Tag: Aster Data Systems

AsterData still alive;/launches SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal

so apparantly ole client AsterData continues to thrive under gentle touch of Terrific Data

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Aster Data today launched the SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal, a new online community for data scientists and analytic developers. For your convenience, I copied the release below and it can also be found here. Please let me know if you have any questions or if there is anything else I can help you with.

Sara Korolevich

Point Communications Group for Aster Data

sarak@pointcgroup.com

Office: 602.279.1137

Mobile: 623.326.0881

Teradata Accelerates Big Data Analytics with First Collaborative Community for SQL-MapReduce®

New online community for data scientists and analytic developers enables development and sharing of powerful MapReduce analytics


San Carlos, California – Teradata Corporation (NYSE:TDC) today announced the launch of the Aster Data SQL-MapReduce® Developer Portal. This portal is the first collaborative online developer community for SQL-MapReduce analytics, an emerging framework for processing non-relational data and ultra-fast analytics.

“Aster Data continues to deliver on its unique vision for powerful analytics with a rich set of tools to make development of those analytics quick and easy,” said Tasso Argyros, vice president of Aster Data Marketing and Product Management, Teradata Corporation. “This new developer portal builds on Aster Data’s continuing SQL-MapReduce innovation, leveraging the flexibility and power of SQL-MapReduce for analytics that were previously impossible or impractical.”

The developer portal showcases the power and flexibility of Aster Data’s SQL-MapReduce – which uniquely combines standard SQL with the popular MapReduce distributed computing technology for processing big data – by providing a collaborative community for sharing SQL-MapReduce expert insights in addition to sharing SQL-MapReduce analytic functions and sample code. Data scientists, quantitative analysts, and developers can now leverage the experience, knowledge, and best practices of a community of experts to easily harness the power of SQL-MapReduce for big data analytics.

A recent report from IDC Research, “Taking Care of Your Quants: Focusing Data Warehousing Resources on Quantitative Analysts Matters,” has shown that by enabling data scientists with the tools to harness emerging types and sources of data, companies create significant competitive advantage and become leaders in their respective industry.

“The biggest positive differences among leaders and the rest come from the introduction of new types of data,” says Dan Vesset, program vice president, Business Analytics Solutions, IDC Research. “This may include either new transactional data sources or new external data feeds of transactional or multi-structured interactional data — the latter may include click stream or other data that is a by-product of social networking.”

Vesset goes on to say, “Aster Data provides a comprehensive platform for analytics and their SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal provides a community for sharing best practices and functions which can have an even greater impact to an organization’s business.”

With this announcement Aster Data extends its industry leadership in delivering the most comprehensive analytic platform for big data analytics — not only capable of processing massive volumes of multi-structured data, but also providing an extensive set of tools and capabilities that make it simple to leverage the power of MapReduce analytics. The Aster Data

SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal brings the power of SQL-MapReduce accessible to data scientists, quantitative analysis, and analytic developers by making it easy to share and collaborate with experts in developing SQL-MapReduce analytics. This portal builds on Aster Data’s history of SQL-MapReduce innovations, including:

  • The first deep integration of SQL with MapReduce
  • The first MapReduce support for .NET
  • The first integrated development environment, Aster Data
    Developer Express
  • A comprehensive suite of analytic functions, Aster Data
    Analytic Foundation

Aster Data’s patent-pending SQL-MapReduce enables analytic applications and functions that can deliver faster, deeper insights on terabytes to petabytes of data. These applications are implemented using MapReduce but delivered through standard SQL and business intelligence (BI) tools.

SQL-MapReduce makes it possible for data scientists and developers to empower business analysts with the ability to make informed decisions, incorporating vast amounts of data, regardless of query complexity or data type. Aster Data customers are using SQL-MapReduce for rich analytics including analytic applications for social network analysis, digital marketing optimization, and on-the-fly fraud detection and prevention.

“Collaboration is at the core of our success as one of the leading providers, and pioneers of social software,” said Navdeep Alam, director of Data Architecture at Mzinga. “We are pleased to be one of the early members of The Aster Data SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal, which will allow us the ability to share and leverage insights with others in using big data analytics to attain a deeper understanding of customers’ behavior and create competitive advantage for our business.”

SQL-MapReduce is one of the core capabilities within Aster Data’s flagship product. Aster DatanCluster™ 4.6, the industry’s first massively parallel processing (MPP) analytic platform has an integrated analytics engine that stores and processes both relational and non-relational data at scale. With Aster Data’s unique analytics framework that supports both SQL and
SQL-MapReduce™, customers benefit from rich, new analytics on large data volumes with complex data types. Aster Data analytic functions are embedded within the analytic platform and processed locally with data, which allows for faster data exploration. The SQL-MapReduce framework provides scalable fault-tolerance for new analytics, providing users with superior reliability, regardless of number of users, query size, or data types.


About Aster Data
Aster Data is a market leader in big data analytics, enabling the powerful combination of cost-effective storage and ultra-fast analysis of new sources and types of data. The Aster Data nCluster analytic platform is a massively parallel software solution that embeds MapReduce analytic processing with data stores for deeper insights on new data sources and types to deliver new analytic capabilities with breakthrough performance and scalability. Aster Data’s solution utilizes Aster Data’s patent-pending SQL-MapReduce to parallelize processing of data and applications and deliver rich analytic insights at scale. Companies including Barnes & Noble, Intuit, LinkedIn, Akamai, and MySpace use Aster Data to deliver applications such as digital marketing optimization, social network and relationship analysis, and fraud detection and prevention.


About Teradata
Teradata is the world’s leader in data warehousing and integrated marketing management through itsdatabase software, data warehouse appliances, and enterprise analytics. For more information, visitteradata.com.

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Teradata is a trademark or registered trademark of Teradata Corporation in the United States and other countries.

TeraData buys AsterData for 260+ million $

Balance sheet venetian method
Image via Wikipedia

This just in! Big party in San Carlos this weekend.

Teradata is acquiring Aster Data‘s business, including its intellectual property and technology product line, through a merger transaction. Teradata plans to support Aster Data’s customers and integrate its employees immediately upon completion of the acquisition, which is expected to occur in the second quarter of 2011. Teradata acquired an 11 percent ownership interest in Aster Data in September 2010, and has agreed to pay an additional $263 million for the remaining ownership interest, net of debt and other expenses. In addition, through this acquisition, Teradata will obtain approximately $21 million of cash which Aster Data is expected to have on its balance sheet at closing.

http://www.asterdata.com/news/110303-Teradata-to-Acquire-Aster-Data.php

 

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AsterData partners with Tableau

This chart represents several constituent comp...
Image via Wikipedia

Tableau which has been making waves recntly with its great new data visualization tool announced a partner with my old friends at AsterData. Its really cool piece of data vis and very very fast on the desktop- so I can imagine what speed it can help with AsterData’s MPP Row and Column Zingbang AND Parallel Analytical Functions

Tableau and AsterData also share the common Stanfordian connection (but it seems software is divided quite equally between Stanford, Hardvard Dropouts and North Carolina )

It remains to be seen in this announcement how much each company  can leverage the partnership or whether it turns like the SAS Institute- AsterData partnership last year or whether it is just to announce connectors in their software to talk to each other.

See a Tableau vis at

http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/geographyofdiabetes/Dashboard2?:embed=yes&:toolbar=yes

AsterData remains the guys with the potential but I would be wrong to say MapReduce–SQL is as hot in December 2010 as it was in June 2009- and the elephant in the room would be Hadoop. That and Google’s continued shyness from encashing its principal comptency of handling Big Data (but hush – I signed a NDA with the Google Prediction API– so things maaaay change very rapidly on ahem that cloud)

Disclaimer- AsterData was my internship sponsor during my winter training while at Univ of  Tenn.

 

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Interesting Interview with Quentin G,AsterData

Here is an interesting interview with Quentin G, CEO AsterData, Marketing trumpeting aside apart-the insights on the whats next vision thing are quite good.

Sourcehttp://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/aster-data.html

As you look down the road, what are the three major challenges you see for vendors who keep trying to solve big data and other “now” problems with old tools?

Old tools and traditional architectures cannot scale effectively to handle massive data volumes that reach 100’s of terabytes nor can they effectively process large data volumes in a high performance manner. Further, they are restricted to what SQL querying allows. The three challenges I have noted are:

First, performance, specifically, poor performance on large data volumes and heavy workloads: The pre-existing systems rely on storing data in a traditional DBMS or data warehouse and then extracting a sample of data to a separate processing tier. This greatly restricts data insights and analytics as only a sample of data is analyzed and understood.  As more data is stored in these systems they suffer from performance degradation as more users try to access the system concurrently. Additionally moving masses of data out of the traditional DBMS to a separate processing tier adds latency and slows down analytics and response times. This pre-existing architecture greatly limits performance especially as data sizes grow.

Second, limited analytics: Pre-existing systems rely mostly on SQL for data querying and analysis. SQL poses several limitations and is not suited for ad hoc querying, deep data exploration and a range of other analytics. MapReduce overcomes the limitations of SQL and SQL-MapReduce in particular opens up a new class of analytics that cannot be achieved with SQL alone.

And, third, limitations of types of data that can be stored and analyzed: Traditional systems are not designed for non-relational or unstructured data. New solutions such as Aster Data’s are designed from the ground up to handle both relational and non-relational data. Organizations want to store and process a range of data types and do this in a single platform. New solutions allow for different data types to be handled in a single platform whereas pre-existing architectures and solutions are specialized around a single data type or format – this restricts the diversity of analytics that can be performed on these systems.

Read the whole interview at –http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/aster-data.html

Speaking of which- there is a new webinar by Merv Adrian (interview on Decisionstats) and Colin White-

 

http://now.eloqua.com/es.asp?s=1015&e=1862&elq=9ec9b73872e849b88d2943cca920acda

and from the famous AOL website- a profile of AsterData’s money flow which kind of hints at an IPO two years onwards-

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/aster-data-systems

Cloudera and Aster Data partner up

Basically making it easier for data to move between the two systems Hadoop (Cloudera) and Aster’s Analytics (MapReduce/SQL)-

From the press release-http://goo.gl/vgsr

today announced an agreement that unites Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop (CDH) with Aster Data nCluster. The integration enables customers to leverage MPP platforms for large-scale data processing, management and analytics across structured and unstructured formats to analyze massive amounts of data for deeper business insight.

Cloudera is building a massively parallel, two-way connector for high-speed movement of data between CDH and Aster Data nCluster. The connector will be supported as part of Cloudera Enterprise.

Interview Tasso Argyros CTO Aster Data Systems

Here is an interview with Tasso Argyros,the CTO and co-founder of Aster Data Systems (www.asterdata.com ) .Aster Data Systems is one of the first DBMS to tightly integrate SQL with MapReduce.

tassos_argyros

Ajay- Maths and Science students the world over are facing a major decline. What would you recommend to young students to get careers in science.

[TA] –My father is a professor of Mathematics and I spent a lot of my college time studying advanced math. What I would say to new students is that Math is not a way to get  a job, it’s a way to learn how to think. As such, a Math education can lead to success in any discipline that requires intellectual abilities. As long as they take the time to specialize at some point – via  postgraduate education or a job where they can learn a new discipline from smart people – they won’t regret the investment.

Ajay- Describe your career in Science particularly your time at Stanford. What made you think of starting up Asterdata. How important is it for a team rather than an individual to begin startups. Could you describe the startup moment when your team came together.

[TA] – While at Stanford I became very familiar with the world of startups through my advisor, David Cheriton (who was an angel investor in VMWare, Google and founder of two successful companies). My research was about processing large amounts of data on large, low-cost computer farms. A year into my research it became obvious that this approach had huge processingpower advantages and it was superior to anything else I could see in the marketplace. I then happened to meet my other two co-founders, Mayank Bawa & George Candea who were looking at a similar technical problem from the database and reliability perspective, respectively.

I distinctly remember George walking into my office one day (I barely knew him back then) and saying “I want talk to you about startups and the future” – the rest has become history.

Ajay- How would you describe your product Aster nCluster Cloud Edition to omebody who does not anything beyond the Traditional Server/ Datawarehouse technologies. Could you rate it against some known vendors and give a price point specific to what level of usage does the Total Cost of Ownership in Asterdata becomes cheaper than a say Oracle or a SAP or a Microsoft Datawarehosuing solution.

[TA]- Aster allows businesses  to reduce the data analytics TCO in two interesting ways. First, it has a much lower hardware cost than any traditional DW technology because of its use of commodity servers or cloud infrastructure like Amazon EC2. Secondly, Aster has implemented a lot of  innovations that simplify the (previously tedious and expensive) management of the system, which includes scaling the system elastically up/down as needed – so they are not paying for capacity they don’t need at a given point in time.

But cutting costs is one side of the equation; what makes me even more excited is the ability to make a business more profitable, competitive and efficient through analyzing more data at greaterdepth. We have customers that have cut their costs and increased their customers and revenue by using Aster to analyze their valuable (and usually underutilized) data. If you have data – and you think you’re not taking full advantage of it – Aster can help.

Ajay- I have always have this one favourite question.When can I analyze 100 giga bytes of data using just a browser and some statistical software like R or advanced forecasting softwares that are available.Describe some of Asterdata ‘s work in enhancing the analytical capabilities of big data.

Can I run R ( free -open source) on an on demand basis for an Asterdata solution. How much would it cost me to crunch 100 gb of data and make segmentations and models with say 50 hours of processing time per month

[TA]- One of the big innovations that Aster does it to allow analytical applications like R to be embedded in the database via our SQL/MapReduce framework. We actually have customers right now that are using R to do advanced analytics over terabytes of data.  100GB is actually on the lower end of what our software can enable and as such the cost would not be significant.

Ajay- What do people at Asterdata do when not making complex software.

[TA]- A lot of Asterites love to travel around the world – we are, after all, a very diverse company. We also love coffee, Indian food as well as international and US sports like soccer, cricket, cycling,and football!

Ajay- Name some competing products to Asterdata and where Asterdata products are more suitable for a TCO viewpoint. Name specific areas where you would not recommend your own products.

[TA]- We go against products like Orace database, Teradata and IBM DB2. If you need to do analytics over 100s of GBs or terabytes of data, our price/performance ratio would be orders of magnitude better.

Ajay- How do you convince named and experienced VC’s Sequia Capital to invest in a start-up ( eg I could do with some server costs coming financing)

[TA]- You need to convince Sequoia of three things. (a) that the market you’re going after is very large (in the billions of dollars, if you’re successful). (b) that your team is the best set of people that could ever come together to solve the particular problem you’re trying to solve. And (c) that the technology you’ve developed gives you an “unfair advantage” over incumbents or new market entrants.  Most importantly, you have to smile a lot! J

Biography

About Tasso:

Tasso (Tassos) Argyros is the CTO and co-founder of Aster Data Systems, where he is responsible for all product and engineering operations of the company. Tasso was recently recognized as one ofBusinessWeek’s Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs for 2009 and was an SAP fellow at the Stanford Computer Science department. Prior to Aster, Tasso was pursuing a Ph.D. in the Stanford Distributed Systems Group with a focus on designing cluster architectures for fast, parallel data processing using large farms of commodity servers. He holds an MsC in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Diploma in Computer and Electrical Engineering from Technical University of Athens.

About Aster:

Aster Data Systems is a proven leader in high-performance database systems for data warehousing and analytics – the first DBMS to tightly integrate SQL with MapReduce – providing deep insights on data analyzed on clusters of low-cost commodity hardware.

The Aster nCluster database cost-effectively powers frontline analytic applications for companies such as MySpace, aCerno (an Akamai company), and ShareThis. Running on low-cost off-the-shelf hardware, and providing ‘hands-free’ administration, Aster enables enterprises to meet their data warehousing needs within their budget.

Aster is headquartered in San Carlos, California and is backed by Sequoia Capital, JAFCO Ventures, IVP, Cambrian Ventures, and First-Round Capital, as well as industry visionaries including David Cheriton, Rajeev Motwani and Ron Conway.

Aster_logo_3.0_red

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