Mole Whackers Need not Apply

Two completely different events caught my attention lately. One of them is a post by Curt Monash called Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole, and the other is the much-publicized alliance for “BI in the Cloud” comprising RightScale, Talend, Jaspersoft and Vertica.

In the post, Curt describes software development (or developing a good software product) as “a process of incremental improvement”. Fair enough. The analogy he draws is between constantly fixing and improving performance bottlenecks and the annoying (if entertaining) arcade game of Whack-A-Mole where you have to be fast enough to clobber enough of the critters as they randomly pop up from below. He then makes the point that “Improving performance in, for example, a database management system has a lot in common with Whack-A-Mole.” Having spent most of my life designing, developing, improving and testing commercial and enterprise software applications, I have to say I don’t totally agree with his analogy for several reasons.

First, call me old-fashioned, but I’m an ardent believer in the fact that software building is deterministic. Whack-A-Mole engineering is not. The age-old controversy about software being more of an art than a science may never be resolved, but at the end of the day, I feel software is (should be) a scientific, engineering-driven, deterministic endeavor like any other engineering discipline. With Whack-A-Mole engineering, buildings and airplanes fall to the ground. That’s not good. In my experience, those who seek to “romanticize” software engineering are typically adverse to proper planning, design and testing as being too “dry” or unworthy an endeavor. That’s nonsense.

Second, there is a distinct difference in the way you develop “regular” software from “system software” and I’ve learned this from sitting in the front row the past several years at XSPRADA watching database software being built from the ground up. It’s a little bit like the difference between building a tree house and a major commercial skyscraper. And I believe that playing Whack-A-Mole games while trying to bring up a building is a scary proposition at best (especially for future tenants). And yet, the example Curt provides involves Oracle’s Exadata, of all products! He states: “When I spoke to Oracle’s development managers last fall, they didn’t really know how many development iterations would be needed to get the product truly unclogged” – This statement is mind-boggling to me.

Because for one thing, it suggests that Exadata is “clogged” (ouch) but worse, that their engineering people have no clue as to how they might eventually (if ever) snake the blockages out of it! So, basically it’s a trial and error approach to building a database. Notwithstanding their “professed optimism” that it wouldn’t take “many iterations at all” to finally figure things out, it certainly doesn’t give me (or any reasonable person) a warm feeling about a multi-million dollar product claiming to be the world's ultimate analytical machine.

I think there’s a lot to be said for sound engineering practices, proper planning and testing, setting expectations and deterministic engineering management practices in the world of system software. That Oracle (or Netezza for that matter, also referenced in the post) might just be going along whacking moles instead is a scary proposition indeed. Even if this little game is limited to “performance engineering” as Curt suggest (as if there was a more important endeavor in an ADBMS), that’s a serious allegation in my book. I say leave the arcade games to the kids, and let the real engineers design and implement database and system software please. There’s no room for amateurs in this game.

On to my next point of interest: the new Gang of Four in the Cloud (with apologies to design pattern aficionados) comprising RightScale, Talend, Vertica and Jaspersoft have recently promoted and demonstrated a “bundled” on-demand package for the cloud. I attended their webcast yesterday and was impressed, but with reservations.

Each of these vendors is impressive on its own, no doubt about it. But it seems to me the bundled proposition might be confusing at best to the unwary customer. This new offering is billed by the marketing folks as “Instant BI, just add water” which drives me nuts. Look, it might be simple in theory, and it might take a few minutes to setup the stack on your own (as Yves de Montcheuil from Talend claims) but it’s still a long way to actually accomplishing anything serious in a few simple clicks. Sorry, not going to happen anytime soon.

You still have to work your way through provisioning and instance management (RightScale), data integration and loading (Talend), feeding and configuring the database (Vertica), and setting up the reports/analytics you might need (Jaspersoft). All of which can be accomplished just as easily (or not) internally by the way. It’s true you’d still have to purchase or license Vertica internally, which may or may not match the SaaS pricing I’m not sure (and either way, Vertica has a SaaS offering as well) but the other components are open source so, I’m not sure I see the big advantage there.

An interesting thing I noticed as well is that some people didn’t seem to understand what RightScale’s role was in the whole offering. This tells me they don’t really grasp the intricacies of “the cloud” – because instance and infrastructure management for enterprise in the cloud is not trivial and you do need something like RightScale to grease the wheels (it’s an abstraction layer really), but I think many people assume moving to the cloud is “magic” and makes all these issues disappear. If that were the case, you wouldn’t need RightScale in the mix. Beware undermanaging expectations I'd say.

Additionally, the pricing model (which is supposed to be so much simpler in the cloud) is confusing at best as each vendor has its own menu. The best answer to that I can remember was “starting at $1,700 per month” – I’m not sure what to make of that. So I think from an engineering/technical standpoint, this endeavor is noble, but from a “let’s make things simpler and transparent for the user” perspective, there’s still a lot of work to be done. In other words, it's a nice play for the vendors holding hands, but I'm not sure how beneficial it might be to the average enterprise user.

As usual, caveat emptor – Beware promises of a holy grail in BI as there is no such thing. It’s all about work. Hard, detailed and careful work with proper planning and budgeting. In that respect, setting up successful BI solutions is a lot like running and implementing software projects. There are no shortcuts, and it’s not a job for mole whackers.