VectorWise analytic database combined with Jaspersoft's BI (business intelligence) software in a joint virtual machine.

A 30-day trial download is available at no charge for the package.

That length of time "suffices to evaluate VectorWise for very limited use cases," Monash said in an interview.

"I'd be shocked if VectorWise didn't do well," he added. "Running dashboards is an easy task for a columnar RDBMS, perhaps unless you have many more concurrent users than you'd likely have in a 30-day test."

Ingres, Jaspersoft and Infobright compete with proprietary products from the likes of Oracle and IBM, but their open-source nature doesn't necessarily give them an advantage on a technological basis.

"In these markets, the main relevance of open source is that it equates to low license and maintenance costs," Monash said.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com