SAND has announced the upcoming release of the new version of our flagship product, SAND CDBMS V6, coming on September 2, 2010. SAND CDBMS V6 defines the next generation of column-oriented database management systems with its delivery of Agile Cloud scalability, giving users the ability to scale both on public Interclouds and private Intracloud architectures. A number of companies are already using SAND CDBMS to drive unprecedented scalability for analytic operational applications in both types of cloud.

Meanwhile, some of our competitors are waxing lyrical about how smart their first-generation technology has become, now that they have discovered and developed… wait for it… MPP. SAND architected MPP into our database from the outset — and our outset was 20 years ago, not barely 20 months.

Anyone can sit around smoking in their marketing departments with clouds billowing onto every PowerPoint deck, and without a doubt a number of our competitors massively do this and do it in parallel. It is an accepted fact that if you want to deliver an enterprise-class scalable solution in the cloud, it needs to be built using parallel technology. What makes the difference is how you use your scalability. The “cloud” is actually a very good analogy for some of our competitors, because what these vendors are selling looks light and fluffy from the outside, but inside turns out to be cold, wet and a long way from the ground.

What you need to navigate the cloud is robust, proven technology. Unlike other vendors in the market, we at SAND know what we are great at doing — providing analytic databases to support deep and wide analysis of Extreme Data. SAND is not trying to put Oracle out of business, nor is it trying to focus on developing OLTP databases. We are delighted dear Mike Stonebraker of Vertica agrees with us that the relational OLTP paradigm is completely unsuitable for analytic applications: using traditional technologies designed to support online transaction processing for analytics is like trying to build a car for the Indy 500 by stringing 700 1-hp lawnmowers together with duct tape.

Unlike Mr. Stonebraker, however, we don’t dream of building a better mousetrap for OLTP. Oracle does a great job of OLTP — they’ve kept Larry in designer suits and big yachts for years. At SAND we focus on the databases people use to make real-time operational business intelligence decisions. Some vendors have got good at duct-taping lawn mowers and putting them together in a big box (if people pay you enough you can buy good lawn mowers and the best quality duct tape). However, this doesn’t change the fact that you are still working with lawn mowers and duct tape.

At SAND, our goal is to deliver more information into the hands of users, as fast and as easily as possible, using existing hardware and driving unprecedented volumes of data. We have been doing this for over 20 years. In the past, unfortunately, we tried to be the ultimate stealth marketing company. We decided our technology was so good we didn’t need to tell anyone about it. We thought that customers would somehow find us through the database equivalent of osmotic viral marketing. While that is a great concept for the future, one I am sure we could get VC funding for (“osmovirus” – doesn’t that sound like it should be a Web 2.0 company?), we are in the present, and it’s time to tell people what our customers have known for years: that SAND simply has the most visionary development team, building the most scalable enterprise-class, mission-critical deep analytic databases on the market.

SAND’s Agile Cloud platform delivers seamless scalability, deep and wide across processors. We ensure that every available resource is fully used to deliver optimal performance to users. We deliver virtual database instances on the fly, with what we call “SAND boxes”: a user easily creates a SAND box, puts their data in it, uses it and moves on, then the SAND box is discarded and the computing resources are made available for the next user. Predictable linear scalability is the core benefit we set out to deliver with our software, and we have done precisely that.

Really good software should be predictable in using all the resources you want it to, when you want it — without the need for someone hanging around to hold the code together with duct tape and glue, or requiring a massive amount of dedicated hardware to be kept waiting for a user to ask the right question. We all know about software vendors who only manage to deliver performance benchmarks by stripping the data — oiling it down, and then massaging it to such an extent it looks like it was worked over by an East German physiotherapist shot-putter — and then sticking it on a box so big, the lights dim in Des Moines whenever they run a query. That’s not innovative — that’s 700 lawnmowers in a box.

SAND software works fast because it optimizes all aspects of disk, memory and CPU performance by seamlessly using every piece of computing power you want it to. That’s smart computing. It’s why I like software, and it’s why I joined SAND. Remember, if it isn’t smart computing it’s just plain dumb.

SAND V6 is smart, and it’s the future of business intelligence in the agile cloud.