Dear TTF:
The key to understand the scalability of this proposition is to understand that BILLION transactions WILL NOT RUN through MSTR software. This is where ROLAP(Relational OLAP) architecture differs from MOLAP, DOLAP and so forth. All the hard crunching of numbers would be done in the Database itself. The MSTR SQL engine would create a simple or complex SQL query, which can define the fraudulent criteria. This will be then sent to a VLDB (think Teradata or Oracle etc), which would do the number crunching, and come out with the fraudulent transactions result set. This would then be sent back to MSTR server software, and then presented in the front end piece.
MSTR very smartly does not get into the business of building database engines. There are so many more well qualified Doctorates of Computer science graduates working at IBM, NCR(Teradata), Oracle who are exercising their brain cells to create scalability for such SQL queries. All MSTR does is to leverage this powerful database ability.
The Value propositoin of MSTR products is in a different realm. You could call it Database Applications, or E-Commerce Applications,etc. But it is not in database kernels.
On what platform the Databases want to run is up to client and the database vendor. This would be more between the Database vendor(Oracle, Teradata) and their benchmarks for various Operating systems.
It is just like the airline business. Boeing and Airbus just build airframes. They are NOT in the business of building the aircraft engines. The customers choose whether the engine will be a GE, or a Pratt & Whitney. Similarly, MSTR is in the business of presenting an "AIRFRAME" for the resultant datasets that are created by the "DATABASE ENGINES".
For more details on the customer successes, just check out microstrategy.com. It would be self-explanatory.
On the last expressed concern(Much of this BI bullshit is just marketing jargon created to sell superfluous products like MSTRs when the basic componentry is already owned by the customer.), the value of applications have been proven over and over again in the field. Just refer to the above mentioned url.
Thanks
sadsack. |
