One of the bedrock notions we have lived with since the mid-1990’s has been the concept of “data explosion” in the enterprise. The widely-propagated theme is that enterprise data is roughly “doubling annually”. But if the recent Unisphere Research survey among information management professionals subscribing to our publication “Database Trends and Applications” is accurate, not only are we well past the era of “exponential data growth” but apparently, we are now past the era of “data doubling annually” as well. In fact, in our study, completed in December and named “Today’s Top Data Management Challenges”, we found that two-thirds of DBTA readers reported data increasing from 0-24% in their organizations last year, with 60% forecasting that level of growth this year.

This doesn’t imply that organizations aren’t dealing with the proverbial “fire hoses of data” because data has been growing rapidly over the past ten years. And there certainly are high growth organizations as well as merged organizations that are dealing with a new flood of information.  But a slower economy and other factors seem to have put us on the down side of the curve when it comes to data growth….and that is new information that has come to light.

The study was sponsored by GoldenGate Software and conducted for us by my former business partner and friend, Dr. Elliot King. Let me know if you would like a copy of the Executive Summary.

Beyond the public positioning about the importance of Java, there is an interesting open source angle to the purchase of Sun by Oracle, particularly from the database perspective. Several years back, through a market study of IOUG members, Unisphere was able to document and quantify the adoption and experimentation with MySQL among Oracle customers – over one-third had installed MySQL, the open source database, somewhere in their organization. Within three months of the release of that study in mid-2006, Oracle announced the bundling of Red Hat with database shipments, as well as a service offer. At the time, that looked like a smart tactical move by offering a less pricy alternative to Oracle-on-Solaris.  During the same general timeframe, both Oracle and Microsoft released their free “Express” editions of their databases – a move that substantially darkened MySQL’s prospects for broader enterprise acceptance.

In mid-2007, we revisited the same topic via IOUG through the study “Open Source in the Enterprise”. This time the study was actually sponsored by MySQL. From where we sit, the most compelling statistic to come out of that study was the virtual standstill in new installations of MySQL over the previous year. The rapidity of the MySQL ramp-up in market penetration through 2006 was reminiscent of the Windows NT eviction of Netware from the enterprise networking OS market. It was a wildfire. Of course, nobody was evicting commercial databases, but the implications were serious. By mid-2007, though, it had come to a virtual standstill. Shortly after the release of the study, MySQL was acquired by Sun, and the news was that Sun would provide the kind of enterprise support and service for open source software the market was demanding – and which was identified in the IOUG “Open Source in the Enterprise” study sponsored by MySQL, oddly enough. But from here, the purchase of MySQL by Sun (reportedly at $1 billion) looked to be about a year-and-a-half late.

Now Oracle is acquiring Sun. From my perspective, the open source angle is compelling and largely under the radar, other than to MySQL users. This acquisition only increases our already-healthy respect for Oracle’s management of the open source phenomenon. Personally, I cannot recall a defter, more subtle or more committed blunting of a potentially disruptive technology over the past ten years by an enterprise software vendor. Is MySQL soon to become nothing more than an Oracle “loss-leader”? Or does Oracle have something more interesting in mind?

Perhaps someone more academically-inclined will author the chapter on this series of maneuvers by Oracle in dealing with the challenge of open source software, because it’s a masterful, anticipatory and creative strategy that deserves to be recognized – and with the evolution of open source applications, its an approach that may be directional for each of the “MISO” vendors in the not-too-distant future.

At this week’s Supercomputing 2008 conference, Microsoft Corp. announced that it had debuted in the top 10 of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The mega-installation is at Shanghai Supercomputer Center and Dawning Information Industry Co. Ltd., which ranked at No. 10 with 180.6 teraflops, the parallel computing speed, and 77.5 percent efficiency.

Microsoft points out that this is “a truly incredible achievement considering that 12 months ago in Reno, Nevada, Microsoft was at 116 on the Top500 list at Top500.org. This is on the heels of Windows HPC Server 2008 releasing to the manufacturing industry in September.”

Microsoft said it is bringing supercomputing to the masses. “Windows HPC Server 2008 makes supercomputing more accessible to end users by allowing them to harness computing power through a familiar Windows desktop environment,” the vendor said.

Microsoft also said it is offering kits on how to achieving supercomputing capacity on its Windows platform.

Microsoft and Cray Inc. — the grandfather of supercomputer vendors — teamed up in September with an announcement to drive high-productivity computing further into the mainstream with the Cray CX1 supercomputer.

Microsoft also said it is delivering developer tools for Windows-based supercomputing, including Task Parallel Library, Parallel LINQ and Coordination Data Structures for managed code to ease the transition to parallel code. These technologies, along with MPI, MPI.Net and Cluster-SOA, extend parallelism to clusters of thousands of nodes using Windows HPC Server 2008.