At a recent Boulder BI Brain Trust, Aster Data Systems discussed their company and products. A BBBT blog summarized our open discussion. One item (under NDA) was about the Aster nCluster-Cloud Edition offering available through both Amazon Web Services and AppNexus. The announcement and blog by Shawn Kung was released this morning.

So what? I feel that this is important because nCluster is available as a virtualized on-demand service. Without buying, installing, staffing and maintaining a data center, you can utilize cutting-edge database technology for sophisticated data analytics. If your BI group is the DIY kind, you can push the cutting edge even further. I hope that Aster will be innovative in marketing their offer through low-cost trial programs to introduce in-Database MapReduce (MR) technology to IT professionals.

An equally important item is buried on the second page. Aster also announced nPath, which is an SQL/MR extension that enables discovery of relationships between rows in a data set. For you SQL folks out there, remember writing SQL statements to compare one row with another, using UNIONs or subqueries or other ugly stuff. Now think of the SQL for time-series analysis. Now think of doing that in a (relatively) simple SQL statement that is efficient and scalable. I am studying this blog by Steve Wooledge for the technical details.

As a side note, Curt Monash has been tracking the MR influence for some time. I commend his DBMS2 blog, especially this posting on why MR matters to data warehousing. 

As a second side note, I discovered an interesting MapReduce counter-argument. Michael Stonebraker argued with Curt Monash that standard SQL-92 with User-Defined Functions (UDF) can do everything claimed by MR and hence MR is not needed. Does the MapReduce emperor wear any clothes?  Tasso Argyros, CTO and Founder of Aster, blogged in August about how MR takes UDFs to the next level. To say that there is controversy in our fair database community over MR is an understatement, and it started over a year ago. I recommend that BI/DW folks take note and understand the issues.