Releases come thick and fast during TDWI. One of the more interesting announcements this week is Aster Data nCluster version 4.5.

Aster Data's mission is to support what it calls big data analytics. It initially addressed this need through support for MapReduce combined with SQL (SQL-MR) and by enabling analytics be fully embedded with the MPP database. In this release the company has introduced an Eclipse-based visual development environment to make development of relevant functions and applications easier, and the IDE makes application push-down a single click function..

Analytics are actually embedded in-database by means of a hybrid environment (introduced in version 4.0) in which, in effect, the company embedded an application server within the data warehouse. In other words all MapReduce functions are executed in this space, which is co-located with the database within the Aster platform and which makes use of shared memory. So you dont get the performance and accuracy overheads associated with traditional environments.

Now, with this release, the company is focusing even further on in-database analytics. In particular, 4.5 includes the Aster Data Analytics Foundation, which provides common functions out of the box. These include time series and pattern analysis functions, (web) sessionisation, core statistics such as standard deviations and moving averages, and market basket analysis.

Finally, the third major element in this release is the introduction of a new (expanded), very granular, management console for administrators. You really need to see this to appreciate it but there is a new query and processing management view, a query timeline graph, a physical and virtual node and partition map, a node overview diagram with detailed drill-down, amongst other new features.

There is no doubt that Aster Data has done well since it entered the market, exhibiting substantial growth in 2009. However, its main claim to fame is its advanced support for MapReduce. As more and more companies add MapReduce capability to their offerings, how will this advantage stand up? There are two main aspects to this: cohabitation with SQL and the in-warehouse MapReduce application server (or equivalent). As far as we know there is no other company that offers both of these capabilities. And, while other companies support both SQL and MapReduce most of them don't have these integrated, and then there is the visual development environment introduced with this release, not to mention the pre-built analytics.

Put all these things together and I think Aster Data remains ahead of its competition in its core market. Of course, there is the question of what that core market is. In other words, where is it that you really need MapReduce? This is more than a short article can answer but two examples would be calculations of moving averages for stock price analysis in capital markets and deep graph analysis in retail or telecommunications where you want to identify influencers. Both of these are difficult to program in SQL and while some vendors are taking the route of extending SQL with specific functions these will always be one-off solutions rather than generic ones. Thus the bottom line is that Aster Data is ahead of the market, in its chosen market, and looks likely to remain in that position for some time to come.