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Curt Monash

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Microsoft is buying MPP data warehouse appliance vendor DATAllegro. This is big news on multiple levels.

By CurtMonash on Thu, 07/24/08 - 6:39pm.

Microsoft announced today that it is buying privately held data warehouse appliance vendor DATAllegro. This is big news, for a number of reasons.

The MPP-versus-shared-everything argument for data warehouse DBMS is over. MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) has won.
Oracle, the only remaining holdout on the shared-everything side, will have to capitulate soon, presumably via an acquisition of its own.
For the first time ever, Microsoft has leapfrogged Oracle at the very high end of database management.
Now that new technologies are unquestionably winning, data warehousing will become a lot cheaper, and new kinds of analytic endeavors will become affordable.
Among the new data warehouse technologies, row-based approaches are holding their own versus columnar, at least in Microsoft's eyes.
We're about to learn how good Microsoft server technologies are at scale-out.

Less significantly, Infiniband just got a shot in the arm, and Microsoft is at least temporarily in bed with Cisco.

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About A World of Bytes

Curt Monash is a leading analyst of and strategic advisor to the software industry. Praised by Lawrence J. Ellison for his "unmatched insight into technology and marketplace trends," Curt was the software/services industry's #1 ranked stock analyst while at PaineWebber, Inc., where he served as a First Vice President until 1987. He subsequently co-founded Evernet, Inc., a $40 million networking systems integrator. Since 1990, he has owned and operated Monash Research, an analysis and advisory firm covering software-intensive sectors of the technology industry. In that period he also has been co-founder, president, or chairman of several other technology startups.

Curt has served as a strategic advisor to many well-known firms, including Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, AOL, CA, and Netezza. Curt earned a Ph.D. in mathematics (Game Theory) from Harvard University. He has held faculty positions in mathematics, economics and public policy at Harvard, Yale, and Suffolk universities.