In today’s competitive and highly dynamic environment, analyzing data to understand how the business is performing, to predict outcomes and trends, and to improve the effectiveness of business processes underlying business operations has become critical. The traditional approach to reporting is not longer adequate, users now demand easy-to-use intelligent platforms and applications capable of analyzing real-time business data to provide insight and actionable information at the right time. The end goal is to improve the enterprise performance by better and timelier decision making, enabled by the availability of up-to-date, high quality information.

There are relatively few applications that wouldn’t run perfectly well on PostgreSQL or EnterpriseDB today. (…)

What’s more, these mid-range database management systems can have significant advantages over their high-end brethren. The biggest is often price, for licenses and maintenance alike. Beyond that, they can be much easier to administer then their more complex counterparts. (…)

And what these mid-range DBMS don’t do today, they likely will do soon. (…)

EnterpriseDB is equal or superior in every way I can think of to Oracle7, a few security certifications perhaps excepted.

If you work for an organization that has expensive contracts with Oracle or Microsoft for their DBMS, it is most certainly in vain.

Meanwhile, the world of open source Business Intelligence is getting more interesting every day. We now have Pentaho Mondrian, Jedox, Birt, Enhydra Octopus, and so on. In 2005, I asked whether open source was ready for Business Intelligence. The question seems less controversial in 2008, doesn’t it?

Most of the database industry has been commoditized. If you stick around with these old schemas, you lose.

I have written about Jim quite a bit here: Jim Gray missing at sea, What is infinite storage? , Science in an exponential world, That’s why I tinker, A “Measure of Transaction Processing” 20 Years Later, ACM Queue - A Conversation with Tim Bray, and so on.

Of all database researchers, Jim is the one who has had the biggest impact on my research and my teaching. Indeed, the cool thing about Jim is that he did not work on abstract nonsense. You can actually take his papers, and give the gist of them to your students, and you will have helped your students a lot.

It seems that Business Intelligence (BI) is now quite mature and very integrated in the technology of large vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle).

Will there be a second wave of BI technology carried by new start-ups? I think so. And I think it will have something to do with infinite storage.

See my other posts Oracle buys Hyperion and Mondrian to partner up with Pentaho for Open Source Business Intelligence.