Last week I attended Bank of America’s Technology Innovation Summit in Silicon Valley. In attendance were leading technology executives from Bank of America who outlined needs and challenges for the global banking giant. BofA’s annual IT spend is greater than $5 Billion, serving  almost 59 million, or one out of every two U.S. households and distribution strength of about six thousand branches, 18,000 ATMs and 24 million online banking customers, and more than 3,000 customer touches every second. Key themes discussed involved Cloud computing, Information Management, Security, Mobility and Green IT. And as I sat through the panel discussions and spoke to some of the IT leaders, it became evident that underpinning all the major business and IT initiatives for the global bank was a central theme – Lots of data, need for better and faster insights.

A senior BofA IT executive stated “Broad BI and data mining remain objectives, not realized goals”. There was a high level of interest in analytics and a big drive to be information-driven across business units.

Clearly, for a large bank like BofA, the business drivers exist. For example, the consumer channels executive was interested in understanding consumer behavior across different channels. In a saturated marketplace for retail customers and facing stiff competition from Chase (now owns WaMu), Wells Fargo (now owns Wachovia), BofA is keenly interested in strengthening its bond with its existing customer base.  With thousands of interactions per second, every interaction with the customer is an opportunity to learn more about customer behavior and customer preferences.

 In the credit card division, early detection of fraud patterns can translate into big savings for a market that is undergoing dramatic transformation due to reforms mandated by Congress. 

On the IT front, BofA has lots of existing investments in BI tools and data management software.

So where is the gap? Why are BI/data mining unrealized goals?

The answer lies in re-thinking and challenging the status quo in data management and analytic application development in today’s big data IT environments. Google, Amazon, and other innovators are leading this and it is only a matter of time before leaders in the financial services industry follow suit. A new mandate and architecture for big data applications  is emerging.

This new class of analytic applications will require a strategic investment in infrastructure that embraces assimilating advanced analytics processing right next to the terabytes to petabytes of enterprise data for key business initiatives including

• Customer service effectiveness to predict customer requirements as well as fully understand customer relationships across branch office, ATM, online, and mobile channels
• Ability to respond faster to regulators or to management and driving decisions based on insights driven from accurate, timely data

Broader, more pervasive BI and richer Analytics is on the threshold of becoming a reality!

At the same time, our CEO and co-founder Mayank will be sharing his thoughts on a separate blog called “Winning with Data” where he will talk about his perspectives of the market trends, customer use-cases, technology evolution and company growth. You can find all of his previous posts there, as well as fresh content starting with the announcement of Aster Data’s massively parallel data-application server.

- What is Aster Data’s SQL-MapReduce?
- Example industry applications of SQL-MapReduce
- Walking through the SQL-MapReduce syntax

Curt has also posted his slides on DBMS2 with a great overview on dispelling the myths around MapReduce, and how MapReduce and SQL play nicely with each other.

We had great turn-out and questions from the sessions.  If you have any questions after reviewing the material, please drop a comment.

In addition to the Big Data Summit we held in New York City (which we’ll detail in a separate post), Colin White presented on a Webcast with Aster on the various use-cases for Hadoop within data warehouse environments. Colin does a great job summarizing what Hadoop is, how it’s different from an RDBMS, the different types of users for each, and how they co-exist nicely in customer environments.

Below are the slides to view if you weren’t able to attend the event, which will also be available for on-demand viewing soon in our resource library.

To kick off the festivities, we’re holding a live webinar earlier in the day at 9 a.m. US Pacific time. Colin White and myself will be discussing Hadoop and data warehousing - how they’re similar, how they’re different, and what they can be used for (both separately and together). In fact, we’ll be making an important announcement of a new product offering that you won’t want to miss. If you haven’t already, I urge you to register by clicking here.

Mark it on your calendar - something “big” is coming on October 1st.

Aster is now in a new phase, when maximal focus on product delivery and responding to customers’ every need is taking center stage. We have a fantastic product that is growing quickly and is being deployed at many, many customer sites. The level of product focus in our team is astounding. Yes, my friends, the garage days are now officially over! … And I’m delighted we’ve come this far.

One should always invest their energy in those activities that most benefit from that energy. Aster is a grown-up now and is solidly set on a path with great momentum toward executing our “big data” vision. At the same time, I have a budding team of incredibly bright students back in my lab at EPFL, who are hungry for my help and scientific direction.  For me, it’s time for the next “garage project.”

As you might imagine, this is not an easy decision for a founder. Perhaps this is how parents feel when sending their kid to college away from home… but time does not stand still.

It has been a thrill to start Aster with Mayank and Tasso, see her emerge from 5 PCs cooled by a portable fan in my living room, and then working for her all these years. I’m proud of what we’ve achieved so far, both in terms of product and market impact, as well as our published research papers. At a future stage in Aster’s growth, it may make sense for me to resume my role in leading the company’s long-term research. Until then, I look forward to helping the company from behind the scenes and to watch Aster grow and develop the best data management platform in the market.

Carpe datum!

We also announced today that our first customer in Europe is the #1 online poker gaming site in the world, Full Tilt Poker. We have been working with Full Tilt Poker for 8 months now helping deploy Aster nCluster to power their fraud prevention systems and provide enhanced customer service to their players.

It is no surprise that data size growth is a world-wide phenomenon, and certainly occurs across “the pond” as well. We have noticed that European customers in numerous industries, such as financial services and insurance, online retailing, social networking, communications, and gaming are deploying new (and sometimes custom) applications to leverage big data.

Aster Data is certainly the most application friendly big-data infrastructure in the market, and we look forward to working with our European customers in the coming years!

This post was co-authored by John Cieslewicz, Eric Friedman, and Peter Pawlowski of Aster Data Systems

One year ago we introduced SQL/MapReduce for the Aster nCluster database, which integrates MapReduce and SQL to enable deep analytics within the database. Pushing computation inside the database and close to the data is increasingly important as data sizes grow exponentially. As SQL/MR turns one year old, we are happy to announce that we will be presenting our SQL/MR innovations next week at the 35th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), the premier international forum for database research.

The title of our conference paper is SQL/MapReduce: A Practical Approach to Self-describing, Polymorphic, and Parallelizable User-defined Functions. The title of the paper may be large, but so are the advanced analytics possibilities created by the invention of SQL/MR!

We developed SQL/MR because we saw a growing gap between the deep analytics and application needs of very large data and the capabilities provided by SQL and traditional relational-only data processing. We call this gap, the “SQL Gap.”

SQL and the relational query processing model are well suited for many, but not all data processing tasks. Some queries are cumbersome, non-intuitive or impossible to express in SQL (note: now that SQL is turing complete, nothing is strictly impossible, but it can be very painful and perform very badly) - check out our paper for some examples. Moreover, query optimizers have a limited number of algorithms at their disposal to process data, which leads to convoluted data processing in situations where applying a little domain knowledge can yield a much more straightforward algorithm.

We found traditional user-defined functions (UDFs) to fall short in bridging this gap between SQL and the answers to challenging analytic problems that need to be solved. UDFs are often user-unfriendly, inflexible, and not easily parallelized. SQL/MR functions, in contrast, are designed to be easy to develop, easy to install, and easy to use - providing developers and analysts with a powerful tool to tackle the challenges posed by very large data.

To do this, we integrated the MapReduce programming model with SQL. MapReduce is a well known paradigm for parallel, fault-tolerant data processing that allows developers to write procedural code that is then applied to data in parallel. Pure MapReduce, however, misses out on aspects of SQL and relational data processing that are great - such as query optimizations, managed data, and transactions. By integrating SQL and MapReduce on top of Aster nCluster’s hardware management and fault tolerance, we leverage the strengths of each, resulting in a system that is much more powerful than either in isolation.

SQL/MapReduce At VLDB
SQL/MR is much more than a user-defined function. As our paper title states, a SQL/MR function is self-describing, polymorphic, and parallelizable. Let’s explore each of these characteristics and see why we hope researchers at VLDB will be as excited as we are by SQL/MR.

Self-Describing and Polymorphic
The behavior and output characteristics of a SQL/MR function are determined dynamically at query-time instead of statically at install-time as is the case with traditional user-defined functions. These characteristics allow SQL/MR functions to behave much more like general purpose library functions than single-use, specific application user-defined functions. When a SQL/MR function is used in a query, the nCluster query planner negotiates a contract with the SQL/MR function, providing the function’s input schema and optional user-supplied parameters. In return, the SQL/MR function agrees to a contract that specifies its output schema for the duration of the query. This contract negotiation is what makes SQL/MR functions self-describing, and their ability to be invoked on different input with different optional parameters makes them polymorphic as well. To summarize, by invoking a SQL/MR function on different input, with different optional parameters, the SQL/MR function may export a different output schema and perform different computation - the possibilities are entirely up to the developer!

Parallelizable
The SQL/MR programming model, like that of MapReduce, is inherently parallelizable. Developers write procedural code in the language of their choice, but at runtime that code will run in parallel across hundreds of nodes within an nCluster database. Advanced analytics and application code can now be executed in parallel, directly on data stored within nCluster making nCluster an application-friendly, high performance data warehouse and data application system. Advanced analytics capabilities that we have already pushed inside nCluster using SQL/MR include click-stream sessionization, general purpose time series path matching, dynamic and massively parallel data loading from heterogeneous sources, and genetic sequence analysis.

Bridging the Gap
SQL/MapReduce has matured greatly over the past year and is used by our customers in creative ways we never imagined - proof positive that SQL/MapReduce is an effective way to bridge the “SQL Gap” to deeper analytics on very large data. Check out the other application examples and sample code videos on www.asterdata.com, as well as the MapReduce category of this blog

We’d love to hear from you about any type of analysis you’re doing where stand-alone SQL is becoming overly-complex … and please look us up at the VLDB 2009 show if you’re making the trip to Lyon, France!

(Apart from the authors, Brent Chun, Mohit Aron, Abhishek Marwah, Raghu Venkat, Vinay Bondhugula, and Prasan Roy of Aster Data Systems are notable contributors to the overall SQL/MR effort.)

In assembling a new hardware stack, Netezza calls this re-architecture as a change but not really a change - the FPGA will continue to offload data compression/decompression, selection and projection from the Intel CPU; the Intel CPU will be used to push-down joins and group bys; the RAM will be used to enable caching (thus helping improve mixed workload performance).

I think this is a pretty significant change for Netezza.

Clearly, Netezza would not have invested in this change - assemble & ship a new hardware stack to share revenue with IBM vs. a 3rd party hardware assembler - if Netezza’s old FPGA-dominant hardware was not being out-priced and out-performed by our Intel-based commodity hardware.

It was a matter of time before the market realized that FPGA’s had reached their end-of-life status in the data warehousing market. In realizing the writing on the wall, and responding to it early, Netezza has made a bold decision to change - and yet, clung to the warm familiarity of an FPGA as a “side car”.

Netezza, and the rest of the market, will soon become aware that a change in hardware stack is not a free lunch. The richness of CPU and RAM resources in an IBM commodity blade come at a cost that a resource-starved FPGA-based architecture never had to account for.

In 2009, after having engineered its software for an FPGA over the last 9 years, Netezza will need to come to terms with commodity hardware in production systems and demonstrate that they can:

- Manage processes and memory spawned by a single query across 100s of blade servers

- Maintain consistent caches across 100s of blade servers - after all, it is Oracle’s Cache Fusion technology that is the bane of scaling Oracle RAC beyond 8 blade servers

- Tolerate the higher frequency of failures that a commodity Linux + RAID Controller/driver + Network driver stack incur when put under rigorous data movement (e.g., allocation/de-allocation of memory contributing to memory leaks)

- Add a new IBM blade and ensure incremental scaling of their appliance

- Upgrade the software stack in place - unlike an FPGA-based hardware stack that customers are OK to floor-sweep in their upgrade

- Contain run-away queries from allocating the abundant CPU and RAM resources and starving other concurrent queries in the workload

- Reduce network traffic for a blade with 2 NICs that is managing 8 disks vs. a Power-PC/FPGA that had 1 NIC for 1 disk

- …

If you take a quick pulse of the market, apart from our known installations of 100+ servers, there is no other vendor - mature or new-age - who has demonstrated that 100’s of commodity servers can be made to work together to run a single database.

And I believe that there is a fundamental reason for this lack of proof-point even a decade after Linux has matured and commodity servers have been used for computing - software not built from the ground-up to leverage the richness and contain the limitations of commodity hardware is incapable of scaling. Aster nCluster has been built ground up to have these capabilities on a commodity stack. Netezza’s software written for proprietary hardware cannot be retrofitted to work on commodity hardware (else, Netezza would have completely taken the FPGAs out, now that they have powerful CPUs!). Netezza has its work cut-out - they have taken a dramatic shift that has the ability to bring the company and its production customers to its knees. And there-in lies Netezza’s challenge - they must succeed while supporting their current customers on an FPGA-based platform while moving resources to build out a commodity-based platform.

And we have not even touched upon the extension of SQL with MapReduce to power big data manipulation using arbitrary user-written procedures.

If a system is not fundamentally designed to leverage commodity servers, it’s only going to be a band-aid on seams that are bursting. Overall, we will curiously watch how long it takes Netezza to eliminate their FPGAs completely and move to a real commodity stack so that the customers can have the freedom to choose their own hardware and not be locked down to Netezza-supplied custom hardware.

That’s why I’m so excited about a webinar we are hosting next week with James Kobielus, Senior Analyst for Forrester Research. In case you haven’t read it, James recently released his report “Massive But Agile: Best Practices for Scaling the Next-Generation Data Warehouse.” In the report, James thoroughly address several issues around scalability for which Aster is well-suited (parallelism, optimized storage, in-database analytics, etc.).

We’ll get into much more detail on these and other issues over the course of the webinar. If you haven’t had a chance yet, please register for the webinar to hear what James, a leader and visionary in the industry, has to say. And make sure to leave a comment below if there are any facets of data warehouse scalability that you would like us to cover.