Open source databases come with the advantage of being free, available for understanding, modification, and improvement as per needs.
There are three ways of using an open source database - do-it-yourself, thirdparty, and outsourcing. The choice of an open source database depends on factors, such as the intended usage, duration of use, and the cost involved as the main factor. Often the best comparison is obtained by first-hand evaluation.
Players: The top three vendors in the database market are: Oracle, IBM (DB2 and Informix), & Microsoft (SQL Server). In the open source market, there are six important
players (on the basis of acceptance in the software community
at large):
1. MySQL - GNU (General Public License) as well as commercial
2. PostgreSQL - BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution)
license
3. Firebird - Initial Developer's Public License (IDPL)
4. Ingres - GNU General Public Licensev2
5. MaxDB (earlier known as SAP DB, it is being developed in alliance with MySQL especially for SAP environments) - GPL
6. HSQLDB - BSD license
Popularity
The popularity of an open source database seems like a trivial concern to the technical community, but the fact stands tall that a product’s success is based on other reasons in addition to the technical features. Some of these are:
a) Support available from community as well as tool vendors
b) Momentum of the product being released in and open source arena
These are the two most important business concerns for choosing an open source product. The former ensures integrity with various other technologies and the latter ensures that open source is not going to die or fade out easily.
The six open source databases that we selected fare differently on the popularity aspect.
• MySQL - most popular open source database boasting more than 8 million active installations. Starting since 95 (internally), the MySQL community is the largest and has frequent releases; version 4.1 came out in Apr-03, current version 5.0 in Aug-04, and the much-talked and awaited future release version 5.1 is out as beta since Nov-05.
• PostgreSQL - has hundreds of companies listed as Users. The community is as old as Aug-96. It is much-adored among technical jig wigs for its huge support of features.
EnterpriseDB is a product built over it. Last few releases have been version 7.4 in Nov-03, current version 8.0 in Jan-05, and the new release 8.1 in Nov-05.
• Firebird - about 0.1 million deployments as of Sep-05. This is a very old community since Sep-84 and has a huge fan following for the number of good and bad times it has been through. The versions out are version 1.0 in Mar-02, current v1.5 in Feb-04 and 2.0 alpha is out there.
• Ingres - about 5000 existing customers. After changing many hands, the product has been made available to open source since ‘04, though it has been in existence along with
PostgreSQL. The current release - r3 is out since Aug-04 and r4 is much-awaited for its support to materialized views.
• MaxDB - about 6000 customer installations. This has been specific to Mobile application development earlier known as SAPDB. Started since Oct-00. It was available in version 7.6 in Nov-05
• HSQLDB - 0.3 million downloads. The project is finding hard to get contributions and is slower than others. It is the youngest in the group, formed since 01. It released 6 versions since Apr-01. Platform Support also speaks about the popularity and acceptance. Regarding the OS, we have major players as Linux, UNIX, Apple, and Windows. Besides, we also have Novell with Netware and BSD.
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Venture specialist Dave Beisel first coined the term “social commerce” to refer to the integration of e‐commerce with social networking. According to PR executive and blogger Steve Rubel, “Social commerce can take several forms, but in sum it means creating places where people can collaborate online, get advice from trusted individuals, find goods and Ideation services and then purchase them. It shrinks the research and purchasing cycle by creating a single destination powered by the power of many.”
Wikipedia describes social commerce (also known as social shopping) as a subset of e‐commerce solution in which the active participation of customers and their personal relationships are at the forefront. The main element of this new trend is customers’ involvement in the marketing of products being sold, e.g. their recommendations and comments through blogs and shopping lists. This phenomenon enables customers to interact with one another in order to make better buying decisions by capturing and structuring “word‐of‐mouth” around product recommendations and reviews.
THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL COMMERCE ON ECOMMERCE
Social Networking sites are a key target for online advertising, as SNS users say peers and colleagues hold more influence over their purchases than any other source of information. Furthermore, Compete, Inc. reports that SNS users spend nearly 25% of their disposable income on online purchases. The recent boom in online advertising has also provided social networking sites a way to convert website traffic into dollars without charging members a subscription fee. The advent of Google's AdWords advertising program has been an especial boon, as it allows sites to place keyword based ads alongside content like users profiles. “Networking sites provide some of the most powerful word‐of‐mouth‐marketing opportunities there have ever been,” says Nancy Costopulos, Chief Marketing Officer at the American Marketing Association. “It's past the fad zone and into the reality zone.”
Another survey by AMA found that 47% of consumers said they would use social networks to discuss and find holiday gift ideas; 29% would buy products through those sites; 51% would look for discounts on social networks; 51% would download coupons; and 18% would read or write product reviews.
According to online marketing firm The ClickZ Network, “‘Brand Advocates’ spread opinions via word of mouth, as well as over social networks, instant messaging, chat, photo sites and blogging. Such advocates have at least a two‐to‐one rate of converting an actual friend or family member to buy the same exact product or brand they support, according to the report.” E‐Consultancy’s Social Commerce Report 2007 found that 67% of online retailers say that a social networking strategy is a medium‐to‐high priority for investment.
A recent study commissioned by social networking giant MySpace reported that business‐to‐consumer messaging could create considerable value when combined with consumer‐to‐consumer messaging. Following up on this study, MySpace recently introduced a hyper targeting program that allows advertisers to pick "enthusiast" audiences from ten categories of interests: music, movies, personal finance, gaming, consumer electronics, sports, travel, auto, fashion and fitness. Similarly, Facebook allows “endorsements” on its site and encourages members to subscribe to brands. Forrester Research observes, “As these ‘Fan‐Sumers’ share their affinities, brands can advertise using trusted social relationships.”
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Outsourced Product Development Myths and Realities
Outsourcing software development has been in place for some time now, with companies having overcome the initial hiatus to embrace this new trend. Both small startups and fortune 500 companies have saved millions of dollars outsourcing their software needs offshore to locations like India, China and Russia and acquired a definitive edge over their competitors who chose to go without software or ramp up an information technology team in house. Whereas traditional software outsourcing has been by brick and mortar companies whose core competency was not in writing software, a new wave has recently arrived where even the Mobile application development companies are now looking out for coalitions or partners who can manage their product development offshore. This is in stark contrast to the normal principle of outsourcing where companies used to outsource tasks which were not a part of their core competency. One must say competitive globalization has arrived.
Choosing an offshore product development partner
Myth: When it comes to choosing a development partner, there is no difference between a one-off software development company and a company focused on Software Product Engineering Services
Reality: You couldn't have been farther from the truth. There is a world of difference between one-off software development and creating a software product. One-off software development is more of a 'Get it working somehow approach' while companies focused on software product engineering live by making strongly architected, portable, maintainable, secure, adaptable, highly configurable and installable software. For more details on the difference between traditional outsourcing and outsourced product engineering,
Project Management Ownership
Myth: Keeping project management onsite with just retaining the team with the outsourcing partner would lower the risk by reducing the number of unknowns.
Reality: Managing the project from onsite is a tricky affair. 70% of the projects can be run successfully by just keeping tab of the deadlines and the deliverables. For another 30%, specially, the pressure cooker ones, it is important to have a pulse of the team and to keep them motivated. This is difficult to achieve when the manager sits at a different location than the team. Moreover, if the manager is co-located with the team, he/she can resolve project/people issues better and keep a closer watch at the quality and the deadlines.
Protection of Intellectual Property
Myth: Our IP would be stolen if we outsource
Reality: Since product engineering is all the Saas application development vendors do for a living, they realize the importance of the partner's intellectual property and use legal and technological measures to ensure the same. Hence they take extreme steps to ensure that the most of the cases, these vendors have separate seating areas and sub nets to ensure safety of the partner's IP. All magnetic media taken in and out of the premises is accounted and the entire premises are under biometric access control. Employees of these vendors sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA) with the partner and confidentially agreements with their employers.
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The processes that enables companies to move data from multiple and disparate sources, reformat and cleanse it, and then load it into either another database, a data mart / data warehouse for analysis, or another operational system to support a business process. This process involves:
Extracting data from outside sources or source operational / archive systems that are the primary source of data for the data warehouse
Transforming the data to fit business needs, which may involve data migration, data cleaning, filtering, validating, reformatting, standardization, aggregation or applying business rules
Loading the data into the end target (i.e., a data warehouse or any other database or application that houses data)
Trends in ETL
Evolving towards generic data integration tools: Not withstanding the fact that ETL tools are specifically aimed at the business intelligence market, they have evolved rapidly over the last few years. According to Gartner, “The stand-alone data integration technology markets — such as extraction, transformation and loading (ETL), replication and federation, and enterprise information integration — will rapidly implode into a single market for multi-mode, multipurpose data integration platforms.” Indeed, if one looks at the top vendors in the market, it is clear that this is happening or has happened already. Informatics has added a real-time module to its distributed software development allowing Informatics to brand Power Center as an EAI tool. IBM has added Data Stage, acquired from Ascential, under the WebSphere family. Oracle has also greatly improved its Warehouse Builder in the 11g version.
Data quality: Another obvious trend in ETL (and data integration in general) is the linkage with data quality tools (both cleansing and profiling). The awareness of the impact of bad quality data on both decision making and operations has risen enormously during the last years. Therefore, most ETL vendors have incorporated data profiling functionality into their tools (thus allowing developers to assess data quality before they develop data transformations), as well as integration with Medical device software development (thus allowing developers to build complex cleansing and standardization features in the transformation process). The above becomes clear when one analyzes the investments or acquisitions that ETL vendors have made over the last years.
Lower latency requirement: In the early stages of their data integration maturity and infrastructure, organizations tend to focus on batch-oriented, high-latency activities, such as nightly population of data warehouses and data extracts for interfacing between developing mobile applications. However, as business pressures require rapid response and reduced cycle times, the demand for lower-latency data integration builds. Although ETL vendors are having a hard time offering true real-time, many offer near real-time functionality.
Market consolidation: Also important to mark is that independent ETL vendors are disappearing. Informatica Power-Center still remains as an independent market leader, but other companies are offering ETL tools as part of a wider gamma of BI tools or as part of the database offering. Indeed, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM all have an ETL offering, with the first two vendors even offering the ETL engine ‘free of charge’ with the database.
Phase out home-built, phase in open source: Quite a few companies have invested during the 80s and the 90s in self-built ETL tools. Mostly these were simple, sometimes metadata-based SQL generators that executed scheduled SQL scripts against the database. In recent years, these tools have been disappearing, first making way for the commercial ETL tools and more recently for the open source ETL market, which has seen quite a few successes with Pentaho Data Integration (previously kettle), Talend and others.
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