LucidDB (aka “the best database for BI you don’t know about”) has a commercial version on the way at last. Nick Goodman, a longtime user active in the Eigenbase and other related open source communities, has stepped in. Nick has a consulting practice that builds BI implementations (many using Lucid and Pentaho), and he’s now spun out a firm called Dynamo Business Intelligence to issue and support a product to be called DynamoDB. He often found his BI clients asking what to use for a database – the default was MySQL, but he loves Lucid’s features and performance, and so it seemed like time. Nick’s blog can be found here.
It’s early days. “We’re still figuring a lot of the go to market,” Nick told me today. He’s the full-time principal – and funder. But he starts with a strong base:
We have something that’s already largely complete. We will continue in a 100% open source model, and with Julian Hyde and John Sichi (his comments here) in related projects like Eigenbase.”
Nick envisions a typical annual subscription model, based on offering support, QA and regular new builds. He doesn’t expect to add ”inside sales”; he’s hoping for a largely self-service process. His site should be ready in a few weeks, but meanwhile “hopefully the people who download soon will know how to slurp out data from MySQL or Oracle, etc. and use the product.” As he gets it ready for market as DynamoDB, his team is working on surrounding the Lucid product with more friendly features including a UI-based admin capability for things like backup – command line is great for some, but hardly a general purpose feature. He highlights key product capabilities including the column store, bit map indexes, and java-based plug-ins as particularly suitable for the projects he’s been involved in. Users of BI tools – open and closed – will find the transparent remote JDBC data access to have value as well, of course.
There’s more detail in the blogs I’ve provided links to; read them. You might also want to check out the estimable Matthew Aslett of the 451 group, who does the story justice along with another interesting development about Calpont. I’ll be watching this story; Lucid DynamoDB deserves to be mentioned anytime MySQL is when BI is on the table, and hopefully it will be very soon.
