Infobright
Date:
By: Philip Howard
Classification: InDetail
Infobright is an open source vendor focused
specifically on the market for analytic data
warehousing. As such it offers a Community
Edition that you can download for no charge
as well as a licensable Enterprise Edition that
has some additional features. While it can be
deployed in any environment it is most likely
to be of interest to users with existing MySQL
skills as, although Infobright actually has a
unique internal architecture (using a columnar
approach combined with some innovative
additional features), it has been designed to
look like MySQL from the outside. However,
we need to make it clear that this is not just
for people who have been trying to run a data
warehouse on a MySQL platform. MySQL runs
out of steam at a few hundred gigabytes as a
data warehouse and that would barely stretch
Infobright, though it would still be a good option.
No, more generally, Infobright will be
suitable for companies with much larger warehouses,
running into tens of terabytes of raw
data who have some MySQL experience, not
necessarily for warehousing purposes. Nowadays
there are not many companies that this
does not apply to.
While Infobright addresses the need for data warehousing amongst the
MySQL community it is not limited to this market. This is because Infobright
is highly scalable, much more so than the average MySQL user
will need (but which should be reassuring). Thus Infobright represents a
potential solution for any company that needs a simple to use, low-cost
analytic solution regardless of the existing processing environment.